As far back as he can remember, all Matt McMahon wanted to do was play basketball.
Growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, McMahon didn’t harbor dreams of one day being a coach.
Young Matt wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, Mac, who played high school basketball before a college tennis career at Tennessee Tech.
While he started playing in the first grade at the Oak Ridge Boys Club, Matt McMahon really began charting his course at the age of 11 when his dad took him to see LSU play Tennessee in UT’s Thompson-Boling Arena on Feb. 10, 1990.
They were among the 22,843 fans treated to an intense scoring duel that night between LSU phenom Chris Jackson (who would later take the name Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf) and Tennessee star Alan Houston.
In a dazzling performance, Jackson poured in 49 points while burying 10 of 20 shots from beyond the 3-point arc. He also had eight assists in the Tigers’ 119-113 win.
Houston wasn’t bad either, connecting on 6 of 15 shots from 3-point range to score 43 points with 11 assists. He and Jackson each made 14 field goals and combined to go 28 of 59 from the floor.
“It was just an unbelievable game,” McMahon said.
As a young guard, he was certainly influenced by their stellar shooting and playmaking that evening — particularly Jackson.
“That game kind of influenced Matt as a guard,” Mac McMahon said, “as a point guard, a two-guard, going through high school and college.”
Later, after Jackson became the third overall pick of the 1990 NBA draft, the younger McMahon got a Denver Nuggets jersey bearing Jackson’s No. 3.
Little did he know at that time that one day he would be the head coach at LSU, walking the sideline of the building Jackson starred in — the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
“That’s the unique thing about this game of basketball,” Matt McMahon said. “Sometimes, things come full-circle.”
Moving on
Following a solid career at Oak Ridge High, the only high school in a town of about 31,000, McMahon’s journey continued at the college level in the fall of 1996.
“We had a real athletic team in high school, except for me,” he said with a laugh. “But I had an opportunity to walk on at Appalachian State, and play for Buzz Peterson and earn my way up to a scholarship.”
One of Peterson’s assistant coaches, Houston Fancher, had worked for a summer in Oak Ridge and knew of the youngster.
“Matt was a walk-on, but Houston told coach Peterson that he might ‘want to take a look at this guy,’” Mac McMahon said.
McMahon wound up playing four seasons for the Mountaineers, appearing in 117 career games with 33 starts — all but one coming in his senior season of 2000, when App State made the NCAA tournament.
“That was always a dream of mine, to play in the tournament,” he said.
While No. 14 seed Appalachian State suffered an 87-61 loss to end his college career, it was time for McMahon, who earned a marketing degree a year later, to decide what he was going to do next.
“I remember sitting in my apartment that night after graduation,” he said. “I really had no idea what the next step in life was going to be for me.”
Coaching it is
It didn’t take long for McMahon to figure it out and, after a meeting with Peterson, he decided to give coaching a try.
“Outside of my mom and dad, the most impactful people in my life were my coaches — whether it was growing up or on into college,” McMahon said. “So, I decided (coaching) was the route I wanted to pursue.”
After a season as a student assistant under Fancher, who had replaced Peterson after he left for Tulsa, McMahon was a graduate assistant for two years at Tennessee before rejoining Fancher as a full-time assistant in 2002.
He was at App State for eight seasons, then went to UNC-Wilmington to work for Peterson for a season.
From there, it was a four-year stint with Steve Prohm at Murray State, where McMahon’s path to a head coaching job was fast-tracked.
McMahon left Murray State in 2015 for a job with old friend Eric Konkol, who had become the head coach at Louisiana Tech, and was in Ruston for all of 11 days when Prohm abruptly resigned to take the Iowa State job.
“I was working Eric’s camp and we had a break, so I was checking my phone,” McMahon said. “I had hundreds of messages telling me Steve had left for Iowa State.”
The next day, the Murray State president called and asked McMahon if he wanted to interview for the position.
He quickly jumped at the opportunity and soon was named head coach at Murray State, a successful mid-major that has sent coaches like Prohm, Mick Cronin, Mark Gottfried, Billy Kennedy and Tevester Anderson on to high-level jobs.
Setting his sights
In the beginning, McMahon said he didn’t think about eventually becoming a head coach.
“But I really got into it,” he said. “I really enjoyed the relationships with the players, seeing them get better.”
About five years into his first job as a full-time assistant, he started to think seriously about moving up the ladder.
“I wanted to see what it was all about,” McMahon said. “My mentors in life, the coaches I played for … I wanted to have that same type of impact on people.”
Nearly a decade later, he got that opportunity at Murray State.
McMahon made the most of it, going 154-67 in seven seasons. He took his team to three NCAA tournaments, winning four Ohio Valley Conference regular-season championships and three league tournaments.
Developing talent
One of the most important tenets of the philosophy McMahon has adhered to throughout his career, especially as a head coach, is player development.
“I love the player development aspect of the profession: Investing time with the players in the gym and seeing them make progress in their careers,” he said.
In two seasons, he helped lightly-recruited point guard Ja Morant become an All-American and the second pick of the 2019 NBA draft en route to becoming an instant superstar.
Another player that benefitted in that area is 2022 OVC player of the year KJ Williams, a 6-foot-10, 245-pound forward who followed McMahon to LSU.
Williams said he had no inside moves and couldn’t shoot the ball at all when he arrived at Murray State as a raw freshman in 2018.
“But I worked on my game that summer and he and the other coaches got with me,” Williams said. “They helped me with my game and helped me develop more moves that helped get me to where I am now.
“Coach Mac pushes you to reach the maximum potential to what you can accomplish with your game.”
The family man
While an assistant at App State, McMahon met a new member of the women’s staff, Mary Brock.
As a four-year player and three-year starter at Furman, Brock naturally knew her way around the court and they started dating soon after they met.
They were married in 2005 and the couple has three children ranging in age from 14 to 10: daughters Maris and Mabry and son Mason, who all attend University Lab.
Some of the qualities Mary McMahon saw early on are the things that made her husband a good fit for LSU in athletic director Scott Woodward’s eyes.
“He was easy to work with because the men’s and women’s staffs were right across the hall from each other,” she said. “After being around him a while, you could tell how hard-working he was.
“I thought he was very good at what he did. He was very smart and had an attention to detail that always kind of made him four steps ahead. He had the work ethic passed on to him by his dad, the same as my dad, so the intangible things were really important.”
Mary McMahon was quick to point out her husband is actively involved in all their activities, especially in basketball and soccer.
And while he’s known to be laser-focused on his job, whether it’s in meetings or practice, or away from home for games or recruiting, he always makes time for his family.
“He’s definitely a family man,” she said. “This business is time-consuming; it’s not a traditional 9 to 5.
“He may not be home to see the kids one day, but he’s available and he’s present … and he wants to be there for them.”