In Mike Dominguez’s words, “It’s all come full circle” for him, his family and his basketball coaching career.
Just recently promoted to head mens basketball coach at New Mexico Highlands University after two seasons as the associate head coach, Dominguez, an Alcalde native, is taking over the reigns of a program and school where his father Rai Dominguez and mother Paula Villareal met while attending the Las Vegas campus nearly 40 years ago.
“It’s unreal and we never would have believed that,” Rai Dominguez said about the promotion. “For someone to say, ‘Oh, your son, he’s going to be the coach where you went to school,’ it’s crazy but there he is.”
For Mike Dominguez, his journey to becoming a head coach has stretched nearly coast-to-coast and has even gone international.
His collegiate career spanned from Northeastern Junior College in Sterling, Colo., to NCAA Division 1 program Florida International University and all the way back to Grand Junction, Colo., where he finished off his college days at Colorado Mesa University.
He left Mesa as the school’s first-ever NCAA Division II All-American (Second-Team), which he earned in 2010, while also being named the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Player of the Year after averaging 21.6 points per game and leading the Mavericks to the program’s first NCAA Division II tournament berth and tournament win.
Spritzed in among Dominguez’s resume is his time spent playing professionally in Mexico for the Liga Nacional de Baloncesto Profesional league, which is the largest and top competitive league in the country and most popular in all of Latin America. His team, the Toros De Nuevo Laredo, won the championship in his rookie season in 2010-2011.
Even before Mike Dominguez earned First-Team All-State honors three times while at Española Valley High School and Capital High School from 2001 to 2004; and made a steal and game-winning layup to secure the Jaguars a state championship in 2004 over Deming High School, his roots began at Alcalde Elementary and Española Elementary Schools.
Under coach Arnie Martinez, he began playing for the Española Redbirds as a mere second-grader, two full grades behind the fourth grade minimum. Later, he traveled as far as Texas, North Carolina and Florida while playing for the Santa Fe Swish travel team before entering high school.
Family was the biggest influence: whether it be from his father taking him to play at Alcalde Elementary on Sundays before the National Football League began playing on CBS at 11 a.m., or what he learned from his great uncle Jerry Villareal, who coached Mesa Vista High School to state championships in 1986 (the year Mike Dominguez was born) and 1997.
The family connection to the game still runs strong today, as Mike Dominguez’s younger sister Stephanie Dominguez and uncle Ross Villareal help conduct the coaching staff at Albuquerque’s Volcano Vista High School under his aunt, head coach Lisa Villareal.
Under her watch, the Lady Hawks have won state championships in 2012, 2014 and 2016. With so much success to go around the dinner table, Rai Dominguez said the family tree is used to winning “a little bling-bling.”
“I basically just grew up going to every single game,” Mike Dominguez said about his upbringing in the Española area. “Whether it be Mesa Vista games, Española games or McCurdy games, because my cousin played there. I kinda got thrown into it at a young age and obviously I fell in love with it.”
One of the strongest aspects of Mike Dominguez as a coach is his ability to recruit players and make them fall in love with what he has to offer. Prior to the last two seasons at Highlands, he spent 2011 to 2017 as the assistant head coach and recruiting coordinator at Mesa. He would go on to sign up eight future all-conference players and an RMAC Player of the Year in Ryan Stephen.
The biggest part of his pitch to recruits?
Mike Dominguez says his resume does all the talking for him.
“The part that I think helps me to gain their trust is that I’ve already done it,” he said. “I’ve played at all these levels and I was successful at all these different levels. I’ve won conference championships, won regional titles in junior college; I won a state title in high school, I won the highest level in pro ball in Mexico. I can relate to them when I give them my experiences and stuff, because they know I’ve been through it and a lot of them want to get to where I was at.”
Mike Dominguez also credited his wide basketball background to his success and eventual landing of the head coaching job at Highlands. He’s taken a little bit from the various coaches he’s been surrounded by and built his own touch and spin on the profession.
He said the promotion to head coach came as no surprise, because there were several talks among the athletic department about promoting former head coach Craig Snow to athletic director and promoting Mike Dominguez to fill the void.
The timing of the plan was the only uncertainty.
“When it actually did happen and got announced and people reached out to me through social media, text messaging and phone calls, that’s where it kinda hit me and I was like, ‘Wow, this really happened,’” Mike Dominguez said.
He has already been on the recruiting trail — most recently taking a road trip to Kansas last week — and will try to further build upon the monumental success and unprecedented heights the Cowboys reached this past season: winning a school-record 22 games, their first RMAC Tournament Championship and returning to the NCAA Division II National Tournament for the first time since 2010.
Even better for Mike Dominguez, for it all to come full circle and have his shot to build upon that success close to home.
“Obviously it was a dream of mine,” he said. “When I got into this profession, I wanted to be a head coach and I’m extremely excited that it’s in New Mexico where I’m from and not too far from home in Española where I grew up at. Las Vegas is Northern New Mexico, a place where I spent my entire life up until the end of high school.”