Coach on the rise.

Coaching seems like it's interwoven in the DNA of Quin Snyder, but it didn't represent the career path Snyder assumed he would take after graduating from Duke University.

Long before he ascended the NBA coaching ladder to become the Utah Jazz's eighth head coach, Snyder seemed ticketed for an entirely different career path. He earned both a law degree and an MBA from Duke and seemed on track to make a living in one of those fields. But everything changed when Snyder applied for the Kauffman Fellowship and did not get accepted. He started thinking hard about what he really wanted to do with life after college. "I still remember exactly where I was when I got the letter and I got dinged and I didn't get it," Snyder says. "I stepped back from it, and I decided with my graduate work there was a natural fit in corporate finance. Go to Wall Street. Use your law degree. Use your business degree. The closer I got to doing that, the less of a fit I felt like it was. I just kept coming back to coaching."

So Snyder pursued a different dream. He returned to Duke, where he had previously played as point guard for three seasons, to be the assistant coach. He earned his first head coaching gig when he was hired at the University of Missouri in 1999. He led the Tigers to the NCAA Tournament in each of his first four seasons--with Missouri reaching the Elite Eight in 2002.

Snyder was eventually fired amid an NCAA investigation into the Missouri program in 2006. For the first time, he got to experience the bitter side of his profession.

"This profession will test you," Snyder says. "There's a lot of people that begin doing it--and it's romantic and it's exciting and your friends are envious. Usually about the time you're looking for another job, you're trying to figure out if you need to transition into something else. The nature of the beast is you're going to find failure."

Leaving Missouri opened a new door for...