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Howard's Kenneth Blakeney, like Deion Sanders in football, wants to reawaken HBCU basketball
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- Howard's Kenneth Blakeney, like Deion Sanders in football, wants to reawaken HBCU basketball
In February for Black History Month, USA TODAY Sports is publishing the series 28 Black Stories in 28 Days. We examine the issues, challenges and opportunities Black athletes and sports officials continue to face after the nation's reckoning on race two years ago.
It was along D.C.'s streets, a couple of miles from where his team now plays its home games, that Kenneth Blakeney learned basketball. Through his local police boys and girls club, he also played baseball and football. He realizes now that sports kept him away from trouble. But sometimes, trouble came perilously close to him.
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"I could be at a basketball court and playing pickup and, 50 feet from me could be a crap game or a dice game that would turn into a shootout or a robbery," the Howard men's basketball coach recalls. "And literally there's guns firing and you gotta run."
This was the 1980s, when Washington was a hotbed for the sale of crack cocaine. By the end of the decade, an alarming amount of drug-related street violence made it the nation's murder capital.
"I lost more friends that, probably, by the time I was 30 years old, were dead longer than they were alive," Blakeney says.
Despite playing under the calming influence of the late Morgan Wootten at DeMatha Catholic High School in Washington's Maryland suburbs, Blakeney knew he had to get away from D.C. But when he jumped at the opportunity to play for Mike Krzyzewski at Duke and made the trip about 4 ½ hours south to Durham, North Carolina, he didn't realize he was getting on a road back to Washington.
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As a guard, Blakeney was part of two national championship teams Christian Laettner, Grant Hill and Bobby Hurley made famous. As a post-graduate assistant, he sat on the bench at James Madison next to Lefty Driesell, who grabbed his arm in the middle of a tense game, their first together, and said, "Kenny, what do you think we should do?" And as a staff assistant, he watched Tommy Amaker, a Black man like himself, bring prestige to Harvard's basketball program by using its academic brand to promote its athletic excellence.
Blakeney, now 50, is back in Washington during a different period for the city and country, one in which protesters take to the streets outside and around the White House seeking accountability for the violent deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And like Deion Sanders in football, he is at the forefront of the sports movement taking place at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which five-star athletes are choosing to attend – or at least strongly consider attending – over traditional collegiate powers.
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Sanders has used his Hall of Fame credentials to lure top recruits – including cornerback Travis Hunter, the No. 1 player on many schools' lists – to Jackson State. He finished 11-2 in his first full season. Blakeney's task is perhaps even more ambitious, but is it impossible?
Howard is a school where Vice President Kamala Harris, late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, novelist Toni Morrison and politicians Andrew Young and Elijah Cummings all studied yet one with virtually no basketball pedigree. Blakeney lacks the star power of Sanders, yet his ability to connect with players and share his vision is quietly laying the groundwork for a similar awakening at Howard.
"He had a very holistic and comprehensive approach to Howard basketball," says Kery Davis, Howard's athletics director who hired Blakeney in 2019. "When we met, he didn't just talk about how we improve on the court. He also talked about how we develop these young men to be future leaders.
"Some people ask, 'Why not us?' I like to demonstrate, 'Why us.' We tell our story. Deion has a great story to tell from his standpoint: Do you want to come and have the HBCU culture but also learn the game under one of the greatest players who ever played? That's his story, and it's a good one.
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"And we're doing the same thing. We're telling our story of why choose Howard. Kenny's a big part of that story for our basketball program."
Like a family
Blakeney's mother, Bobbie, moved to Washington from tiny Jefferson, South Carolina, and worked at a downtown Safeway grocery store for 30 years. She wanted her children to have a better opportunity to succeed. Kenny attended a Catholic grade school on a more affluent side of town from where he lived. Along the way to school each day, his bus drove past Georgetown University, which stood on a hilltop and overlooked the city. He still remembers the thrill of passing the place where his heroes resided.
Blakeney lived about a mile from John Thompson in Northwest Washington. Sometimes, he would make his mom drive by Thompson's house just to see it. To Blakeney, Thompson, like local playground legend and future Notre Dame and NBA star Adrian Dantley, offered hope he could make it from his neighborhood.
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Thompson would turn Georgetown, a relatively small, academically prestigious private institution into a power and become the first Black coach to win a men's basketball national championship, in 1984. He signed some of the top talent in the sport because he connected with his players – who were primarily African American – in ways others could not. When they looked into Thompson's eyes, they knew he understood their struggles.
It is a role Blakeney, a father to daughters Nona (17) and Naomi (4), has also embraced.
"The first time I talked to KB, I could just sense the trust he had in me," says Steve Settle, a redshirt sophomore forward on Howard's team. "We come from the same family and I'm a big family-oriented person. The connection we had from the first time we talked, it just felt family-like."
Settle, Howard's second-leading scorer (14.1 ppg), didn't have any other collegiate offers coming out of DeMatha. Blakeney gave him one after watching his 15-second clip posted on Twitter.
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"He believed in me more at that time than I probably believed in myself," Settle says.
Two decades after Krzyzewski helped him succeed, Blakeney would again show faith in a player, when he pulled aside Jeremy Lin, Harvard's star, after a loss at Cornell. Lin, an American-born player of Taiwanese descent, had performed poorly after players on Cornell's team repeatedly hurled a racial slur at him.
Blakeney told Lin about being a Black player for Duke in the ACC, where fans called him the 'N' word and spit in his area of the court. He challenged Lin to not allow the opposition's ignorance to throw him off his game and defeat him.
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Lin, who went on to become a global star in the NBA, says the moment with Blakeney was a turning point in his life.
"Never again will I allow somebody else's words about my skin color get me to a place where I'm basically fitting into what they want to happen, which is for me to self-destruct," Lin said in a SLAM virtual discussion he conducted with Blakeney in 2021 .
'Change the culture'
At the outset of his tenure at Howard, it was Blakeney who was discouraged. Two of his three leading scorers from a 17-17 team the previous season transferred. That was a good year for Howard, which has made the NCAA Tournament twice (1981 and 1992) in its 50-year history as a Division I team.
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Along the way to an 0-9 start, Blakeney got a call from Ashley Howard, who was starting his second season as La Salle's head coach.
"You're not going to win this year," Howard told him. "Spend time and learn the craft and recruit your butt off."
Blakeney also heard from one of his childhood friends, Xavier Williams.
"The best way to change people," Williams told him, "is to change people."
Howard finished 4-29 yet the conversations allowed Blakeley to take a step back.
"I think people looked at the first year and said, 'This thing is a failure. It's not working,' " says Davis, the athletics director. "I didn't see that at all. What I saw was the need and necessity to completely come in and change the culture and change the narrative around who we were as a program."
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Even before his first season began at Howard, Blakeney landed an official visit from five-star shooting guard Josh Christopher, who now plays for the Houston Rockets. Christopher ultimately chose Arizona State but brought his massive social media following along with him to Howard's campus.
Then, on July 3, 2020, Howard got a commitment from 6-11 forward Makur Maker, who became the first five-star recruit to commit to an HBCU since ESPN started ranking prospects in 2007.
"I need to make the HBCU movement real so that others will follow," Maker wrote in part on Twitter that day. "I am committing to Howard U & coach Kenny Blakeney."
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Maker cited Blakeney's credentials as a former player at Duke and DeMatha and a coach at two Ivy League schools. "He's built to win," he told ESPN's "First Take."
Davis says the choice benefitted the player as much as the school.
"If Makur had chosen to go to one of the Power 5 schools on his list, that announcement would not have been on 'Good Morning America.' It would not have been on ESPN."
Maker's injury-plagued career for Howard lasted two games. Howard ultimately played five games in 2020-21 before it was shut down due to COVID concerns. Maker didn't want to risk another college season getting canceled, so he left for Australia's National Basketball League with hopes of going in the first round of the NBA draft.
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Yet while Maker was at Howard, the school ran the social media metrics and he got over 1 billion social media impressions. According to Blakeney, that figure equates to about $4 million of marketing exposure.
'Why can't we be Georgetown?'
It's these small yet significant steps that show how Howard is making strides with its mission. Settle remembers during Blakeney's first season, there was no air conditioning in their gymnasium. Instead, during the summer, two fans in each corner blew hot air. On Jan. 17, Burr Gymnasium hosted Notre Dame, whom the Bison nearly beat in the MLK Day Classic.
Mike Brey, the Irish's longtime men's basketball coach, was a history teacher at DeMatha when Blakeney was at the school. Brey was also the assistant varsity basketball coach. When he took a similar position at Duke, he told Blakeney, "I'll be back to get you in a couple years."
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Brey has remained one of Blakeney's close friends and agreed to bus his team 4-plus hours north after a Saturday game at Virginia Tech to play Howard. Brey and a Fox audience watched the Bison switch, trap and contest their way back from a late 11-point deficit. Elijah Hawkins' 3-point attempt, which would have sent the game into overtime, banged off the rim at the buzzer and Notre Dame escaped 71-68.
The game was another step that Davis, a former senior vice president of programming for HBO Sports, has carefully orchestrated to show a Howard alumni base conditioned to athletic mediocrity – or even failure – there is a benefit from investing in athletics.
Howard is 11-10 this season but the players can feel the momentum building. They played Villanova, a perennial top-10 program, close well into the second half in November. They put a scare into Georgetown during a 12-point loss in December. Since then, the Hoyas have started 0-11 in Big East play, opening a door for Howard to achieve one of Blakeney's goals: To become the destination team in D.C. that Thompson's once was.
"Why can't we be Georgetown?" Howard president Wayne A.I. Frederick asked in his first conversation with Davis. "Why can't we be Notre Dame? Why can't we be Duke?"
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Blakeney was an assistant at Columbia for a season before Howard hired him. But he had left coaching for about eight years before that to be closer to his girlfriend, Tracey, who works in the fashion world in New York. (She would become his wife.) He also wanted to focus on Sportin' Styles, a fashion accessory company he co-founded.
Blakeney has started two businesses. He sees Howard as his third startup, with one big advantage. As he has waded back into the world of recruiting, he has seen several cases where parents – and perhaps even grandparents, aunts, uncles and siblings – of prospective players have attended Howard.
"We have a brand that a lot of Black families know about," he says. "Our constituents are kind of like every Black person in the world."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Howard's Kenneth Blakeney wants to reawaken HBCU basketball
