Oklahoma City Thunder coach Mark Daigneault knows what it takes to win titles — his wife has won 7

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

Oklahoma City's Mark Daigneault has the best record of any NBA coach this season. And he has the second-best record of any coach in his house.
Daigneault is a coach — and a coach's husband too. His wife is Oklahoma assistant women's gymnastics coach Ashley Kerr. She and the Sooners went 33-2 this season and won another national championship, their third in four years.
So as Daigneault chases his first NBA title — he and the top-seeded Thunder open the NBA Finals at home against the Indiana Pacers on Thursday night — his wife has been part of seven national championships over her career on the staffs at Florida and Oklahoma, the most recent of those coming just a few weeks ago as the Thunder were starting this playoff run.
Daigneault isn't shy about touting the strengths of his wife's resume, either.
'Among my wife and I, she is — by far — the more accomplished, more impressive, better coach,' Daigneault said. 'She's the real deal.'
It's a relationship born from ties to Florida. Daigneault — a Massachusetts native — was a student manager under Jim Calhoun at Connecticut, part of the team that won an NCAA championship there in 2004, then started his assistant coaching career at Holy Cross for three years before moving on to Billy Donovan's staff at Florida.
Kerr, a Florida native, was a gymnast whose four years as a student-athlete for the Gators was ending around that time. She was brilliant, a four-time All-SEC academic selection, and Florida found a way to keep her with the program once her eligibility was exhausted. Kerr became a volunteer student manager for the 2011 season, then got promoted to team manager and eventually assistant to the head coach.
Along the way, she and Daigneault started dating and over time things got serious. And then the relationship reached a key moment. Daigneault had an offer from the Thunder to coach the Oklahoma City Blue, their G League franchise. He was ready to leave.
Kerr had a job in Gainesville. She was not ready to leave.
'The OKC job was a no-brainer for him,' Kerr told The Oklahoman newspaper for a story in 2021. 'I was like, 'You have to do it. You have to.''
It became a long-distance relationship for a few years, until Kerr decided it was time to leave Florida and try to embark on a coaching career in Oklahoma. The Sooners didn't have a job for her initially, before a volunteer position opened up right around the time she was going to make the move anyway.
Kerr kept that volunteer job — coaching balance beam and helping Oklahoma win three NCAA titles — for about six years before the NCAA changed rules to allow volunteer assistant positions to be converted into full-time, paid positions.
Over that time, Daigneault was promoted from the Blue to the Thunder, they got married and started a family.
'She has a way of connecting with our student-athletes on a personal level and is an exceptional leader,' Oklahoma coach K.J. Kindler said when Kerr was finally promoted.
Daigneault likes to say the real coaches in his house right now are the couple's two children, ages 3 and 2, who basically run the show.
'We are not in charge,' Daigneault said. 'We are just surviving.'
The younger of the two kids was born April 15, 2023 — a day after the Thunder were eliminated from that season's play-in tournament and the day the Sooners were competing in the NCAA gymnastics final in Fort Worth, Texas. It was also more than a week before Kerr's due date.
She went into labor in Fort Worth at about 5 a.m. Daigneault had been back in Oklahoma City for about an hour after the middle-of-the-night flight home from Minnesota, where the Thunder lost that play-in game. He hopped in the car and made it to Fort Worth just in time for the birth that morning, and later that night the Sooners won a national title.
'Our team really rallied around her,' Kindler said.
There are obvious benefits to a coach being married to another coach, as Daigneault and Kerr have found. There is an understanding of the jobs, an understanding of long hours and late nights and travel and unpredictability. But when they're home, they try to be home, not still at work.
'There's certainly a lot more things that define our relationship together, starting with our kids now,' Daigneault said. 'That's occupying the majority of our bandwidth, but even beyond that, we've always tried to compartmentalize it in a way that's pretty healthy because we both like to be home when we're home and not just using the house as an extension of our jobs.'
Daigneault got his master's degree from Florida, though he originally intended to get it immediately after graduating from Connecticut. If he had stuck to that schedule, though, he almost certainly wouldn't have coached at Holy Cross. He might not have made it to Florida. He might not have met Kerr. He might not be married to someone with seven national championships. He might not have come to Oklahoma City. He might have missed out on these NBA Finals.
Right place, right time.
'If you replayed my life 10 million times — I used to say a million, but now that we're playing in the NBA Finals, I'll say 10 million — this would only happen once,' Daigneault said. 'And so there's never a minute that I'm not grateful.'