SAN ANTONIO — It looks more like steel cage match than a basketball practice drill. However, it’s the way Kelvin Sampson opens each season—the loose ball drill.
Bristling over the fact that video of the drill made its way onto the internet, Sampson reluctantly explains the loose ball drill.
“It’s the first drill of the year,” he says. “Then I don’t do it anymore. Because, if something happens once, it could be an accident. Happens twice, it could be coincidence. If it happens three or more times, it can and should be a habit. As long as they’re doing that naturally, I don’t need to do a drill. As a matter of fact, I don’t even like that drill. I don’t like doing drills. I’d rather them be like that anyway.”
It’s a drill with one rule. A coach rolls a ball onto the floor. “Whoever gets it is on offense,” Sampson says. “Whoever does not get it is on defense.”
Needless to say, you want to be on offense—desperately. And players collide, dive and hit the ground as the ball bounces around.
“That would be the floor,” Sampson corrects a questioner. Not the ground.
Usually, one player on each practice team competes in the drill, but Sampson has been known to change it up.
“Sometimes, I just do the drill with an individual against nobody, you know?” he says. “Sometimes, I may just drop the ball, let it pitter patter to a stop. When I blow the whistle, see how quick they get to it. Everything is a competition.”
Competing is a competition
To say the Houston Cougars are built in Sampson’s image is putting it mildly. The toughest defensive team in the nation has been imbued with the fighting spirit that carried Sampson from the Lumbee community in Robeson County to the highest level of the college basketball world.
“He always says, Competing is a competition, whether it’s a rebound. It’s who wants it more,” sixth-year Cougar J’wan Roberts says. “I feel like when we go into games, it makes it a lot more easier because practices are so hard. When you practice a certain way in practice, when you get to the game, it’s like the (other) team’s not ready for this, but we are. Going into games with the intensity of making teams uncomfortable or playing hard, I think that’s what gets us going.”
Toughness runs in the family
Competing, fighting for everything and going places that make others uncomfortable has been part of Sampson’s DNA since his early days in North Carolina. He had a role model at home in his father and high school coach, John Sampson.
“My dad, when he was coaching, and this is why he was my hero and I admired him so much, is that high school coaches in North Carolina in the ’60s and ’70s, ’80s, ’50s, you only had a nine-month contract,” he says. “There was three months he had to hustle. He had to go find jobs.”
“I can tell you what his jobs were. He taught drivers ed. He sold Lincoln life insurance. He sold World Book Encyclopedia, which was Google before cell phones. My mother used to make us read that so we’d do good on the SAT. The fourth thing, he worked at tobacco markets in Lumberton. We were from this little country town called Pembroke. I learned a lot from him. During those days, during segregation, like tobacco markets were different. Three different bathrooms, white, colored and other. That was it. That’s where he worked. He would take me to work with him. All of a sudden when I got older, I had a job with him.
“Those three months I probably learned more from him in those three months than I did in the other nine months. You got a family. You got to feed your family. That’s your job. Coach all you want, but you got to take care of your family.”
From obscurity to oblivion
That’s what took Sampson to Montana Tech, where he went 7-20 his first season (Sampson exaggerates slightly, declaring his record to be 4-22), 0-15 in the Frontier Conference.
“(Longtime Michigan State coach) Jud Heathcote called me up the day after that season ended. Jud calls up and said, ‘Hey, Kel, I just want to congratulate you. You’re the only coach in captivity that possibly could have taken Montana Tech from obscurity to oblivion. Got to go, Kel.’ True story.”
“They hired me as their basketball coach because it was not important,” he says. “If it had been important, they would never have hired me (laughter). Everybody there that played, every student, was an engineer. I could never have gotten into school there, and I’m coaching those guys in basketball. I think every curriculum required 30 credits of math, metallurgical engineering, petroleum engineering, mining engineering. Yeah, I could never go to school there. I felt a lot of those guys that were seniors were older than I was, or the same age. I was 24. They were in their fifth or sixth year because they were doing something extra onto their curriculums.”
If there was a conflict with classes, there was no question which came first, and it wasn’t the one most modern basketball fans would think.
“‘Coach, I can’t make practice today.’ They didn’t ask me. They just said, ‘Hey, I’m not going to be at practice today.’ Sometimes we’d only have seven on a road trip, which meant we didn’t have to take a bus, we would just go to motor pool, they’d give me the keys to the van. No credit cards, I’d have enough money to go fill. They knew how far the trip was, so they gave me enough money to get gas. I had to turn had all the receipts for those trips.”
It didn’t take long for Sampson to lift the program out of the depths of oblivion, however. He strung together three straight 22-win seasons, then moved on to Washington State. He would move on to Oklahoma and Indiana before arriving at Houston, and at the doorstep of a national title with back-to-back Final Four appearances.
Still, as far as Kelvin Sampson has come, he hasn’t forgotten his North Carolina roots, or his father, who planted them.
“He was inducted into the North Carolina High School Coaches Hall of Fame. I don’t remember the year. I was coaching at Oklahoma. I remember flying in for it,” he says. “I realized the same year he was inducted, David Thompson’s high school coach in Shelby and Dominique Wilkins’ high school coach in Little Washington and John Willie Sampson from little old Pembroke. I said, ‘You know, the coach from Shelby Crest’s best player was David Thompson. Coach from Little Washington’s best player was Dominique Wilkins. One of (dad’s) best players was me. That probably tells you why he got in the Hall of Fame.”
That, and the toughess that has players throwing themselves on the ground—floor—more than a half century later.
“It’s not for everybody,” Sampson says of his drill, “but it is for the ones that are here.”
