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How Houston's Kelvin Sampson went from pied piper to coaching national championship game
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- How Houston's Kelvin Sampson went from pied piper to coaching national championship game
Kelvin Sampson strode down a sidewalk in the middle of campus flanked by a handful of pep band members playing the school fight song.
Every once in a while, they'd stop and Sampson, using a bullhorn, would tell any student within earshot that the Houston men's basketball team had a game that night. Tickets would be handed out, fists would be bumped and Sampson would pied-piper the group to its next on-campus stop.
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He did that regularly during his first few years at Houston .
"You know, half our students didn't even know we had a basketball team," Sampson told me last week.
A stretch?
Maybe.
But still.
"I mean, nobody showed up to the games," the former OU coach said.
That isn't the case anymore.
More: Kelvin Sampson isn't taking Houston to Final Four with a superstar but rather a superpower
Kelvin Sampson celebrates after Houston rallied to beat Duke in the Final Four on Saturday, putting the Cougars into the national championship game against Florida.
Sampson and the Cougars are playing for a national championship Monday night. On Saturday night when they upended mighty Duke with a late comeback for the ages, Houston fans made the Final Four roar and the Alamodome shake.
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The Cougars' student section?
Packed.
It was the kind of thing the program enjoyed in the 1960s with Elvin Hayes and the 1980s with Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler and Phi Slama Jama. But those days were long ago and far away when Sampson took over at Houston in 2014.
And they seemed even further when Sampson took stock of the program in those days.
The team had no practice facility, and the first time he visited Houston's Fertitta Center, then known as Hofheinz Pavilion, he sat down in one of the seats and found that every chair in the row was broken.
And it wasn't just the facilities that were lacking.
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The team, playing in the far-flung American Athletic Conference, traveled to away games on commercial flights. Charter flights have been the norm in major college basketball for decades.
Not at Houston.
"They didn't feed the players," Sampson added. "I mean, there was just no support. It started at the administrative level and went all the way down.
"The only thing they were good at was firing basketball coaches."
Houston coach Kelvin Sampson reacts after a play against Duke during the second half in the Final Four on Saturday.
In the two decades before Sampson's hiring, Houston had gone through five head coaches.
"But I made up my mind: I wasn't gonna be the next casualty," Sampson said.
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Sampson could improve the on-court product, but he needed help with the off-court issues. Then athletic director Mack Rhoades became an early advocate, laying the groundwork that would ultimately lead to a practice facility and arena improvements.
When Rhoades departed in 2015, board of regents chair Tilman Fertitta and university president Renu Khator became Sampson's biggest allies.
"Tilman and President Khator," Sampson told reporters in Houston last week, "once I got my spiel out, once I told them where (the program) was and what needed to be done, they were on board."
Of course, getting on board got even easier when Sampson and the Cougars started winning lots of basketball games. After an inaugural 13-19 season at Houston, Sampson and the Cougars have won more than 20 games every season.
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In 2018, Sampson's fourth season, Houston made the NCAA Tournament.
That streak continues.
So does this one: Every year Sampson and the Cougars have made the tournament, they've won at least one game.
Now, they've been to six consecutive Sweet 16s and two Final Fours in five years. Safe to say, Houston has more than returned to national prominence.
But Sampson is still mindful from whence the program came.
"I tell everybody, if you're a fan of our program now, you won't have a real appreciation for this unless you were here in 2014 and saw where we started," he said.
"And now look where we're going this weekend."
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Where Sampson and the Cougars could go Monday is to the program's first national title.
And you can bet just about everything in San Antonio will be painted Houston red because that's how it has been all weekend.
When the Cougars left their hotel Saturday before the national semifinal, for example, every inch of the hotel lobby was jammed with Houston fans. The only space was the walkway roped off for the team. Houston's entire pep band was there, too, playing the fight song on repeat.
Sampson, no longer needing that bullhorn, smiled the whole way to the bus.
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at @jennicarlsonok.bsky.social and twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
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More: Houston's stunner vs. Duke after years of heartbreak 'soothes a lot of wounds'
Houston vs. Florida
TIPOFF:7:50 p.m. Monday at the Alamodome in San Antonio (CBS)
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: How Kelvin Sampson overhauled Houston to March Madness title game
