Chris Beard gives hilarious take on nicknames, name problem on the team

Texas coach Chris Beard faced a problem thousands of school teachers across the country manage to solve every fall: how to differentiate two kids with the same name. However, in Beard’s case, he faced the very rare issue of having three people in the Longhorn program share two different names.

At a recent press conference, the Texas coach explained his process for handing out nicknames, offering up examples of the nicknames this year’s freshman class earned already. Here was what Beard called the freshman, whose actual names are Dillon Mitchell, Arterio Morris, Rowan Brumbaugh and Alex Anamekwe.

“Yeah the freshmen have been great. Rowan and Alex, and ‘Terio and D-Mitch as we call ’em. There’s a funny thing coaching, you know. You got two Dillon’s — Dylan Disu and Dillon Mitchell. That’s a problem. The first thing you do is you go…does anybody have a nickname they bring in? Not really. And so, I think the closest thing we had was ‘D-Mitch.’

Beard then explained the process of giving a nickname. Stating that it has to be a natural occurrence, not forced.

“The nickname’s gotta stick too. You can’t force it. So, first thing you ask the person is: are you okay with it? GAs and managers, we don’t care if you’re okay with it — we have Elton John, we have Dirty, we have Fireball — it doesn’t matter, that’s your name. Players, though, we’re interested in the player kinda wanting to like his name. So we went Dylan Disu and ‘D-Mitch’ on that.”

Chris Beard then had to apply that process when giving a nickname to the unfortunately named new strength coach. Check out this funny story on how Beard handled having to refer to the new assistant, who shares a name with two other players.

“The other one we had — this one’s crazy. So we have Marcus Carr on the team and we have Brock Cunningham on the team. Two of my all-time favorites. Then John Riley hires our assistant strength coach this year. Special guy, played college basketball at Incarnate Word, from San Antonio. And his name is Marcus Brock. So this is a real problem, you know. ‘Marcus’ — two guys run to you. ‘Marcus Brock’ — three guys run to you. ‘Brock’ — two guys.”

Marcus Brock could not be the name he went by. So Beard thought long and hard about the potential new nickname.

So we had to figure this out. You know, he’s from Incarnate Word, but that’s too long, too choppy. We tried San Antonio, it didn’t stick. So then I came up with: Alamo. So Alamo is sticking.”