SAN ANTONIO – Before Duke coach Jon Scheyer coached in his first official game after taking over for Mike Krzyzewski, he flew his team to Houston to play in a secret preseason scrimmage.
Scheyer intentionally sought out Kelvin Sampson and the Cougars for his first career “game.”
“I wanted the toughest test for our team,” said Scheyer, at 37, 32 years younger than Sampson. “I just believed Houston would be the toughest test. They’re the toughest test because of their coach. Their coach is as good as it gets in college basketball period. I admired from afar how they defended.”
So, on Oct. 29, 2022 while the football Cougars were beating USF at TDECU Stadium across campus,the two talked for 45 minutes before the scrimmage. Duke may have lost. It doesn’t matter. Sampson saw something special.
“I’ll tell you how good a job he’s done,” Sampson said of Scheyer. “Nobody ever talks about Coach K anymore.”
Not much comes from those scrimmages a) because they are secret and b) in the big picture they don’t mean much. But 2 ½ years later the images can’t fade.
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“I think we got punched in the face many times that day. We punched back, though,” Scheyer.
“Hell yeah, I do [remember],” Duke guard Tyrese Proctor said. “It was physical as hell. I got knocked on my ass a couple of times. It was just a different type of game. That’s just the way they play, they try to junk it up.”
“He was rattled,” Houston assistant Kellen Sampson said of Proctor. “The game seemed really fast for him, but gosh he was talented.”
The scrimmage has become an inspiration for Kellen who will someday soon take over for his father, Kelvin, as head coach of the Cougars when the 69-year-old elder Sampson retires.
“He had a presence about him,” Kellen said of Scheyer. “There was an easy way that he communicates. It felt like and looked like he was a head coach. I remember thinking, ‘He’s going to be all right.’ “
“Jon was so secure and courageous enough to build Duke through his eyes. He didn’t feel like he simply needed to continue what Coach K was doing. He went outside the program. He changed their social media presence. Offensively, they don’t do anything Coach K did. He has been willing to coach Duke the way Jon Scheyer sees Duke.
The teams played a much more significant game that that scrimmage last year in the Sweet 16. Duke’s 54-51 win over the Cougars propelled it to its 17th Final Four. This national semifinal marks No. 18. Only North Carolina (21) has more.
What all this means Saturday night when Duke and Houston meet again in the Final Four is unknown.
The rematch marks more of the same for Duke. For Houston it is a reminder of how long it took to turn on the lights. They haven’t dimmed for a while.
“We’re not just a sparring partner for Muhammad Ali” Kellen Sampson said, remembering that scrimmage. “We’re preparing for our own heavyweight fights.”
But it wasn’t always that way for Houston. The program was in bad shape when Sampson arrived in 2014 as any member of the Sampson family can tell you.
Houston had problems before Sampson arrived
As she waded through confetti, grandchildren and hugs on the Lucas Oil Stadium floor Sunday at the Midwest Regional Final, Karen Sampson, Kelvin Sampson’s wife of 45 years, couldn’t believe how far she, her husband and Houston basketball had come.
Coming to the University of Houston in 2014 wasn’t anything close to a slam dunk for the Sampson family. Forget the basketball metaphor, this was actually a career risk. The Cougars hadn’t smelled the NCAA Tournament in 22 years.
What you see this week in this town is a bright, shining No. 1 seed for the third consecutive year representing the nation’s fourth-largest city. These Cougars have been buffed to brilliance. But long before getting to San Antonio this week, there were questions about the Sampson family taking the Houston job at all.
First, there were rats in what was then known as the Hofheinz Pavillion. Homeless folks too.
“There was an inordinate amount of rats – and rodents and birds,” said Lauren Sampson, Houston’s director of basketball operations. “They didn’t ever lock anything.”
“They killed the vineyard,” summed up Karen, Kelvin Sampson’s wife of 45 years. “The vineyard was Phi Slama Jama, what it used to be. All of a sudden they didn’t water it.”
Not all of a sudden. The neglect of Houston basketball from those glory days was lengthy and profound. When Kelvin Sampson took the job 11 years ago, it wasn’t just about revitalizing a roster or turning on a city. At first, it just was about turning on the lights.
“I turned off the lights for a photo shoot and it took three months for the lights to come back on,” Lauren said. “We changed everything.”
That included ripping out asbestos – a health hazard – that kept those lights from being changed for the longest time. That included creating the momentum for change the decrepit Hofheinz Pavillion into the glittering, modern Fertitta Center. That is, changing the culture one piece of sheet wall at a time.
If you’re getting the vibe that Houston’s resurrection has been a family affair, you’re right. Karen holds within her an oral history of all things Sampson. Lauren is her dad’s right-hand woman.
“I knew it was going to be a major reclamation project. It was just way worse than I even imagined once we got in there,” Kelvin said of Houston. “I did it with my daughter and did it with my son.”
Kelvin wasn’t going to take the job unless Lauren and Kellen were included. They knew enough of the blueprint to tell everyone to get out of the way.
“We always had programs we built, Montana Tech, Washington State,” Lauren said, recalling her father’s previous stops. “Oklahoma was our big thing. At Oklahoma, you had to recruit the fan base every year. There was no carryover. That last game you ended up with, that wasn’t your first-game crowd.”
All of those places changed because of the Sampson Effect. In four years at Montana Tech, an NAIA school, he improved the Orediggers’ record by 13 games from the first season to the second and won at least a share of two conference titles. By the time Sampson left Washington State in 1994, the Cougars had made the NCAA Tournament. They’ve been back only three times since.
Oklahoma has never been more successful than when Sampson was there guiding the Sooners to 11 tournaments in 12 seasons.
Houston’s success a family affair
April 2, 2014 – the date of Sampson’s hiring – was a strange time in everyone’s life. Kelvin had just finished his sixth year as an NBA assistant. Lauren, who sold sponsorships for her father’s program at Indiana, left the profession following the coach’s second set of major NCAA violations.
“I was heartbroken after Indiana,” she said.
Sometime later, Lauren was in Charlotte, North Carolina, interviewing for a job at ESPNU. Walking through the offices, a familiar sight caught her eye.
“They had my dad’s face on a dart board and they were throwing darts at it,” she said. “I just looked and said, ‘I need to get out of sports. That’s my dad.’ I left. I was crying.”
Leaning on her cosmetology license, Lauren went to work for a beauty salon. It was nice to be anonymous again. Between jobs, dad had time to pop in for a haircut.
“Half the people at this beauty salon, you can get credit hours for beauty school when you are in prison,” Lauren recalled. “Half the people I came out of beauty school with were coming out of jail.
“Everyone looked at him and they were like, ‘You look so familiar. Is he a probation officer?’ I went, ‘Yes!’ “
When the Sampsons arrived at Houston the level of apathy on campus was staggering. Lauren would print out what she called “invitations” to hand out to students. The address of Hofheinz was included because, she says, the students didn’t know where the games were played.
She would go walk the arena concourse handing out team posters. She would get them handed back to her. Speaking of team posters, the first version under Sampson featured the Cougars in practice jerseys. The jerseys didn’t arrive in time for the team photo shoot according to The Athletic.
Lauren tried to read the riot act to existing staff.
“I torched them,” she recalled. “I went full Sampson on our senior staff. I looked at them, I closed my book and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do because you’ve killed this program.’ “
That first season ended with a rag tag bunch posting a 13-19 record. The Cougars were second to last in American Athletic Conference attendance. The band and cheerleaders didn’t show up until the conference season.
“They would just run out there and wave,” Lauren recalled. “First of all, those first couple of years, who are you waving at?”
But Kelvin Sampson was a revitalizer. The job made sense because, well, it was available. Sampson hadn’t had a head coaching job for those six years when Houston came open. https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/houston-coach-kelvin-sampson-is-winning-after-his-career-was-derailed-for-ncaa-violations-that-are-now-allowed/
“I wanted to go to the worst situation I could find,” Kelvin said Thursday prior to Saturday’s national semifinal against Duke. “There were no expectations in Houston. It was terrible. The administration didn’t care. All they were good at was firing coaches.”
The Sampson wave swept over the program like Houston’s summer humidity. Lauren has an Oklahoma degree in communications with minors in history and Native American studies.
“But really I have a PhD in college basketball,” she said.
After that first season, the Cougars never won fewer than 21 games. The Midwest Regional win over Tennessee was the school-record 34th.
The Sampson family is in its third Final Four and a game away from playing for a national title.
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