He Looks Just Like Steve Kerr, Yet the Similarities Are Anything but Superficial

When Steve Gillis got tickets to a Warriors-Lakers preseason game in Las Vegas earlier this month, he wanted to be right near the coaches. Not because he happens to look strikingly similar to Golden State coach Steve Kerr; it was never about getting noticed. As a dedicated coach himself, Gillis wanted to observe and listen.

He’d enjoy watching his favorite team, the Warriors, in his own city with family and maybe jot down a few notes to take back home. Because of how striking the resemblance is, though, Gillis wouldn’t go unnoticed.

A video of Gillis walking back to his seat, just a handful of rows behind Kerr and the Warriors’ bench, took off across social media a few days after the game. Once Gillis found his seat, Kerr appeared to look directly at him, almost shocked in disbelief.

It’s a funny clip, but just like a lot of things on the internet, everything isn’t always as it seems.

“The clip that went viral, I’m pretty sure he’s not looking at me,” Gillis told Sports Illustrated over the phone. “I didn’t see him and the reason why I’m sitting there is because I’m an aficionado of coaches and of greatness and how you study, how you deal with players.”

Gillis has been in coaching for three decades. Him and his wife started the Summerlin Volleyball Academy in Las Vegas. Early on, he was the women’s head coach at Whitworth University in Washington, then he was a high-level high school coach at Gonzaga Prep before he joined the U.S. men’s national team staff and served as an assistant at the University of Washington.

The Kerr comparisons started around the same time his coaching career began; some people have called him “Kerr” for nearly 30 years, back when the former NBA guard was winning championships with Michael Jordan and the Bulls. Tom Hoff, a three-time Olympian and captain of the 2008 U.S. men’s volleyball team that won gold in Beijing, is one of the earliest to dub Gillis as Kerr’s doppelgänger.

“[Hoff] has called me Kerr for 30 years,” Gillis said. “He’s from Chicago, so that makes sense. The first time I walked in the gym, he thought I was Kerr when I came down to Colorado Springs. He was like, ‘are you kidding me? Who is this!’”

The resemblance is uncanny. “He looks more like Steve than Steve,” the NBC Sports Bay Area broadcast said in 2024 when Gillis went viral for the same reason. “I just thought he was strikingly handsome,” Kerr said of Gillis in 2024. But the parallels go deeper than that, even beyond the wild coincidence the two share a first name. It’s the fact that Kerr has reached the highest level of his profession by figuring out a winning formula and how to relate to his players as the years go by and his teams get younger.

Gillis wants his youth volleyball players to work hard, but more importantly, to never lose the joy of the game and how great the process of improvement can feel. He’s teaching young ladies a game that he loves, and his message when he recently kicked off a new season was similar to Kerr’s overarching philosophy. The same tactic that lets Stephen Curry run around and drain wild three-pointer after wild three-pointer with a kid-like joy can help unlock any game, at any level.

“I told [my volleyball players] that you’re going to have more fun than you’ve ever had in volleyball,” Gillis said. “That’s my guarantee to you. I’m going to make you work harder, but we’re going to have more fun. When Kerr talks about the joy of the game and flow, I get that. He’s got it right. It’s got to be enormously joyful and fun at any level.

“And I think that’s where most coaches get it wrong, is that they think they have to hold the steering wheel a lot tighter and grind and push and demean. And it’s like, no, no. You don’t have to at any level. If you see the people that are pros, and Kerr’s a pro, they hold the wheel a lot of times with one hand and it’s loose.”

It’s not just Kerr, either. Gillis got seats that close because he also wanted to hear how Lakers coach JJ Redick handled the game, managed timeouts and drew up and communicated plays. Gillis spent the first half behind the Lakers’ bench, then moved behind the Warriors’ bench for the rest of the game.

Life as Kerr’s long-lost twin has its perks. None that are forced, though, all arise naturally. Last year, Gillis was at a volleyball tournament in Seattle that he started back in his days at Washington. He was on a beeline to go talk to his sisters, two Seattle residents he doesn’t see often, when a gentleman with a low baseball cap and glasses got in his way to ask for a picture. Gillis politely declined because his sisters were taking off. The man asked one more time, but Gillis turned down the picture again.

As he started a 15-minute chat with his sisters, it dawned on him. That was Pete Carroll.

The former Seahawks coach was there watching his granddaughter on another court and, luckily, he was still around so the two could get that picture and shoot the breeze. During their conversation, Carroll’s phone buzzed. He had a text from another Steve (yes, it was Kerr) who couldn’t believe how handsome Gillis was.

That’s not the only time it’s happened. Boxer Thomas “Hitman” Hearns’s son recently stopped Gillis at a gas station. “Steve?” Hearns asked, to which Gillis replied, “yes.” When Hearns followed it up with, “Kerr?” Gillis said, “nope!” The two died laughing and chatted about Hearns’s legendary fights for a bit. At the Warriors game where Gillis first went viral in 2024, a worker positioned him near the team tunnel to see if Kerr would notice. Roger Federer happened to be at the same game, and as the tennis legend was walking across the court with Warriors owner Joe Lacob, he noticed Gillis and asked him for a picture.

Maybe Federer thought he was actually Kerr, but who could blame Gillis for obliging his favorite athlete of all time? (No. 2, by the way, is Curry.)

“I get these happenstance things that happen,” Gillis said. “For me, it was such a cool day brightener to run into Thomas Hearns’s son who, because I’m a sports nut, you could bring up any sport and we could have fun talking about it, whatever it is. The fact that we had a chance meeting in Vegas about 10 days ago was pretty cool.

“If the Steve Kerr lookalike gets me there, then for that I’m thankful. But in no way am I ever trying to capitalize, manipulate, get it for anything other than just lucky connections with people.”

Kerr has seen Gillis, but the two have yet to officially meet. Should that ever come to fruition, Gillis says he would just want to listen and absorb as much as he can from the four-time NBA champion coach. He’d ask Kerr who his mentors are in life, who have been his biggest influences and what he’s reading right now. He wants to know how the greats feed their minds and who molded them into who they are.

However, there doesn’t even have to be a conversation. A bucket-list item for Gillis is to watch Kerr—or any other legendary coach—conduct a practice and work and train his guys. Should that happen, Gillis would be there jotting notes in his phone, feeding his mind and taking back a thing or two for his volleyball players and high-school students.

If they ever got together for a cup of coffee, though, it wouldn’t just be two strikingly similar-looking gentlemen staring into a mirror. They’d have plenty to talk about.

PODCAST 🎧: Listen to SI’s NBA podcast, Open Floor, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.