Breakthrough season
Through determination, Sampson has rebuilt program — and his reputation
“A stonecutter hammers away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two. It was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
Jacob A. Riis
ORLANDO, Fla. — A rock is the first thing visitors see upon entering the player’s lounge inside the Guy V. Lewis Development Facility.
It’s kept in a case with a sledgehammer leaning against it, a symbol of what Kelvin Sampson has based the revival of the University of Houston men’s basketball program.
Most days, Sampson often ends every staff meeting with the saying, “Let’s go hit the rock.”
“It ain’t going to break today,” Sampson, the Cougars’ 62-year-old coach, continues. “We don’t know how many times we are going to have to hit it, but I just know it’s going to crack.”
“He’s said it for four years,” says Kellen Sampson, an assistant coach on his dad’s staff. “Our whole culture has been based on hitting that rock.”
The Cougars kept swinging through a 19-loss season in Sampson’s first year. A few more chips in the rock were made in back-to-back 20-win National Invitation
Tournament seasons.
None of that compares with this season’s magical ride: a 24-6 record, No. 21 national ranking and, most importantly, a return to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2010 when the 68team field is announced Sunday.
“We knew this would not be easy,” says Sampson, whose team is the No. 3 seed and plays in Friday’s quarterfinals of the American Athletic Conference tournament.
“I thought Houston was a job you could win at. Everybody looked at the facilities, the apathy, all the negatives. That’s what drove me. That’s what really reeled me in. It’s not what they had; it’s what they didn’t have.
Turns out, both sides needed each other.
For Houston, it was a chance to land a proven coach with a track record of turning around struggling programs. For Sampson, it was a second chance to return to the college game after a five-year ban for NCAA violations at two different schools.
A once-proud program, Houston had not been nationally relevant since the Phi Slama Jama days of the 1980s. The Cougars have been to the NCAA Tournament just twice in the last quarter-century. It’s been 34 years since they won an NCAA Tournament game. And facilities? Before Sampson’s arrival, some of the worst in college basketball.
“I like going places that are a little rough around the edges, that need to be built, need to win,” Sampson says.
His first two jobs were at underdog programs Montana Tech, a Division II school in Butte, Mont., and Washington State.
From a 7-20 start, he took Montana Tech to three straight 22-win seasons and two conference titles.
“There’s hard jobs and bad jobs,” Sampson says. “That was both.”
At Washington State, Sampson endured three straight losing seasons before eventually ending an 11-year NCAA drought.
At Oklahoma, Sampson inherited a program with history but overshadowed by football. He led the Sooners to the NCAA Tournament 11 times in 12 seasons, including the Final Four in 2002, and three straight Big 12 tournament championships.
“Taking over some difficult situations has been his calling card,” Kellen says.
The results are undeniable. On Wednesday, Sampson was voted the AAC Coach of the Year. He is 28 wins shy of 600 for his career, which could come late next season. On Sunday, Sampson will join an exclusive list as one of just 14 coaches to ever take four schools (Washington State, Oklahoma, Indiana and Houston) to the NCAA Tournament.
NCAA over NBA
Does Sampson consider this season a redemption moment? He does not like to talk about his past, which includes a showcause penalty for making hundreds of impermissible phone calls to recruits while at Oklahoma and Indiana. The NCAA has since changed its rules, with what Sampson did now legal.
“Right now, college basketball is going through this FBI probe and we’ve had people arrested and the term ‘corruption’ is being used,” ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas says. “Kelvin Sampson was being criticized for phone calls. That’s how ridiculous the NCAA system has been all these years. He was out of the college game for a while because of phone calls. Tell me we don’t have our priorities out of whack.”
After he was fired from Indiana, Sampson worked as a consultant for the San Antonio Spurs. He spent three years with the Milwaukee Bucks and three seasons as the lead assistant and interim coach with the Rockets.
“To me, being a head coach in the NBA was going to be my redemption moment,” Sampson says.
Sampson says he was leaning toward staying in the NBA.
“For a while there, I was one foot in, one foot out,” he says. “Once I decided to go forward, I had to make sure I was going to be two feet in.”
During the interview process, former UH athletic director Mack Rhoades was “brutally honest” with Sampson. Fan support was lagging. Facilities were in desperate need of upgrades.
“When you’ve won before, it means you can win again,” Sampson says. “I challenged our administration. They fired coaches every four years around here and didn’t do a whole lot to help them. I asked them why not?
“Our university was way behind everybody in this league. Until they stepped up and said this is important, I wasn’t going to come here. They made a commitment. Then it made it easy.”
UH opened the $25 million Guy V. Lewis Development Facility in 2016. In December, the school will open the $60 million Fertitta Center.
There were other challenges. Several star players chose to leave the program after he was hired, leaving Sampson with only five returning players his first season.
“It was like rats running off the ship,” Sampson says. “Everybody was jumping ship on us.”
With eight spots to fill, Sampson and his staff scoured the junior college ranks and relied on past relationships for leads on available players.
“When you start recruiting in May at this level, it’s like the blue light special at Walmart starts at 10 in the morning and you show up at 6 in the evening,” he says. “There ain’t a whole lot left on that table.”
Three weeks into the job, Sampson joked he thought about calling Rockets general manager Daryl Morey and coach Kevin McHale. “Can I please come back?” The Cougars went 13-19 in Sampson’s first season, but the foundation was laid.
“I knew what the house was going to look like, but nobody else did,” Sampson says. “They just saw that we were losing. I saw a foundation. I knew we were going to build on that.”
The Cougars followed by going 22-10 and 21-11 the next two seasons, making the NIT both times.
Trending up
At the Cougars’ final regularseason game March 4, completing a perfect 15-0 run at their temporary home H&PE Arena on the Texas Southern campus, Rockets stars James Harden and Eric Gordon were sitting courtside.
“He means a lot to me,” says Gordon, who played one season for Sampson at Indiana. “It’s good to see him turn this program around and make this into a winner.”
Afterward, Sampson came over to midcourt and gave Gordon a hug.
“He just knows how to win, whether he has star players or guys that are role players. He’s going to find a way to win,” Gordon says. “He’s a special coach. I think he’s an underrated coach. He will be a Hall of Fame coach in college basketball.”
This year’s run includes wins over top-10 teams Cincinnati and Wichita. The Cougars finished in a tie for second in the AAC after being picked sixth in the preseason. And they’ve yet to lose consecutive games.
“This year, we kicked the door down,” Sampson says.
Some of the same trademarks that have followed Sampson at every stop are present with the Cougars. UH is among the national leaders in defense and has outrebounded all but five opponents this season. The lineup, led by first-team all-conference guard Rob Gray, lives on the 3-point line.
“It’s been so long since the university has been ranked and in the Tournament each year,” Gray says. “We’re just getting started. We want to make this a trend that’s normal for the University of Houston basketball program.”
Sampson is expected to receive a raise this offseason. He has three years left on a deal that runs through the 2020-21 season and pays him more than $1 million annually.
“We are very excited about the future,” says Chris Pezman, UH’s vice president of intercollegiate athletics.
Shortly after being hired, Sampson received a FedEx package. It was a standard aluminum ladder. The note read:
“Congratulations! I hope you’ll need to use this a lot during your journey as a Houston Cougar. — Joe”
OU athletic director Joe Castiglione came up with the idea to send Sampson a ladder he would someday use to cut down the nets after winning a championship.
“My guess is that this is only the beginning for the Houston Cougars basketball program,” Castiglione says.