HOUSTON — With his Houston program near the top of the polls and its culture as rock-solid as the Fertitta Center walls, Kelvin Sampson leans forward on his office sofa and divulges why one of the greatest rebuilding stories in recent college basketball history almost never unfolded.
His mind reaches back to a conversation he had with his father in February 2014. This was 12 years after he had led Oklahoma to the 2002 Final Four, four years after the NCAA gave him a five-year show-cause for making excessive phone calls to recruits as the coach at Indiana. Sampson was in his sixth year as an NBA assistant coach and his third with the Houston Rockets. His goal was to be an NBA head coach.
So what changed his mind? He inhales a deep breath, pausing a few seconds. Then he talks about that conversation with his dad.
“I know you want to be a head coach in the NBA,” John W. Sampson told his son, “but you were put on this earth to coach in college.”
Thirty-six hours later, his 84-year-old father died.
“My dad was my hero,” Sampson says. “That weighed on me heavily.”
The comment prompted Sampson to take inventory of his life: son Kellen had just been fired from his assistant coaching job at Appalachian State; daughter Lauren was “miserable” in her job in North Carolina; wife Karen was commuting between Houston and their home in Charlotte. Sampson’s agent would call him with alluring college opportunities, one after another, but Sampson wanted a true up-from-rubble rebuild — and he found it with Houston, where memories of Phi Slama Jama were so old they collected dust. He calls it the hardest job he has ever taken because of how far behind they were in every area.
“Houston needed me, for sure, but I needed Houston too,” Sampson says. “I wanted to do it with my family. I wanted something I could build from scratch. I didn’t give a s— about losing — that’s shallow. But I thought we could win here.”
As the Cougars vie for a third consecutive No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, Sampson’s 11-year tenure already includes a 2021 Final Four berth, five straight Sweet 16 appearances, back-to-back Big 12 regular-season titles and five NBA Draft picks. During a nearly hour-long interview with Hoops HQ, Sampson, 69, provided a peek behind the curtain at his program’s culture — as defined and distinct as any in college basketball. The Cougars excel at player development, often turning prospects with few stars beside their names into pros. They dip their toes in the transfer portal but don’t camp out there. And the DNA of Sampson’s team — defense, rebounding, toughness, discipline — hasn’t much changed since his days making $16,000 a year at Montana Tech four decades ago.
“It’s so old-school, it’s new-school,” Houston assistant Kellen Sampson says. “It’s now become refreshing.”
Ask the elder Sampson why the recipe still works so well today — in the age of NIL and unfettered annual free agency — and he gives a nearly eight-minute-long response before saying, “Trying to explain what our program is or how we do things is like describing what the Atlantic Ocean looks like when you’ve never seen water. We are not conventional in any way.”
He chuckles.
“We do it our way.”
One summer morning that first year at Houston, Kelvin Sampson knew exactly what he was looking for when he pulled into an empty Dallas AAU gym parking lot before 7 a.m. — and it had nothing to do with prospect Galen Robinson Jr.’s on-court play.
Arriving before any other coach, before the gym doors were unlocked, Sampson wanted to see Robinson’s demeanor when he got out of the car for an 8 a.m. game. Once inside, the coach hid behind bleachers so he could see Robinson warm up on the far end of the court without the player spotting him. After each layup, Robinson enthusiastically high-fived each player in one line and patted the backside of each teammate in the other.
“This kid’s going to be my captain one day,” Sampson thought that morning. And that’s exactly what happened.
All of Houston’s recruits must possess a baseline level of talent, of course. But there are a slew of intangibles that are also prerequisites. When Sampson took over the Houston job, two of his first hires were his son and Hollis Price, the point guard on his 2002 OU Final Four squad. They knew what it took to play for him because they had already done it. When the staff conducts a deep dive into why some players succeed at Houston, it boils down to two elements: competitiveness and maturity.
“People say, ‘He’s a good player, you should recruit him,’” Sampson says. “No, no, we’re doing a kid a favor by not recruiting [him] because he’s going to transfer. All [players] can’t handle this. There’s some programs where you’re not held accountable, you don’t develop responsibility, and you just want it easy.”
At a time when hitting the transfer portal is all the rage — St. John’s Coach Rick Pitino said he will completely eschew high school players — old-school recruiting remains the bedrock at Houston. The Cougars have assembled one of the best classes in school history with three top-20 players arriving next season, according to ESPN. Sampson can’t count the number of times his son hit the road at 4:30 a.m. en route to San Antonio to watch elite high school prospect Kingston Flemings’ 7 a.m. practice, fortifying their belief that the guard could be a foundational piece of the program in the future.
When Sampson uses the portal, it’s to add to the established foundation. One guiding principle: He never wants to sign his best player for the upcoming season. The best player needs to have already been on campus. The hallmark of great programs is where you’re able to backfill, Kellen Sampson says, so “you’re able to water your roots, not your flowers, and you’re always able to turn up a good harvest.”
Two of the Cougars’ top four scorers this year — guards L.J. Cryer (Baylor) and Milos Uzan (Oklahoma) — are multi-year transfer additions. But the staff believes if you can minimize what you’re expected to do annually in the portal, you can vet prospects to find those who fit the system.
“This ain’t milk and strawberries here,” Kelvin Sampson says. “These kids work.”
When Uzan initially arrived on campus, Sampson didn’t see the 6-foot-4 junior as a leader. “Too meek, too mild,” Sampson says. “He had to get some mud in his blood.”
He told Uzan that he was “as soft as puppy s— in the rain.” Then Uzan broke his nose during a collision in a preseason rebounding drill. He was out for several weeks, missing key conditioning time and reps with his new teammates. Houston suffered early-season losses in part because of Uzan’s foul trouble. He had to learn to play as hard as Houston demands, but without fouling. Since then Uzan has steadily matured, managing to fill the sizable void left by Jamal Shead, a second-round NBA Draft pick by the Toronto Raptors. “He surrendered to the culture,” Sampson says.
For Cryer, it was baptism by sprint. The sharp shooter transferred to Houston because he valued what Sampson told him about always holding him accountable. Cryer expected this next chapter to be hard, but when he arrived on the first Monday after finals in June for early-morning conditioning, he realized “hard” was an understatement.
Eighteen 100-yard sprints at 6 a.m. Then weight training. Then on-court workouts. All before 9 a.m. “It takes your mind to another place, man, and you’re like, ‘What did I get myself into?’” Cryer says. “But you come out better on the other side, for sure.”
Cryer believes he did not fully adjust last season until midway through conference play. He had to become familiar with early-season bubble drills — when a lid is placed on the basket so every shot is an opportunity to sharpen rebounding tenacity. He had to get acclimated to how hard they practice, how adept Sampson was at pinpointing who was giving only 90 percent, the difference between playing hard and competing.
What happens when Sampson walks into practice and doesn’t like a player’s body language?
“I’ve seen him run people the whole practice, or kick you out and have you run the track the next morning,” Cryer says. “Even the day of shootaround, here we practice. At Baylor, it was more like getting shots up. But when I got here, I’m like, ‘Dang, ankles taped and everything. It’s a real practice.’ I had to switch my mind.”
Sampson is often asked how he gets his kids to play so hard for him. “Because they know I’ll take a bullet for them, and then they turn around and take a bullet for me,” he says. “There is a relationship that is built when nobody’s watching.”
The staff creates a plan for each player to have a chance to be first-team all-conference in their role, but the timeline has to match those of both the player and his circle of influence for there to be a fit. The process can be difficult on the players, but sometimes it’s the coaches that need to do the adapting.
After Cryer bombed in a 2 for 7 shooting performance against Cincinnati, he shared with assistant Quannas White that the pressure to perform was squeezing him. The conversation strengthened the trust between player and staff. “He hit a supernova level after that, and away he went,” Kellen Sampson. Now Cryer leads the team in scoring this season while shooting 42 percent from three-point range.
Uzan’s turning point came in December, when the staff stopped asking him to run Shead’s offense. He met the staff halfway with his effort and competitiveness; they met him halfway with a scheme to best take advantage of his strengths. “As many changes as he was having to make, we were willing to make changes to maximize him,” Kellen Sampson says. “He was like, ‘I’m not in the military, I’m in a partnership. This isn’t a dictatorship, this is a marriage.’”
And then there’s senior J’Wan Roberts, who for years responded to his minutes being occasionally cut by putting in more work and trusting the coaches’ message that, “Your time will come. When you get your moment, swing your sword — don’t miss.” Now he’s averaging more than 30 minutes per game on a team with designs on winning its first national title.
“Be patient,” Kelvin Sampson says. “Worst thing in the world is to put your career in a machine and hit the fast-forward button.”
Back in his office, Sampson walks behind his desk and lifts up a framed photo of a mountain overlooking the Montana Tech campus. He smiles at the memories of finding a payphone after every game to make two calls: To the sports editor of the Montana Standard to dictate the box score, and to the guy running the local power plant to make sure the giant ‘V’ on the mountain flashed.
He cut his young coaching teeth in Butte, where the athletic director for the longest time called him “Kevin,” where a player’s girlfriend’s father drove the team bus, where he got players to play harder than they ever thought they could and where the program culture we see today began to take shape.
That long-defined culture has now restored luster to a once-proud Houston program. Eleven years ago, Sampson’s late father, a pioneering high school coach himself, gave him the nudge he needed to return to where he felt his son belonged. Now, with Sampson’s son and daughter on staff, he’s surrounded by family. And he has a championship-caliber roster, choc full of players with mud in their blood.
“His ability to connect with college-aged kids is his gift,” Kellen Sampson says. “He can get them to play harder for him than another man can get his kids to play for him. That’s what my grandfather always recognized in him: Your gifts are with young people.”
