For top-seeded Houston, basketball is a family affair
Lauren Sampson remembers riding on the team bus in frigid winters as a preschooler during her father’s first head coaching job at Montana Tech, athletic tape affixed around the windows in a losing effort to stave off the cold.
Her family told her the team’s games were her parties and let the little girl run the show.
“They gave me a mic and I’d say: ‘Welcome,’” she recalled. “And then they would sew bells into my game dresses so they could hear me as I was wandering around.”
Her younger brother, Kellen, remembers using
Washington State facilities as his personal playground when dad ended up there a few years later. He once slipped into the UCLA locker room when the Bruins came to town — he was no older than 5 — and wasn’t discovered until coach Jim Herrick was midway through his pregame speech.
“He looked at me and said: ‘Hey, little fella’s got to go,’” he said.
Decades later, the siblings are at their father’s side and both play key roles on coach Kelvin Sampson’s staff as Houston makes a run at its first championship.
Kellen Sampson is the team’s top assistant and Lauren Sampson is the director of basketball operations for the top-seeded Cougars (33-3), who meet No. 5 seed Miami in the Sweet 16 on Friday in Kansas City, Missouri.
The 67-year-old Sampson has turned around the once-proud program in his nine years at the school on the edge of downtown Houston. The Cougars have risen to heights not seen since t he days of Hakeem Olajuwon and Phi Slama Jama and have become perennial championship contenders.
Having Kellen and Lauren with him, he says, has made all the difference.
“It’s probably why I’m here,” he said. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think how lucky I am to be working with my family.”
The 40-year coaching veteran said having his children as part of a carefully cultivated staf has helped him last this long in the game. He once thought he had to do everything himself, now he delegates. And his children aren’t afraid to speak up.
“Kellen and Lauren, they know my idiosyncrasies, they come back at me, they disagree with me,” he said. “They tell me no, they say: ‘that’s not the right way,’ and they just help me. They’ve made me better.”
For Kellen Sampson, the path to where he is today was a linear one, as he knew from a young age exactly what he wanted to do: “I don’t know if I’ve spent a single second thinking about being anything other than this.”
He talked with dad about his college options and the elder Sampson wasn’t shy with a suggestion.
“The conversation was based on who do you think will prepare you to be the best college coach you can be,” Kellen Sampson said. “And he was really honest and said: ‘Look, I think I can prepare you to do that better than anybody.’ And I chose to play for him.”
After playing at Oklahoma and beginning his career there, he took jobs elsewhere — away from his father — to build his own path before rejoining him at Houston in 2014.
Lauren Sampson worked in sports for years before moving to pharmaceutical sales. It wasn’t long before dear old dad lured her back to the family business.
“The first year that my dad was at Houston, my grandfather had just passed, and he had always been the first phone call after a game,” she said. “And that first season at Houston, for a lot of games, I turned into that phone call, and he would kind of ask me questions throughout that first season.”
With her marketing background, he’d ask her what she would do to get more people at games, improve the arena atmosphere and other such scenarios. After a year of this back and forth he asked if she’d consider moving to Houston to work with him; in 2016, she did.