By Joshua Gallatin
With the 2024-25 basketball season right around the corner, the Bulldog will faithfully be monitoring the debut of BCC’s new men’s basketball coach Luke Gomez. Gomez succeeds Pablo Carrasco after he accepted a job this past offseason. Before the start of the season, I had the privilege of sitting down with Coach Gomez to discuss how he plans to lead this team.
Tell us a bit about your coaching history:
I started coaching when I was twelve years old after I graduated little league baseball. My dad had me come back and help the team. I was an infielder, so I started teaching the infielders how to get down on the ball, approach it, snap it, etc. I learned from a young age that I wanted to coach, that I liked to coach. And from there I got into coaching basketball because I was a bad basketball player and I sat on the bench, but I liked the game regardless. What I did was I sat next to the head coach and I learned some stuff about what to do and, more importantly, what not to do. When I was eighteen years old, going to college, I met Steve Lavin and took his basketball class. Even though football was my favorite sport, I took to basketball because that became the thing I liked to do. It seemed like it was easy to me, though I would say easier than football because football has twenty-two players on the surface and basketball has ten on the surface. Plus, I was going to school in Indiana where Hoosier hysteria was basketball.
Do you have a certain player or players that could be your impact players going into the season?
To be honest, no. What I’ve seen from this team so far is that there are a multitude of guys that can either hurt or help us in many capacities. And my job is to cut down on the weaknesses of both the team and the individual player and bring about our strengths. I think this is going to be a team where you see that the leading scorer of one game isn’t necessarily the leading scorer of the next. But the same thing goes for rebounds, assists, steals, charges, etc. I think you’ll see that change fluctuate throughout the year. And that actually will lead to a balanced team and balanced teams tend to win more often than teams that have one or two potent scorers. So it’s a good and a bad thing for us.
Do you have a favorite player on the team?
I do. That would be Joe Sway. Favorite, but every coach has favorite players whether they want to admit it or not because the favorite players are always the guys who do three things. They listen, they work hard, and they’re successful in their craft. In addition, they consistently get better at what they do. Those three attributes make for a coach’s favorite player. If you want to throw a fourth attribute, that is how unselfish and how team-oriented he is. He is going to do things that sacrifice for the benefit of the team regardless of what that is. So diving for a loose ball, diving for a ball out of bounds, taking a charge, rebound in traffic, taking an elbow to the nose and playing through it. All of those things matter and those are the details that don’t show up in the stat lines, Joe Sway is that type of player.
Do you have any goals for this season?
Win a National Title.
Anything else you want to add?
That’s on the court goal and our off the court goal is twofold. It’s to have a higher academic standard than we normally have here. And the other one is to be community oriented, like getting involved. We’ve already been to a couple of volleyball games and a couple of players showed up at a soccer game. We’re looking to get involved with all the athletics within the school and other things as well, such as the chess club. A couple of our kids play over at the chess club and we want to become as community oriented as we can possibly get.