By the time you finish listening to Josh Pastner on Conference Crunch, one thing is obvious: this man genuinely, unapologetically loves life.
Josh Pastner Wants to Live to 120 — And Empty His Tank Every Single Day Until He Gets There
When asked about his “why” — why he gets up every morning, why he still coaches in a sport that chews people up — Pastner didn’t reach for a brand slogan or program‑approved talking point. He went straight to the core. “What you see with me is what you get,” he said. “I am like this all the time. I’m a really, really positive person. I’m a person that absolutely loves life.” There was no filter, no hesitation. Just a coach telling you how he actually experiences the world.
“Every Day Is A Gift, Every Heartbeat’s A Gift”
He didn’t pretend life is easy. In fact, he framed his positivity around the reality that it isn’t. “I also understand that life is extremely, extremely fragile and precious,” he said, noting that everyone has “been around things, seen things” in their own lives that drive that point home. That fragility is why he doesn’t want to look back one day and say, “Hey, I didn’t exhaust every day of life.” For Pastner, that’s the standard — not just for coaching, but for everything. Empty the tank. Don’t waste the gift. Whether it’s as the head coach at UNLV, as a husband, as a father, as a person, he’s determined to push himself so that no day feels half‑lived.
When he zooms in on the job, Pastner’s “why” is equally clear. “I love my job. I love what I do. I love every single thing about it,” he said, and then tied that emotion directly to effort. He wants to “exhaust everything that I have in my tank to empty my tank to try to give us the best chance to continue to move the needle.” Moving the needle isn’t just wins; it’s taking a program that hasn’t been to the NCAA tournament in more than a decade, that has never won a Mountain West regular season title, and pushing it somewhere it hasn’t been in a long time. He has already done it at Memphis and Georgia Tech. Now he wants to do it again, in a different city, under different circumstances, with the same relentless energy.
That energy is visible on the sideline. Fans remember his Memphis days because of it. UNLV fans are already noticing it. Pastner admitted that when he came to UNLV, “I had more people come to me like we love just watching on the sidelines because you’re so energized all the time.” He “wear[s] my emotions on my sleeve,” he said, and “coach[es] every possession like it’s the last possession that you get.” That isn’t a metaphor for him — it’s how he lives. You see it in the flashcards, the constant movement, the box‑to‑box defense he plays on the sideline. You see it in the way he talks about in‑game entertainment needing to match his energy so that fans feel it in the building.
His life philosophy shows up even in his social media bio. On his account, he keeps three lines front and center: “Every day is a gift, every heartbeat’s a gift, every breath is a gift.” And then he drops the kind of line you don’t usually hear from a college coach. “I talk about I hope to live to 120 one day. I hope to, I really want to because I love life.” Most people joke about making it to retirement. Pastner is trying to stretch the timeline as far as he can — and if he gets close, you get the sense he’ll still be sprinting around a gym somewhere, telling someone to move their feet and keep their rear end going.
Why He Coaches Every Possession Like It’s The Last One He’ll Ever Get
Going into his 16th year as a head coach, he says he’s “loved every second of it.” He rarely complains — “I don’t know, the only time I’ve really complained is a couple times this year I’ve called the league office about the officials,” he joked — and even that comes with his trademark clean language. Beyond that, his mindset is simple: be “solution-focused,” enjoy “being… doing what you do,” and “love every second of it and see where it can take you.” That might sound like a poster quote, but when you pair it with the way he actually lives — from the sideline energy to the rebuild grind at UNLV — it reads more like a mission statement.
Maybe the most striking part of Pastner’s “why” is that it never asks him to sacrifice his core values. He refuses to use foul language, refuses to let his staff do it, refuses to turn coaching into personal attacks. He wants wives and kids to be able to sit in his huddles without “earmuffs.” He wants to coach strictly about performance, keep his words disciplined, and stay away from the kind of language that clouds the message and harms the person. “You can be at a high level and be successful and not have to change your values or principles along the way,” he said. In a profession that often tells you the opposite — that you have to get “dirtier” to win — that’s a radical statement.
When you pull it all together, Pastner’s interview on Conference Crunch reads like a blueprint for how to live and coach in a brutal era without becoming brutal yourself. Love life. Treat every heartbeat like it’s borrowed time. Empty your tank. And when the pressure spikes and the stakes get high, protect the people around you — their minds, their hearts, their dignity — with the same intensity you use to chase wins. He might not know if he’ll make it to 120, but if he does, he’s already telling you what those years will look like: full speed, full heart, and no regrets about how he spent them.
