Bringing his team to play by the sands of Santa Cruz’s Main Beach has turned back the sands of time for Jeff Van Gundy.

The former NBA coach turned head coach of USA Basketball’s FIBA World Cup America’s Qualifying team has been in town for the past week. He has been taking the team through a training camp at Kaiser Permanente Arena and preparing the players for the final two games of the first round of qualifying: Friday’s 84-48 blowout of Cuba and Monday’s 8 p.m. game against Puerto Rico.

His packed schedule has left little time to explore Santa Cruz, but really all the coach needs is to get reacquainted. Van Gundy has ties to the area that span all the way back to his boyhood.

“For me, from a personal standpoint, there’s a level of nostalgia I’ve been thinking about since I found out that it was going to Santa Cruz,” the former coach of the NBA’s Houston Rockets and New York Knicks and ESPN commentator said during an interview last month.

Van Gundy’s father, Bill, coached the Cabrillo College men’s basketball team for one season in 1977. Van Gundy, who would have been about 15 at the time, would drive to games with him from Martinez and help keep the scorebook.

“It made me think of all these things: the year spent diving with my dad to Cabrillo — we’d spend an hour and a half commuting from Martinez, which would probably be longer now because of traffic. … We’d eat the french dip, go to the gym, I’d keep score, the scorebook,” Van Gundy, 56, said. “Talk about reliving your past, your youth.

“I can’t wait to get there. I’m just excited, I really am.”

In addition to those experiences, Van Gundy attended the Moraga Valley Athletic Camp at UC Santa Cruz for most of his youth. The back-to-back, week-long summer camps, which moved to UCSC from St. Mary’s College in 1971, provided instruction from some of the Bay Area’s best college coaches to 13- to 18-year-olds in basketball as well as baseball or football.

When they weren’t training, the boys headed to the beach and the bright lights of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk amusement park.

“I spent many summers and many nights at the Boardwalk,” Van Gundy said.

The coach now lives Houston with his high school sweetheart and now wife, Kim Van Gundy. He said he hasn’t been back to Santa Cruz since his family moved to New York when he was in high school.

During the past two weeks, Van Gundy has hardly gotten to see the sunshine, much less put his feet in the sand, as he prepares his team — which includes mostly G League players, including Damion Lee of the Santa Cruz Warriors — as best he can to qualify the USA for the 2019 FIBA World Cup in China. Currently undefeated, Team USA (3-0) is on its way to securing a top-three finish in group C and a spot among the 12 teams in the second round of qualifying. The nations with the seven best finishes in the second round will represent the Americas in the next World Cup.

The USA beat Puerto Rico (2-1), 85-78, during a closely contested first-round game in November.

Van Gundy said the qualifying rounds have been a fun ride, but nothing compared to what awaits the coach at the Boardwalk soon after the final buzzer sounds Monday night.

“I will be on the rides,” he said. “I don’t know if they sell those bands anymore for the unlimited rides — they used to have those. But I will be there.”