A decade ago, Griff Aldrich was walking a different career path. He was an attorney, then managing director and chief financial officer for a private equity firm. He was successful and happy. Could anyone imagine he would leave that behind for the uncertainty of coaching college basketball?
 
“They thought I was crazy,” Pepperdine’s new head coach said when asked the reaction of others to leaving an $800,000 salary for a $32,000 assignment as a sort of chief of staff for the University of Maryland-Baltimore County men's basketball team in 2016. 
 
“Not everybody,” he quickly added, qualifying his answer. Throughout much of his time forging a professional career, Aldrich also devoted up to five nights a week to coaching an AAU team through The Forge For Families, a Christian ministry in Houston’s Third Ward, one of the city’s historically poorest neighborhoods.
 
“The people close to me knew how much time I was spending coaching AAU,” Aldrich said. “People knew I not only had a passion for coaching young men but just loved the game of basketball.”
 
“The more I did that, the more I felt called to coaching,” he said, explaining that the program followed a holistic approach by blending academics, faith and basketball. “Not unlike the values of Pepperdine,” Aldrich noted.
 
Leaving the professional world for hoops was not the last pivot Aldrich, 51, would make. Working last season as associate head coach under best friend Ryan Odom at Virginia — where he received his law degree — Aldrich helped the team cultivate a 30-win season in their first year. 
 
He envisioned staying a while at Virginia. Then the Pepperdine head coaching job opened and Aldrich could not resist the opportunity.
 
“This is going to sound obnoxious and I don’t mean it to. I didn’t get into coaching to rise in the ranks,” he explained. “There have been very few places where it feels like it fits our family, it fits our ethos, it fits what we want to do. Pepperdine was always very high on that list.”
 
Aldrich spent seven seasons as head coach at Longwood University in Farmville, Va., before last season. He coaxed the Lancers to a program-record 16 victories in his debut season of 2018-19. Three years later, Longwood won the Big South title to earn its first-ever NCAA Tournament bid. Two years after that, the Lancers made it back again.
 
Aldrich was gratified by how that success resonated in the community at large. “Longwood is a smaller state institution in Virginia. It’s in a smaller town,” he said. “It was just such a source of pride . . . just to see the joy that everybody had for the team’s success and to kind of put Longwood on the map.”
 
Pepperdine was once a regular on the NCAA landscape, having played in the NCAA Tournament 13 times — just not since 2002. Aldrich sees a commitment from the university to provide the resources to revive the program, including the near completion of the Mountain at Mullin Park, a new $150 million on-campus basketball home that overlooks the Pacific Ocean and will seat 3,600 fans.
 
“The opportunity to build. I think that’s something I enjoy doing. God’s made me a little bit to be a builder,” Aldrich said. “The opportunity to come in and try to revitalize a program that’s had great success in years past and try to help bring it back to its old glory.”
 
Odom has no doubt his buddy, since their days in the 1990s as teammates at Division III Hampden-Sydney, is the right man for the assignment.  
 
“I think it’s the perfect place for him and his family and at this time. The values are aligned there for him and his family,” Odom said. “They’ll compete at the highest level in the WCC. His players will believe they belong. He’s going to do the same thing he’s always done — a great job.”
 
If building suits him, it’s not what primarily fuels Aldrich’s passion for coaching. He talks about the transformation that he can help affect in the lives of young men, but believes that impact can extend beyond the locker room.
 
“College basketball has the ability to do so much for a community, whether it’s building campus morale, bringing alumni back or raising the profile of an institution,” he said. 
 
Odom saw positive qualities in Aldrich from the time they met at Hampden-Sydney. He was diligent, had high character, was supportive of his friends, competitive and equipped with a consistent work ethic. “He’s very motivated to do great things and to help people,” Odom said.
 
At Hampden-Sydney, they developed under head coach Tony Shaver, a one-time walk-on at North Carolina, who played for Dean Smith and alongside the likes of Mitch Kupchak, Phil Ford and Walter Davis. In 1996, Odom was the team’s MVP and Aldrich won the team’s leadership award.
 
During their senior season, Aldrich had applied to law schools, but also was invited by Ryan’s father, Dave Odom, to join his staff at Wake Forest as a graduate assistant. When news came that Aldrich had been accepted to Virginia law school, Dave Odom basically rescinded his job offer.
 
“You need to go do this. Differentiate yourself. You can always get back into coaching,” Odom said. 
 
Aldrich knows it was the right advice and he thrived in his time as an attorney — including a four-year stint in his firm’s London office — and subsequently in business. It was Ryan Odom who gave him the chance to veer into coaching, albeit with the substantial pay cut.
 
By Year 2 at UMBC, the Retrievers were ready to make history. Winners of the America East Conference, Aldrich and Odom expected they would be seeded No. 16 in the 2018 NCAA bracket. “We started some conjecture on who we might play,” Aldrich said, “and the unanimous view was we really don’t care who we play, except Virginia. We don’t want to play them. 
 
Of course, they got Virginia. When the game began, things changed. “I remember thinking at about the eight-minute mark of the first half, we can play with these guys,” Aldrich said, recalling a game that was tied at 21-all at halftime. “Then the flood gate opened up at the beginning of the second half and it just snowballed. We couldn’t miss. 
 
"It was eerie and surreal. The arena felt like a complete sellout and then to become so quiet because everyone was going, `What in the world is going on?’ ” What happened was UMBC outscored Virginia 53-33 in the second half to win 74-54, posting the first-ever victory by a No. 16 seed in tournament.
 
Eight years later — after a satisfying run at Longwood and partnering for the third time with Odom last season — Aldrich is eager to create something at Pepperdine. In two months’ time, he has signed 11 new players, convinced the Mountain at Mullin Park had as much to do with early recruiting success as the university’s academic reputation and the spectacular view from the Malibu campus, perched above the Pacific.
 
“I think this is going to be really fantastic. They love it,” Aldrich said of the new facility, expected to be open in time for next season. “It’s a real tangible expression that Pepperdine is making a push to build a basketball program.”