When life throws you a curveball, sometimes the best play is to stay in the game. For Lee Cummard—a BYU basketball legend who went from star player to trusted coach—that lesson hit home in the summer of 2019, setting the stage for an unexpected encore that would redefine his career.
After BYU made a change at the top of its men's basketball program, Cummard, then an assistant under Dave Rose, found himself at a crossroads. The former Cougars standout, who had electrified the Marriott Center as a player and later served on both Rose's and Jeff Judkins' staffs, was ready to walk away from the hardwood entirely.
"I was actually going to get out," Cummard admitted this week on the "Y's Guys" livestream. "I have a ton of family in the insurance business in Arizona. I was down the path with a few big companies."
With his insurance and commercial licenses already secured, Cummard was poised to trade in his clipboard for a briefcase. "I was like, 'Hey guys, I'm ready to go! What are we doing?'" he recalled. But as timing would have it, the insurance offers stalled—a delay that felt frustrating then but now seems almost providential.
"The week that they finally came to the table, that Monday, is when conversations started with coach Judkins," Cummard explained. Judkins, the winningest coach in BYU women's basketball history, had a staff opening after Dan Nielson took the head job at Utah Valley. It was a lifeline Cummard hadn't anticipated.
Naturally, he had questions—big ones. "You went from the men's side to the women's side. What's the difference? Can I even do this? Will I be able to reach and connect with the players?" Judkins' response was unequivocal: "He boosted me with confidence and said, 'Hey, you will be great! We have a great team. Come be a part of this.'"
Guided by a patriarchal blessing that pointed him toward a life in sports, Cummard chose to pass on insurance and join Judkins' staff. What he didn't know then was that his decision would make him far more than an assistant coach—he would become BYU's ultimate insurance policy for the future.
"I have just seen it play out in that way. I don't think that was coincidence," Cummard reflected. "Although sometimes I wonder—all my family does extremely well selling insurance—cousins, uncles, brothers, and they live an..."