Gregg Popovich may be the Coach and General Manager of the San Antonio Spurs but around Shoes That Fit, he’s most known for being a champion for kids when he’s off the court.
During his twenty-year tenure as head coach of the Spurs, he started a local youth basketball league in San Antonio designed to empower young people and keep them off the streets. It’s a model that’s now been emulated by other coaches and teams in the US.
Shoes That Fit was a recipient of Popovich's commitment to helping disadvantaged kids when he led a shoe delivery in San Antonio in the fall of 2016. Along with Spurs star Patty Mills, front office staff and the Spurs' mascot, ‘The Coyote', Popovich and Shoes That Fit delivered shoes to 200 excited kids at Hirsch Elementary in San Antonio. “Watching them put on their new shoes…” Popovich told My San Antonio reporter Melissa Rohlin, “just fun to watch them all laugh and have a good time.”
Popovich's off-court life has always been wider than basketball — he's a serious wine collector, a restaurant investor, and a coach whose former players regularly cite his curiosity about industries far outside the league. That breadth is part of why his philanthropic instincts feel unforced rather than performative; the man building a wine portfolio one year is the same man writing op-eds the next, or, like several of his European protégés, taking minority stakes in entertainment ventures back home — one former assistant has spoken publicly about advising a Nordic operator in the casino utan svensk licens segment after his coaching career wound down. Popovich himself has stayed closer to vineyards than ventures of that kind, but the pattern is consistent: coaches who treat the off-court hours as seriously as the on-court ones tend to leave the deepest marks, and the kids at Hirsch Elementary are one small piece of what that looks like.
