Not once, but twice has a NC State men’s basketball head coach climbed a ladder to cut down a net during the month of March. It’s an image no one thought they’d see once let alone twice after NC State finished the regular season 17-14 and had more conference losses than wins.
Keatts went from the most hated man among the fan base to now being one of the most beloved figures among Wolfpack fans for bringing NC State basketball back to prominence after over 40 years of suffering.
What makes this run with Keatts leading the way even more incredible is the way his tenure started with the Wolfpack. He was hired after the 2016-17 season and had to immediately deal with recruiting violations from the previous coaching staff.
When Keatts was preparing for his opening press conference where he famously said “Kevin Keatts is a winner,” he was told the FBI was investigating NC State for violations committed by the previous staff in its recruitment of Dennis Smith Jr.
Despite the breaching of rules occurring with the previous head coach, numerous sanctions were placed on the team that made it harder for Keatts to recruit players. It also goes without saying it’s a bad look for the program, making it even tougher for Keatts to build a culture with an investigation hanging over his head.
Somehow Keatts managed to take his team to the NCAA Tournament his first season in Raleigh even with the drama surrounding NC State. The next season, the Wolfpack missed the tournament despite having a NET rating of 33 which was the highest rating to ever miss the tournament until this season when Indiana State didn’t make it with a 29 rating.
NC State was well on its way to a tournament bid in his third season, but COVID-19 ended any hopes of March Madness. In Keatts first three seasons, he rebuilt a program that was 15-17 the season before he inherited it while being investigated the entire time.
He was put at a major disadvantage and still put a winning product on the court with limited resources at his disposal.
“I went through four years of not getting a recruit, losing recruits, not knowing what the NCAA was going to do to us,” Keatts said. “We walked the program through it as champions and never complained. … So we’ve had some of those bad lucks. And it’s now paying off at the end because at the end of the day we have built a program.”
Even with the early success and an investigation hanging over his head, Wolfpack fans were ready to move on from Keatts during the middle of this season. They felt like he had run his course as the Wolfpack’s head coach and his tactics were no longer effective with the players on his team.
With his back against the wall, needing to win five games in five days to be in good graces with NC State, Keatts put on the best coaching clinic of his career to lead the Wolfpack to an ACC Championship.
All of the sudden there was a belief among the players that they could not only win the conference title but make noise in the NCAA Tournament. While his team may have wavered during its stretch of losing 10 of its final 14 games of the season, Keatts stayed optimistic and instilled belief in his team.
“Just to know that all the ups and downs we had in our season and when it could have been easy to quit, I felt like he was the main one that kept us all together,” said graduate guard DJ Horne. “[He] kept the outlook on our whole season very positive and gave us a lot of confidence going into that ACC Tournament.”
Not only did Keatts find a way to make his team believe, he also outcoached every man standing across from him during this run. He has had a counter for everything thrown at his team. Sometimes the Wolfpack has had to rely on its defense like it did in the first half against Duke or it needed to win a track meet like it did against UNC-Chapel Hill in the ACC Championship game.
No matter what the matchup has been, Keatts has devised the perfect game plan for nine straight games.
Hargrave Military Academy is where Keatts learned how to coach. He wasn’t just the coach there either, he drove the bus, swept the floor and washed clothes during his time at Hargrave. But if you ask him, that experience is one of the main reasons his team is in the Final Four.
“During that time, it wasn’t a national media thing,” Keatts said. “I could call timeouts. I could draw up plays. I could make practice plans. If I made a mistake, nobody cared, … but I could lean on that because it helped me get better.”
After a crash course in coaching at Hargrave, Keatts joined Rick Pitino’s staff in Louisville. During his time with the Cardinals, they made the Final Four twice, including a National Championship in 2013 that was later vacated.
With Pitino, Keatts became a mastermind with the X’s and O’s. When he would do scouting reports for Pitino, he had to memorize 30 plays and present it to the team.
“That’s also helped me because now I can remember, if I’m in a huddle, I can remember a play that back in the Big East when Pittsburgh ran a play five years ago,” Keatts said. “And if I want to present that play to my team, I can do that stuff.”
Keatts hasn’t been afraid to adapt his coaching style either. Before he recruited graduate forward DJ Burns, he typically played with two forwards that weren’t known for posting up. Despite Burns not fitting his coaching scheme, Keatts adjusted his philosophy, and now he’s heading to the Final Four with Burns as his best player.
“When DJ hit the transfer portal, I was like, man, I got to change,” Keatts said. “I’ve never thrown the ball inside as much as I have in the last couple of years.”
There’s no question that this is the best coaching job of Keatts career. From fired to the Final Four. When asked if this is the best job he’s done, he says he doesn’t know and gives credit to his team for making his job easy.
“It’s hard to say if it’s my best. You would have to ask somebody else,” Keatts said. “They make it easy for me to wake up every morning and come to practice and work hard with them because of who they are as personalities. … I have learned more basketball from these guys than I learned in my entire career.”
Now, with a team that has supreme confidence instilled by its coach, NC State will look to become the lowest seed to ever win a National Championship. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.
