the coaching ladder and paid his dues.

Melissa was five months pregnant when he was fired from his first D-league head coaching job and he accepted a demotion as a D-league assistant coach. Can you identify with the faith it took to stick it out in coaching at that point?

By 2011, he finally felt established as a third-year head coach in the D-League, the NBA’s minor league now known as the G-League. It is designed to develop players and coaches for the NBA.

But Young’s team, beset by injuries beyond the normal G-League roster chaos, was 6-17, and his instinct was right. The Iowa Energy fired him when Melissa was five months pregnant with their first child.

“I was, like, a decade younger than the other coaches and I thought I was on the fast track, on my way (to the NBA),” Young says. “It was devastating when I got let go because now I had to start over.”

The first decision was about where Melissa should deliver the baby. They drove two hours to her parents’ home in Nebraska. Then they moved on to Arizona to be surrounded by his family. It’s a brutal moment in his coaching career, but Young did enjoy a brief respite at home with Melissa while the Energy paid the last few months of his contract.

“Then the stress hit once Jude was born,” he says. “I didn’t have a job and we were trying to figure out what we were going to do.”

The other Sunday came later that year, on a rainy fall night. Young arrived alone in Bear, Delaware, to start a new job that was a step back and a cut in pay, though it came with free housing. He didn’t know a soul in the entire state. He had shipped a large metal pod with his belongings and called a local Latter-day Saint congregation for help.

“These two missionaries came over and we carried everything up to the third floor in the rain,” Young says.

He knew how this was going to look.

“It was a smelly old apartment and I had to leave town to go on the team’s first road trip, and Melissa and her mom were coming out with Jude, who was like three months old at the time. I knew she was going to not love the fact that I wasn’t there and that the apartment was smelly.”

The least he could do was buy her some bath salts. He left them on the bathtub, then cut out for a road game in another minor league basketball town.

“She called me just bawling on the phone,” he said.

“He wasn’t there, and I’d never lived east of Nebraska and it was just in a bad part of town and my mom and I just held each other and cried,” Melissa said. “We’re like, ‘OK, this is it.’ My mom said, ‘How am I going to leave you here with a 3-month old baby and your husband’s not even here?’”

There’s so much more to the story about the months between those two Sundays and why he swallowed hard and accepted the job as an assistant coach with the Delaware 87ers, the minor league team for the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers. There’s uncertainty and decisions and connections that finally — finally — led to the NBA, where he has spent the past eight years and has coached in the NBA Finals and an All-Star Game.

He became the league’s highest-paid assistant and appeared to be a lock to get his own head coaching position at the pinnacle of the game. But the Youngs say God had a different plan for them.