SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4 Sports) – Steve Wojciechowski spent seven years as the Marquette head basketball coach, winning 128 games and taking the Golden Eagles to the NCAA Tournament twice.
But when he was fired in 2021, Wojciechowski said he lost the joy of coaching.
“If I’m completely transparent and honest, at the end of my coaching journey, I lost [the joy],” Wojciechowski said. “But I’m not losing that again. My kids taught me that.”
Wojciechowski, who was named the Salt Lake City Stars head coach last week, has spent the last two years coaching his sons on their 7th and 8th grade teams, and that has helped him rediscover what he loves about the game.
“My kids are the joy,” Wojciechowski said through tears at his introductory press conference Wednesday. “Sometimes in college, that can be robbed from you. So to see the game through my kids’ eyes again, that was awesome. One of the things I promised my kids was that when I got back into coaching, there was always going to be joy to it.”
Wojciechowski is very close with former Jazz head coach Quin Snyder. They both played college ball at Duke, they were were head coaches in college and now the G-League, and Snyder highly recommended this job.
“Quin’s feelings about the Jazz organization and Salt Lake City, he loves this place,” Wojciechowski said. “I love Utah. I got married at Deer Valley. The opportunity to coach the high level players that are a part of the G-League, is really exciting.”
Wojciechowski loves the direction the Jazz organization is heading, and is looking forward to helping develop the teams’ young talent with the Stars, who made the G-League playoffs for the first time last season.
“Watching what Will [Hardy] did this year was incredible,” Wojciechowski said. “I saw a team that competed every night, I saw a team that was connected, and I saw a team that played with joy. Our would like our culture to be very similar and mirror that. Because I believe in all three of those things deeply.”
