Meet Heat assistant coach, summer league head coach and Erik Spoelstra lookalike Eric Glass
.jpg "Miami Heat assistant coach Eric Glass (center) is serving as the summer league head coach for the third time in the last eight years.")
For those who have been watching the Miami Heat for the last decade-plus, Eric Glass is a familiar face.
Not only did Glass just complete his 15th season with the Heat, but he also has a resemblance to longtime Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra. It’s a resemblance Glass is aware of and has learned to have fun with.
“We’re the same height, we have the same hair, complexion is a little bit the same,” Glass said with a laugh. “So definitely, I get double takes all the time. People on the plane or something like that will think I’m Spo. It didn’t bother me.
“But now I make a joke about it. I used to tell people when he was around just so he would get [upset], I’m like: ‘That’s my dad.’ We have about an 11-year difference, but I try to make him feel older by saying that and just get a chuckle out of it. But yeah, I get it a lot. I just try to roll with it.”
But Glass is more than just a Spoelstra lookalike, he’s also a Heat success story in the coaching room.
After initially joining the Heat in 2010 as an intern in the video room at 25 years old, Glass just completed his fourth season as one of the assistant coaches on Spoelstra’s staff and is currently serving as the Heat’s summer league head coach for the third time in the last eight years.
“I feel like I’ve become a totally different person,” Glass said of his growth since joining the organization, with the Heat opening Las Vegas Summer League on Friday against the Atlanta Hawks (4:30 p.m., ESPN2). “Also, I became a man in Miami — I was coming out of college. So I’ve really grown up in terms of family. It’s been really nice.”
Glass has worked his way up the Heat’s coaching ladder since arriving in Miami, too. From video room intern, he was promoted to video coordinator and then he became a player development coach before spending one season as the head coach of the Heat G League affiliate team in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 2019-20 and then returning to Miami to become a Heat assistant coach.
“A lot of times in this profession, coaches are bouncing around,” said Glass, who is now 41 years old. “As a guy that didn’t really have any NBA ties, I was able to lock in a system where I was able to be developed and coaches were pouring into me and helping me grow and getting better. Obviously, this is the third summer league I’ve coached, the time I had in Sioux Falls. The care and the effort and the nurturing that they’ve poured into me, I feel like I’m just growing like a bamboo tree.”
The roots of that bamboo tree began growing when Glass was a high school senior in Southern California, as he spent time coaching a middle school flag football team for a senior project.
“I fell in love with it,” Glass said. “You know, you’re getting to that age where you’re thinking about what you want to do with your life. I was like, ‘Man, let’s see if I can do this.’ I thought I’d be like a P.E. coach and a high school football or basketball coach.”
So instead of pursuing a walk-on basketball opportunity at the college level, Glass began coaching high school basketball as a college freshman.
“It was the perfect timing for me,” Glass said. “Because I had always planned to try to walk-on somewhere. I probably wouldn’t have made a Division I walk-on, but I could have been in [junior college] or something like that. And as I was going through that coaching process, I was like: ‘Why am I going to waste three or four years?’ Then all of a sudden, I’m 24 and I’m trying to get in. Let me just get in at 18 or 19 years old.’”
That’s exactly what Glass did when he graduated high school, spending the next three years as a basketball coach at Servite High School in Anaheim, California.
“My freshman year in college, I was coaching high school basketball,” Glass continued. “I was a coach for the freshman team. I just started really young, I was like five years older than everybody else. But I became obsessed with it. It was the best decision I made. Because if I would have tried to play basketball and do all that stuff, it would have set me back. So I’d coach and then I’d go down to the beach and we would play pick-up [basketball] and I got my fix there.”
Glass then went up another level, serving as a student assistant and graduate assistant for the men’s basketball team at Cal State Fullerton from 2007-09. He also worked as the video coordinator for UC Irvine’s men’s basketball team during the 2009-10 season.
This all led Glass to an internship with the Heat.
“Then the Miami Heat internship, I found out about it,” he said. “I interviewed and I got it, which I didn’t expect at all. It was kind of like on the back burner like, ‘Yeah, I’ll just throw my name in there and it became true.’ And then I went from there.”
One day, Glass wants to become a head coach in the NBA. For now, he’s just trying to make the most of his third opportunity to coach the Heat’s summer league squad after also doing it in 2018 and 2019.
“In this coaching profession, everything is changing,” Glass said. “The league is adjusting and if you’re not ready to begin new every day and come with a fresh approach, you get left behind in basically any industry — not just coaching. So when the summer league opportunity was presented to me, I jumped at it.
“I think you can always practice your craft and honing your skills. It’s been six years for me [since I last was the summer league head coach]. So I’m similar, but I feel like I’m a lot different than the last times I coached. The first couple times I did it, I had been in the video room behind the scenes for so long and it was my first chance and I was like, ‘I’m in my bag. I’m going to do this. I’m going to coach every drill.’ But I have that experience, I have G League experience. What it’s about for me this year is just helping the next group of guys. Our assistant coaches, we have a really young staff this year and we’re really excited to give them as much experience and help coach and nurture them. That’s really where I get my joy right now, just trying to help the next group of guys coming up.”
