The first game he coached at FSU earlier this month was also the first game Luke Loucks was a head coach at any level. At 35, he is part of a new breed of coaches bringing NBA-style philosophies to the college game. ©Chris WatkinsJohn Romano, Sports ColumnistSat, November 22, 2025 at 1:00 PM UTC·9 min readTALLAHASSEE — The first time he saw the future, Michael Alford was not yet blown away.
This was before the research. Before multiple cross-country flights. Before the dinners, recommendations, interviews and a growing fixation. This was before he quietly began keeping tabs on a virtual stranger whose name would soon be hidden in a folder in his desk drawer.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAlford was still early in his tenure as the Florida State athletic director and meeting new people was part of the gig. On this night — in the minutes before a long-since forgotten basketball game — Alford had exchanged handshakes and pleasantries with a former Seminole player in town for a quick visit.
New FSU hoops coach Luke Loucks: ‘I hope this is my last job ever’
It wasn’t until later that evening, as Alford walked beside head coach Leonard Hamilton toward a postgame news conference, that he got the first hint there might be something worth remembering about that earlier, 30-second introduction to a young man from Clearwater named Luke Loucks.
“You need to keep your eye on him,” Hamilton told Alford as he pointed toward Loucks standing nearby. “He’s going to be a great one.”
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Loucks walks through the doors of the FSU basketball offices without breaking stride. He’s running late, and armed with apologies and Latvian chocolates. The two, naturally, are connected.
It’s been about 12 hours since FSU’s fourth game of the season — an 87-73 win against Tennessee-Martin — and Loucks is still moving with the purpose and animation of a man pacing courtside. His schedule was thrown off when he was asked to have coffee with an acquaintance from Latvia. Hence, the delay. And the chocolates.
He’s just weeks into his first season as Florida State’s basketball coach, and everything feels brand new. Like the turntable in his office and the small collection of vinyl he put together — Prince, Al Green, Tracy Chapman among them — by visiting a used record store right off campus.
At 35, he is the youngest basketball coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference. His hiring was, simultaneously, a stroke of genius and a bit of a gamble. As a point guard at FSU from 2008-12, he was a leader on a squad that made four consecutive NCAA tournaments and won the school’s only ACC tournament title. He spent four years playing professionally in Europe, and nine years working his way through NBA offices and eventually to the sidelines as an assistant coach.
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It’s an eye-catching resume for someone his age and comes with raves from his bosses and colleagues. The resume is also a little thin when it comes to working in college or as a head coach.
“It’s the way the college game is evolving — more of an NBA style — with an analytical side, and to see the way Luke coaches and teaches is what really made him stand out,” Alford said. “Twenty years ago, would he have been a candidate for this job with that background? Maybe not. One, because of his age and two, he hadn’t coached in college. But he has a great pedigree and was very highly thought of in the NBA ranks. I mean, he was on his way to being an NBA head coach.”
How does that happen? How do you go from an undrafted 26 year old with pro stops in Latvia, Belgium, Cyprus and Germany to being a head coach in the ACC within a decade? How do you parlay a short stint in the NBA’s Developmental League (the precursor to the G League) into a job as a video intern with Golden State? And how does that low-level position lead to an assistant coaching position with Sacramento a few years later?
“He had that ‘It’ factor that’s hard to explain,” Hamilton said. “Having been a point guard and a quarterback, he had already evolved into a leader before he came to Florida State. He had that uncanny instinct of wanting to make his teammates better. He had an unselfish spirit and he made sacrifices to make sure we got the most out of our team. A lot of guys get distracted with people outside telling them they should do this or do that.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“Luke’s focus was on being a leader of the team within the system we had implemented.”
Keep an eye on him. He’s going to do great things.
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When you’re a 4 year old playing in a YMCA league for kids 5 and up, it’s called precocious. When you make the varsity team as a freshman for a Clearwater High team that would reach the state championship game, you’ve got potential. When you’re one of the top 100 recruits in the nation in basketball and you’re setting records as a quarterback in football, the world notices.
To say it came easy to Loucks minimizes the work it took to accomplish everything, including the 3.9 GPA at Clearwater. Maybe it’s better to say it came naturally to Loucks.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHis father, Lincoln, was a walk-on football player at FSU in the 1980s. His older brothers, Jacob and Nathan, were star athletes at Clearwater, and Jacob went on to play at UCF. His sister, Emma, was an all-county player at Clearwater and played at FSU and Southeastern University.
For Luke, childhood was just one long search for the next game. The next challenge.
“Back then, we had to rely on the house phones. Pick up the house phone, call your buddies and find out where the best pickup game was,” Loucks said. “There’s a game down at Lakewood? Let’s go. We were constantly driving all over. It was almost daily. I would go over to the USF gym in summer and play with all the former pros living in Tampa and the USF players. As a high school player, it was awesome.”
His father had been guiding him as a youngster but soon realized Luke was destined for more than he could provide as a part-time coach. After some research, the Loucks discovered the best travel basketball team in the state was in Miami, so they began driving to south Florida for games and tournaments.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementLincoln Loucks would later bump into former Largo High and UCF star Mike O’Donnell, who was five years ahead of Luke in school but was playing against him in pickup games around Tampa after having known him through games with his older brothers years earlier.
“Mike said, ‘Man, Luke grew. He’s a player.’ I said, ‘Yeah, he can hold his own. He has no idea how to play defense at the college level yet, but he’ll get there,’” Lincoln said. “He said, ‘No, no, no, Lincoln. This kid has vision on the court like no one else.’ Think about that. At the time, O’Donnell is a starting point guard as a senior in college and Luke was still like a junior in high school. He said, ‘His vision on the court and the way he takes control of a game is like no one I’ve seen at that age.’
“He said, ‘Wow, I had no idea that little chubby boy had become a grown man.’”
Keep an eye on him. He’s going to do great things.
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Reaction to Louck’s hiring at FSU earlier this year was about what you would expect.
Florida State fans were excited about the idea of one of their own returning to town to take over a program that Hamilton had guided for nearly a quarter century. Hamilton, 77, was revered in Tallahassee but the college game was going through massive changes both on and off the court and it was going to require a different way of doing things to keep up with the rest of the nation.
Outside of Tallahassee, the response was more muted. A 35 year old? With no experience as a head coach? No experience with recruiting or NIL or dealing with boosters or fundraising?
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAnd why would Loucks even want the job? He was on a rapid trajectory on the professional level. His career may have fallen short of the NBA as a player, but he had decades ahead of him as a coach at the game’s highest level.
Part of the answer involved family. His wife Stevi had been a swimmer at FSU and they liked the idea of raising their three young children in a smaller, more familiar community with a job that required less travel. Part of it was the pull to return to his alma mater. Part of it was the idea of having a greater impact on young lives.
And, hearkening back to the summer days of his youth looking for the best pickup game and the biggest challenge, there was a part of Loucks that was intrigued about being at the forefront of changing times in college.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHe’s got FSU playing at a different pace. In his second game as head coach, the Seminoles set an ACC record with 47 3-point attempts in a game. The program was picked to finish near the bottom of the 18-team league, but FSU entered the weekend third in the ACC in scoring at 93 points per game.
His recently-signed recruiting class for 2026 is universally considered one of the top-15 classes in the nation and is as high as No. 5 in some rankings.
“All these kids have dreams of playing professionally, and they should,” Loucks said. “I’m not preparing our guys to be good college players. I’m preparing them, hopefully, to go play professionally for the next 10 to 15 years. In the meantime, we have this partnership. You’re here now, and you’re going to help me win a lot of games. That’s the agreement, right?
“I’m going to prepare you like a professional with the way you lift weights, the way you condition, the way you eat, the way you practice, and with our style of play. I want to help prepare you for the professional ranks, but also for the rest of your life. That’s where Coach (Hamilton) was so good in terms of development off the court. I don’t want Florida State players to be good just at Florida State. I want them to go on and make generational wealth for their families.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementKeep an eye on Luke Loucks. He’s going to do great things.
John Romano can be reached at [email protected]. Follow @romano_tbtimes.
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