College Basketball Coach Turns Worst Coaching Job Into Slam Dunk at Salkehatchie

A little over a year ago, the University of South Carolina Salkehatchie posted a job opening for its men’s basketball coach. It might have been a single sentence: applications being accepted for the worst college coaching job in the country.

The school, a junior college at a rural outpost about an hour’s drive west of Charleston, had shut down its men’s basketball program before last season after going through four coaches in eight months. One quit before setting foot on campus.

There was not much to offer the candidates. The pay: $38,000 per year but no recruiting budget or staff. The facilities: a gym whose court is seven feet short of regulation, whose showers don’t have running water and whose men’s locker room doesn’t have a toilet.

And another thing: there were no players.

The job would test career ambitions, which made it perfect for Matt Lynch.

Lynch, 33, is like many hustling their way up the coaching ladder. He’s had the coaching bug since a church league dad handed him a clipboard and asked him to design his team’s final play. He embraces long hours. He schemes persistently. He charms relentlessly.

But what sets Lynch apart is that he is making the climb as an openly gay man.

In almost any field beside men’s sports, this might be met with a shrug. It’s been more than a decade since the military repealed its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the last presidential election cycle featured a gay candidate. Acceptance in the United States has extended emphatically to women’s sports. But men’s sports, despite a trickle of out athletes and assistant coaches, largely remains one of America’s last closets.

According to Outsports, the website that chronicles L.G.B.T.Q. athletes, there had never been a publicly gay men’s head coach in any of the North American major professional leagues, nor in college football or men’s basketball until Lynch.

There was no way for Lynch to know if being gay would affect his job prospects, but it remained a question in the back of his mind — even for a job that was within his reach.

“If I was going to get a head coaching job, I knew it was going to be at a place that needed to be built,” said Lynch, who came out publicly nearly four years ago in an essay for Outsports shortly after he was fired, along with the rest of the staff, at the University of North Carolina Wilmington after three losing seasons. “All I ever wanted was an opportunity. The way I looked at it was this may be a bad job, but it’s my bad job. You’ve got to make the big time where you are.”

In a series of interviews over the last year, starting shortly after he was hired in December 2022, Lynch has described putting together a program almost from scratch — enlisting two volunteer assistants, prodding sympathetic administrators for help and assembling an all-freshman roster with a global reach.

As Lynch closes out his first season with a winning record, his X-and-O acumen has been challenged,…