TO THE NEXT LEVEL
After joining UH in 2014, Sampson rebuilt program ‘brick by brick’
INDIANAPOLIS — In the beginning, Kelvin Sampson, armed with a bullhorn and a small spirit band, would walk around the University of Houston campus to drum up support for the men’s basketball program.
Those three or four times each month were called “campus blitzes.” The mission: fill seats at Hofheinz Pavilion.
Seven years later, Sampson no longer needs to go door to door in search of fans. In the school’s deepest NCAA Tournament run in nearly four decades, UH will play Baylor in the national semifinals on Saturday. Two more wins will deliver UH its first national championship, a remarkable culmination of a rebuild for a once storied basketball program that went to consecutive national title games with Hakeem Olajuwon in 1983 and 1984 but had fallen on hard times and become nationally irrelevant.
It is a long way from what Sampson saw in his first years at UH.
“In any good environment, it needs to have a large student presence, and that just was not the case,” said Lauren Sampson, UH
basketball’s director for external operations and Sampson’s daughter. “Our whole deal was we were going to take our show to them.
“Shock and awe a little bit.”
In her office, Lauren Sampson would print out hundreds of invitations (tickets are free to students). Kelvin Sampson would pass them out on the 45-minute walk that included surprise visits to classrooms, plus a stop at the student center and even a few buildings where the group was kicked out.
One time, the night before final exams, Kelvin Sampson showed up at the library with hundreds of doughnuts.
“For the next 10 minutes, free doughnuts,” Sampson said over the intercom.
Students rushed for the free food.
“Now come to our basketball game,” Sampson said.
“You guys have a team?” a student asked.
“I thought basketball didn’t start until January,” another student said.
The “campus blitzes” lasted four years. By the 2017-18 season, the Cougars were on the way to the NCAA Tournament for the first time under Sampson. Word was out. Not only did Houston have a basketball team, but it soon would be among the best in the country.
“My job is to recruit a team,” Kelvin Sampson told his daughter. “Your job is to recruit this campus.”
“Once we got through the first year, we just started adding pieces, and we did it brick by brick,” Sampson said. “We weren’t in a hurry. We didn’t try to cut any corners. We did it brick by brick.”
The UH program, which had made Final Fours in 1967-68 and 1982-84, had fallen off the radar after Guy V. Lewis retired in 1986. Before it could start the reconstruction, it had to make the right head coaching hire. Coach James Dickey had brought stability to the program, but the Cougars remained at best a middle-of-the-pack program in Conference USA and in the first season in the American Athletic Conference. When Dickey stepped down in 2014, citing personal reasons, then-athletic director Mack Rhoades said the challenge became to find the “right guy” to return UH to national relevance.
Sampson had been out of college basketball since 2008, slapped with a fiveyear ban by the NCAA for making impermissible phone calls at Oklahoma and Indiana (those same calls are now legal). He was an assistant coach with the Rockets when Rhoades called about the UH opening.
“Timing is everything,” said Rhoades, now the athletic director at Baylor. “Kelvin needed Houston, and we needed Kelvin. It was like this perfect match.”
Rhoades said Sampson, the school’s seventh coach since Lewis retired, owned his mistakes and deserved a second chance.
“I was convinced he had learned from those things and owned those things,” Rhoades said. “He wanted to rewrite his recent history as a college basketball coach.”
Investing in basketball
Even with a reputation for winning, Sampson knew this would not be a quick fix. “The lower the program was, the better for me.”
What Sampson inherited: “Severe apathy. Terrible facilities. Nobody really cared.”
The first step was a $25 million investment through private donations for the Guy V. Lewis Development Facility, a 53,000-squarefoot combination of practice courts, locker rooms, offices, film rooms and “comfortable couches and video games.” Two years later, Tilman Fertitta, chairman of the school’s board of regents and billionaire owner of the Rockets, donated $20 million to refurbish Hofheinz Pavilion into what is now Fertitta Center. Brick by brick. Sampson put together a coaching staff that included son Kellen, his top assistant and the program’s head coach-in-waiting. He kept Alvin Brooks, who has longtime ties to the school and was named Thursday the new head coach at Lamar. He brought in Quannas White, a point guard on Sampson’s Final Four team at Oklahoma.
Sampson inherited a roster that, after an exodus following Dickey’s departure, included five players. He hurriedly recruited players to fill out the rest of the roster. Predictably, the Cougars went 13-19 in Sampson’s first season.
“I thought we could win. I did,” Sampson said. “We had to get through the first year. That was important.
Because then we could start building. The wins were all pluses that first year. The losses meant nothing.”
Brick by brick.
By his second season, Sampson added local high school products Galen Robinson Jr. and Chris Harris Jr. and brought in transfers Rob Gray Jr. and Damyean Dotson. As the seasons went by, the Cougars added Devin Davis and Armoni Brooks, Corey Davis Jr., Fabian White Jr., Breaon Brady and Nura Zanna, Nate Hinton, DeJon Jarreau, Brison Gresham and Justin Gorham, Caleb Mills, Marcus Sasser, Quentin Grimes, Reggie Chaney and Tramon Mark. The list goes on and on. Most were not highly recruited out of high school. But they were the “right fit” for Houston, Sampson said.
UH went 22-10 and 21-11 in Sampson’s next two seasons, both times reaching the NIT. The breakthrough came in the fourth season when the Cougars went 27-8 and made the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2010 and just the second time since 1993. The Cougars were eliminated in the round of 32 on a buzzerbeater by Michigan.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be a one- or two-year (fix), not if you are going to do it right, not if you are going to build it to last,” Rhoades said. “We needed somebody to take us to the next level and be nationally relevant.”
UH won a school-record 33 games and the AAC regular-season title in 2018-19, losing to Kentucky in the Sweet 16. Last year, the Cougars were 23-8 and repeated as AAC champions before the postseason was called off due to the coronavirus pandemic. Sampson is convinced that team could have made a deep postseason run. UH’s 111 victories since the 2017-18 season are the second most in the country behind Gonzaga (123).
With each step, even the losses, Sampson (167-63 in seven seasons at UH) could tell the program was not far away.
“Those games told me we’re getting close,” he said. “We’ve just got to keep swinging. We’ve got to keep winning. We’ve got to keep getting kids to believe. That’s what we did. We were getting closer.”
Brick by brick.
Long-term commitment
Along with sizable investments in facilities, UH two years ago made a longterm commitment to Sampson with a six-year deal that pays more than $3 million annually, making him among the highest-paid college basketball coaches in the country. He recently received a two-year extension that runs through the 202627 season.
“He came here on the promise of building something. … He didn’t have very much. He didn’t have the tools,” UH President Renu Khator said. “Kudos to him and his family for believing.”
UH athletic director Chris Pezman said the investment in basketball has been worth it. Fertitta Center has been sold out, and season ticket purchases often come with donations. It’s too early to tell the financial benefit of this season and postseason, Pezman said, but exposure is something you can’t buy.
The visibility of playing on college basketball’s biggest stage translates into potential increases in donations and sponsorships and is a chance for the university to reasonably increase ticket prices in ensuing years, Pezman said.
“That’s what athletics provide — a very visible opportunity for the university,” Pezman said. “It’s a galvanizing moment that brings everybody together for the community.”
The payoff
And although winnings from the NCAA Tournament are shared and often modest — Pezman noted that each game a team makes earns it a unit worth $1.65 million, which is later distributed among the conference teams over six years — that money still ends up in UH’s revenue stream, funding scholarships and operating costs, Pezman said.
In the most recent information available, the UH athletic department reported $75 million in revenue and $1.37 million in profit for fiscal year 2019, according to a copy of the school’s financial report submitted to the NCAA. Unlike some of the schools in larger conferences such as Texas and Texas A&M whose budgets are fully funded outside of the university through media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships, UH’s athletic budget in 2019 counted over 57 percent of its revenues from direct support from the school ($34.1 million) or student fees ($8.7 million). That is on par with schools in similar-size athletic conferences.
Has UH’s investment been worth it?
“You can ask any Cougar today, any Houstonian — yeah, it is worth it,” Khator said “We are dancing with the Four. The Final Four.”
Years later, Lauren Sampson smiles when the student section at Fertitta Center — known as “The Cage” — is packed and loud. She also remembers those days not so long ago, when she would stand near the tunnel at the old Hofheniz Pavilion and look into the crowd.
“It was sad,” she said. “But we would look up and see kids that we saw on the (campus walks). They would yell, ‘I made it!’ And we would wave at them.”