MISSOULA — Tanner Lind, who took what was once a side hustle and turned it into a successful player-development business that has high-major college players, NBA veterans and overseas professionals tracking him down to improve their games, didn’t know quite what he had done until his 10-year-old filled him in.
“When I told him I was going to start doing player development for the Lady Griz, he said, ‘Dad, you got your dream job,’” Lind recalled this week, after his first day working with players from the Montana women’s basketball program.
“I hadn’t thought about it like that, but this is a dream job for me. I love the Griz.”
While he’ll continue to run Lace ‘Em Up Basketball, his training facility in Salt Lake City that takes some of the best players in the world and makes them even better, he’ll be a usual face around campus the next six weeks, then throughout the season as the program’s first director of player development.
“As you assess where your program is at, which you need to do all the time but especially when things don’t go as you want them, and last year didn’t go as we wanted, you ask yourself, what are the things that caused that?” said Lady Griz coach Nate Harris.
“We had some weaknesses, some things we needed to shore up. One of those was player development. People were not leaving here significantly better players than when they got here. To address that, to turn a weakness into a strength, we wanted to make a very specific hire.”
Harris calls it a “home-run hire” not just because of Lind’s unique skill set but because of his background and connection to Montana, to Missoula, to his alma mater, to Grizzly Athletics, having grown up five houses away from campus, one of seven kids of Dennis and Angela Lind.
Dennis Lind is a 1970 graduate of Montana and earned his law degree from the university in 1973. He and Angela raised their family on 6th Street and, with the university’s athletic facilities a few stone throws away, on a heavy diet of Grizzly sporting events.
“I don’t think I missed a game for 18 years,” says Tanner, whose four sons and their nine cousins call Dennis and Angela Grandpa and Grandma Griz. “Being a block away, we just grew up in Griz culture, always going to games. They are some of my favorite memories.
“My connection to the Griz has been lifelong. This is home. I take a lot of pride in being from here, like everyone who’s from here.”
The campus custodians, those who worked anywhere near a basketball court, knew him by sight, this kid they always had to send home when it was time to shut the facilities down, who was coached by Gary Kane, Shane Belnap, Eric Bowie, Grizzlies who Lind’s dad hired to train his son at the sport he loved.
He played at Hellgate for Griz legend Eric Hays, was high school teammates with Dan Selvig, son of hall-of-fame coach Robin Selvig, used those connections to become a student manager and practice player at Utah State under former Montana coach Stew Morrill before Lind returned home.
While finishing his degree at Montana, he coached at Hellgate under Jim Sampson, then started that side hustle, taking anyone with the same love of the game he had, who wanted to get better, and changed them from players to ballers.
“I tried coaching and loved that aspect, but when I started doing skill development, I thought, whoa, this is it. This is what I like, and I’m good at it,” he said. “That’s all I’ve done for the last 16 years. I love working with players on an individual basis and helping them get better.”
He and his wife, Amanda, who also is from Missoula, knew they would soon max out on what Tanner could build in their hometown, so they sought out a larger market and landed in Salt Lake City, where Lind offered his services, free of charge, to every basketball team at every level in the region.
All he asked was that he be allowed to hand out his information, in case any players wanted more of what he had to offer. They did, so much so that he now has his own facility, a basketball nirvana on Redwood Road.
It’s a grinder’s paradise, three hoops, spartan, the space not even the size of a college court. No distractions, no full-court games, just total focus on the task at hand. “Fundamentals never go out of style,” he said. “Players like it. It’s not hard but it’s hard work.”
Every player who walks through the door, from youth to NBA veteran, presents Lind with a unique problem to solve, because everyone he works with is a blend of both strengths and weaknesses. Lind’s job is to take the latter and get them more in line with the former.
“I love figuring out what they are not strong at and putting a plan together and seeing how we can get good at ball-handling, footwork, finishing, shooting, passing, body movement, timing,” he said. “I love helping them get better and seeing confidence build within players as they develop new skills.”
The test — and the reward for Lind if he’s done his job — is the games, because what value is a new skill if it doesn’t help a player’s team become better? He wants to polish a skill set until it can shine in a game environment.
“Can you actually transfer the skills you’re working on into the game? Then as a team, you almost have to look at it through a different lens,” he explains. “Can these five players put their individual skills together and compete and win basketball games?”
It takes time, time to develop or improve a skill, even in a sport one’s played for years, time to be able to transfer that new skill to a full court, to an actual game, five-on-five, not just inside Lind’s facility.
But when that transfer happens?
“I love when players work on something over and over and over and then incorporate it, then their friends or family or other players are like, wait a minute, you weren’t doing that before. That’s new,” he said.
“I love the feeling when a player comes to me and says, people are starting to notice. There we go, that’s the energy I want.”
Lind began working with Sam Merrill before he played at Utah State, before he was selected by the New Orleans Pelicans with the final pick in the 2020 NBA Draft, before was traded to Milwaukee, before he played for Memphis, before he played for Cleveland.
Before Merrill scored 23 points in 25 minutes in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals last month as Cleveland won big at Detroit to eliminate the top-seeded Pistons, with one of the NBA’s top shooters going 5 for 8 from the 3-point line.
Back then Merrill was just a player at Bountiful High, his school less than five miles from Lind’s Lace ‘Em Up Basketball facility. Then they found each other.
“He’s a top-five shooter in the world. I take a lot of pride in knowing I’ve been a part of it. He’s done the work, so I don’t take any credit, but I take a lot of pride in how I’ve helped that journey,” Lind said.
Merrill and Cleveland would fall to the eventual NBA champion New York Knicks in the Eastern Conference finals, as Jalen Brunson spent the entire postseason putting on a master class of everything Lind teaches, the overlooked arts of the finer points. Consider Lind a fan.
“There wasn’t a whole lot to his game in the Finals. Jab step, go. Jab step, go, get to a spot,” Lind said. “It’s something simple, but if you look at the details, super advanced, the body positioning, the timing of his dribble, the way he stops with both feet under his hips, on balance and able to rise up quickly.
“When you have the details, something simple becomes super advanced at a high level. When you can perform it against a defender, when all those things come together? Yeah, that’s the good stuff.”
Among the players he’s now working with are Harris’s Lady Griz.
“As Tanner and I explored it and had conversations and it became a reality, it became a home run in terms of what I thought this team needed,” said Harris. “I never would have dreamed we’d get someone with his level of experience and his level of expertise.
“His love of this university and his love of Montana is one thing that made this work.”
Lind fully believes in himself and what he preaches and coaches, but he knows he’s not a worker of wonders, more a guide, someone who can lay out the path to improvement, possibly to greatness, but that’s all he can do. The rest is up to the player, who has to take most of the journey on their own.
It’s no different the next six weeks inside the gyms of the Adams Center as he teaches and trains a new set of students. “I get three hours with each player, but three hours isn’t going to make you good. It’s going to be the hours after. Then it’s personal accountability,” he says.
“The things I do are the road map for them to hopefully come back on their own and work on the things they feel they need to work on. That’s the idea. Let’s create players who can train themselves and want to fall in love with the game.”
Just as Tanner Lind did decades ago, a Grizzly returning to his roots, a basketball under his arm throughout.
