This is how close UCLA Coach Ben Howland is to Pittsburgh Coach Jamie Dixon.
Dial the number for the home Jamie and Jacqueline Dixon share with their two young children in the Pittsburgh suburbs, and Ben and Kim Howland's 22-year-old daughter, Meredith, might answer the phone.
A nursing student at Pittsburgh -- and a cheerleader at the school when her father was coach -- Meredith is a regular baby sitter for the Dixons.
This is also how close Howland and Dixon are: After Dixon's sister Maggie, the coach at Army, died suddenly at 28 last spring, Howland was a pallbearer.
It is a relationship that runs both long and deep.
Howland was already beginning his coaching career in the early 1980s when he first saw Dixon play at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame High.
Later, the pair would spend years together building programs at Northern Arizona and Pittsburgh before Howland left to become the coach at UCLA in 2003 and Dixon stepped into his old job at Pittsburgh.
On Thursday in San Jose, they'll be on opposite benches for the first time, each with the same purpose -- trying to get his team to the NCAA tournament's Elite Eight.
"It's exciting," Howland said. "Whoever wins that game, and obviously I hope it's us, we want to win it, but whoever wins is one game away from the Final Four."
The men talk "pretty much every day," Dixon said last week in Buffalo, N.Y., as his team got the two wins that earned Pittsburgh a trip to San Jose.
"Meredith is at our house all the time," he said. "We talk just about every day, but we talk more about family things than basketball."
The relationship started, quite naturally, with basketball.
Howland, 49, already was an assistant at UC Santa Barbara when Dixon, who is 41 and grew up in North Hollywood, was still in high school.
"The first time I remember seeing Jamie Dixon play was for Notre Dame out in the Valley, a CIF game," Howland said. "He had about 31 points.
"He was writing me letters all the time, saying, 'I really want to go to UCSB.' "
But Howland and Santa Barbara didn't find a place for him, and Dixon, a classic late bloomer, went on to a standout career at Texas Christian.
"I was the new guy on the block, 24, 25 years old," Howland said. "It was a big mistake, one of the hundreds I've made in 26 years in the business, but one I won't forget."
He didn't make another after Dixon's playing career ended, recommending him for a graduate assistant's job on Jerry Pimm's staff with him at Santa Barbara.
