Popovich, who won his third N.B.A. Coach of the Year award this season, left Pomona-Pitzer 26 years ago, but the bond remains — not just between him and the program and his former players, but also with the coaches in the Sciac (pronounced Sky-ack), a collection of small, mostly liberal arts colleges in the Los Angeles area that, like other Division III programs, do not offer athletic scholarships.

Image Popovich in the huddle with his players at Pomona-Pitzer, a program he coached for eight seasons in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Credit... Pomona College

Popovich had no designs to leave in 1988 to join the Spurs’ staff under Larry Brown, with whom he spent the 1986-87 season at Kansas while he was on a sabbatical. He had built Pomona-Pitzer into a conference champion after going 2-22 in his first season. The intellectual atmosphere of the Claremont Colleges — a group of five undergraduate and two graduate colleges in Claremont — invigorated him, and it was easy for Popovich and his wife, Erin, to envision raising their children in the leafy commuter community.

His departure was serendipitous. The Popoviches had been planning to buy a house in the area and had an agreement from the president of Pomona-Pitzer for a loan. But when the president died, the new president would not honor the agreement, which Popovich said he had in writing. Shortly after the meeting, Popovich received a call from Brown offering him a job.

Marveling a bit at the fork-in-the-road moment, Popovich said that if he had gotten the loan, he would “absolutely” still be there.

Popovich was one of the few coaches to leave the Sciac. The conference’s coaches earn a salary in the range of $80,000 to $120,000, comparable to that of many Division I assistants, and are free of the headaches of recruiting and the grind of travel that are present at other levels. Administrations, concerned more with academic success than winning, rarely push out coaches.

Eslinger, who completed his sixth season at Caltech, is the new kid on the block; six of the nine coaches have been at their posts at least 16 seasons. Mike Bokosky, who has been at Chapman for 22 years, does not have a cellphone. Occidental Coach Brian Newhall has been around for 27 seasons, long enough to have coached against Popovich.

“It’s the no-turnover league,” said Rich Rider, in his 19th season at California Lutheran after working as an assistant at Boise State. He is one of two coaches in the league with a doctoral degree.