Keatts transforms UNC-Wilmington
Coach guides Seahawks back to NCAA
Craig Ponder spent much of spring 2014 selling his North Carolina-Wilmington teammates on Kevin Keatts, pleading with them to stay.
Keatts was hired away from Louisville, where he was an assistant coach on a national championship team, to revive a Seahawks program that had topped 20 losses in five of the previous six seasons.
Some of Ponder’s teammates were not sold.
So Ponder, who had played for Keatts at Hargrave Military Academy, told them how Keatts would coach. The players would work but be in the best shape of their lives. They would win because Keatts had done that everywhere.
“It was kind of an effort of talking those guys off the ledge,” said Ponder, who graduated last year. “It was a gut check. … We couldn’t go back to the same place that we were previously.”
Those rough years seem a faint memory as 12th-seeded UNCWilmington (29-5) prepares to play No. 5 Virginia (22-10) in the first round of the NCAA tournament at Amway Center on Thursday.
In three years, Keatts has remade the Seahawks program and restored it to the type of success it had in making four NCAA tournament appearances from 2000 to 2006.
In the process, Keatts’ engineering of UNC-Wimington’s remarkable turnaround has put his name in the discussion for bigger jobs.
“He changed the whole culture when he got here,” redshirt senior Chris Flemmings said. “We had some rough seasons, but since he’s been here, it’s been winning and focus on winning and us getting better every day.”
Keatts, 44, took over a UNCWilmington program that hadn’t had a winning record in the seven seasons before he got there. He’d left a Louisville program that had gone to two Final Fours and a Sweet 16 with the 2013 national title while he was on the staff.
“When I took this job three years ago, the first week of practice, I thought what did I just do?” Keatts said.
The players were skeptical as Keatts sought to shift their style from a walk-the-ball up, set system. Keatts gave them more free- dom, but that required intense conditioning. If the Seahawks wanted to be aggressive and uptempo, they’d have to run.
“It was hell. There was no other way to put it,” Ponder said. “We had never been through a workout like the ones he initiated when he got there. Guys were falling on the floor.”
The next season backed up all Ponder had told his teammates about Keatts. The Seahawks went 18-14, winning a share of the Colonial Athletic Association regular-season title.
It would be the first of two consecutive CAA Coach of the Year honors for Keatts, making him the first coach in the league to do that.
“In a very short period of time, he had earned the respect of every one of our players,” UNCW athletics director Jimmy Bass said. “That group he had in his first year, to win 18 games was an absolute miracle.”
UNCW followed that up with a 25-8 record last year, a CAA tournament title and a return to the NCAA tournament. Facing defending national champion Duke, the Seahawks held the lead at halftime before losing by eight.
“When things were at an alltime low, we knew that we weren’t going to stay at that level,” said assistant coach Thomas Carr, who also played for Keatts at Hargrave. “Did we think we were going to be as good as we were? No. But at the same time, desperation met reality and then success followed.”
UNCW’s continued success this season included CAA regular-season and tournament titles.
And it has Keatts’ name being floated for jobs at Power Five schools, particularly North Carolina State. Bass said he is working on an extension and raises for Keatts and his assistants.
For his part, Keatts says he’s not focused on what’s next.
“When you win, I think it’s flattering, obviously,” Keatts said. “But for us, we just stay locked in.
“I love this team. I love this program. I haven’t thought about any other program.”
As a young coach at Hargrave, Keatts left for a Division I position at Marshall before realizing he missed it and returning to the prep school for eight more years. He thought he’d be like Fork Union coach Fletcher Arritt Jr., who built a powerhouse in more than 40 years with the program, and stay at Hargrave for his career.
That was until Louisville coach Rick Pitino called with an offer too good to pass up.
“What people have to realize is as much as coach likes money, he loves winning,” Carr said. “It would take something special. He’s not going to be a guy that just jumps at the first thing.”
Right now Keatts has a special thing going and is set up to win at UNC-Wilmington, so he is focused on a Virginia team that is one of the best in the country defensively and will test his team’s ability to push the pace.
Success in the tournament would only further add to his résumé and his resurrection of the Seahawks program. But even without it, Keatts has rendered Ponder’s role as chief advocate obsolete.
After three winning seasons, everyone is sold on what Keatts can do.