Lynchburg native Kevin Keatts guides N.C. State to men’s Final Four

Kevin Keatts was a junior in high school, and he’d finally made the varsity football team as a wide receiver.

But in the first game of the season, Keatts rode the bench for Heritage High School’s Pioneers.

After the victory, his coach, John Walker, issued his promising young athlete an apology; he’d meant to get Keatts on the field.

“He said, ‘Not a problem, Coach. We won,’” Walker recalled. “I thought that was a rather surprising response, because most high school kids want to play, and when they don’t, they’re upset about it.”

Not Keatts.

Even at that age, the young man who would become North Carolina State University’s men’s basketball coach believed team success far outweighed individual glory. Nearly 35 years later, it’s that mentality that has Keatts and the Wolfpack improbably in the Final Four of the NCAA Division I tournament. The Lynchburg native and his team will take on No. 1-seeded Purdue in the national semifinals Saturday in Glendale, Arizona.

N.C. State limped into the postseason on a four-game losing streak, including losses to rivals North Carolina and Duke, but they found their stride in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. The Wolfpack won five games in five days, exacting revenge on both UNC and Duke in the process, to win the conference title and earn an automatic bid to the national tournament.

Since then, the 11th-seeded Wolfpack have rattled off four more consecutive wins to reach their first Final Four since 1983. They are just the sixth No. 11 seed to ever reach the semifinals of the NCAA’s most popular championship, based on attendance and TV viewership.

“This one is different than any other one I’ve been around,” Keatts said in a conference call.  “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a run that’s similar to this. … It’s hard to do when your back’s against the wall.”

But if any coach’s experiences prepared him for such a run, it’s Keatts’. In that junior football season, Walker saw something different about Keatts. He moved the young athlete from receiver to backup quarterback.

“He was just a real positive leader,” Walker said. “His teammates responded well to him.”

Later in the season, Keatts filled in for the injured starter and led the Pioneers to victory. After starring on the basketball court for Heritage the following winter, Keatts focused on football over the summer and went 11-0 as a starting quarterback before an injury forced him to sit out a playoff game, and Potomac ended the future coach’s gridiron career.

Basketball took Keatts to Ferrum College, where as a freshman point guard he helped the Panthers to the Dixie Conference title and first-ever NCAA Division III tournament appearance. Keatts went on to score 584 points from 1991-95 at Ferrum, and he stayed on the following season to serve as head coach Bill Pullen’s assistant coach.

At Ferrum, Keatts said he learned how to do more with less.

“I learned to survive,” the coach said this week of his time at Ferrum. “When you’re playing at a really small college and there’s not a lot of national attention, you’re really playing the game for the love of the game.”

Keatts left Ferrum the following year to be the assistant coach at Southwestern Michigan College, a junior college, and returned to Virginia in 1997 to be the assistant at Hargrave Military Academy. He spent a total of a dozen seasons at Hargrave, 10 of them as head coach (with a two-year stint as the assistant at Marshall University in between), and turned the Chatham prep school into a national power on the high school stage.

“Those were two foundations that I would never pass up,” Keatts said. “They really prepared me for hard work and learning how to start at the grassroots level, learning how to start at the bottom and work your way up. … It just humbles you and it teaches you that you’ve got to continue to work, and if you put in the work, anything is completely possible.”

Keatts’ success at the prep level got the attention of legendary coach Rick Pitino, then at Louisville. He joined Pitino’s staff in 2011, and the Cardinals reached the Final Four that season. The following year, led by Keatts’ Hargrave pupil and Roanoke native Luke Hancock, Louisville won the 2013 NCAA championship with Keatts on the bench.

Keatts took his first collegiate head-coaching job at UNC Wilmington ahead of the 2014-15 season and earned Colonial Athletic Association coach of the year honors in his first season. The Seahawks won the CAA tournament the following two years, reaching the NCAA tournament, before N.C. State hired him away from Wilmington. Success followed Keatts to Raleigh, where he guided the Wolfpack to a third-place ACC finish and another NCAA berth in his first season.

The Wolfpack enjoyed winning seasons for five of the next six years under Keatts but did not return to March Madness again until this year. And a month ago, the run the Wolfpack are on now seemed a pipedream to those outside the program. N.C. State got off to a good start but stumbled in ACC play with just a 9-11 record. They entered the conference tournament seeded 10th of the league’s 15 teams, and due to the structure of the tournament, had a gauntlet of five games in five days to win the title, a task never before accomplished.

But the Wolfpack beat Louisville in the first round. Then they topped Syracuse. And Duke. And Virginia, in overtime. And then hated rival UNC, then ranked fourth in the nation, to cut down the nets in Brooklyn.

Most basketball pundits agreed that the Wolfpack’s ACC tournament run saved Keatts’ job. It also, due to clauses in his contract, earned him a half-million dollar raise and a two-year extension. He will make $3.1 million next season and is signed at N.C. State through 2030.

But Keatts insisted the focus on winning prevailed throughout the tournament and afterward.

“We are completely locked in and focused. The moment has not bothered us,” he said. “There were a lot of folks that thought winning the ACC would be enough, and people would be satisfied, but not in our locker room.”

It’s fortitude Keatts said has set his team apart, a quality their coach learned growing up in Lynchburg.

“I really got my toughness and foundation from Lynchburg, and that place means a lot to me,” Keatts said. “I grew up on outdoor basketball courts, and I grew up when there were chain nets. … On a Saturday or Sunday, the courts would be so packed that if you lost a game, you had to get in the car and try to get to another court.”

Those competitive pickup games were arguably where Keatts got his start recruiting. During school breaks and summertime, he was the ringleader of the young basketball talent in Lynchburg.

“We’d come home from college and get together and play on the same teams,” recalled Hilliary Scott, an E.C. Glass alumnus and current head coach at University of Lynchburg.

The two, separated by a year in school, had been high school archrivals in a city that rabidly chooses sides.

“It’s Glass-Heritage,” Scott said. “It’s Carolina-Duke. It’s Alabama-Auburn. You put all those biggest rivalries together, that’s what it was. And it brought out the best in all of us really in every sport. Those are the games there were the most fans at, and I can remember when that rivalry went all the way back to middle school.”

But once in college — Keatts at Ferrum, Scott at Roanoke College, where he became an All-American, and other Lynchburg guys at other schools — they could join forces and make one another better. The group remains close to this day. Scott and Keatts talk regularly, exchanging texts on coaching and each other’s seasons. Otis Tucker, another Glass alum of the era who starred at Lynchburg and is a die-hard UNC fan, was there to cheer on Keatts’ Wolfpack in the ACC championship against the Tar Heels. Another Glass and Lynchburg alumnus, Roy Roberson, left his longtime post as the boys coach at E.C. Glass to serve on Keatts’ staff at N.C. State for four seasons; Roberson is now the boys coach at Sanderson High in Raleigh. Another Virginia connection, Roanoke College grad Chris Zupko, is still on Keatts’ staff as assistant director of basketball operations. The relationships forged back then stood, and Scott guessed that Keatts’ interest in coaching was piqued in those college years, both at Ferrum and in organizing his friends to play ball back home.

“He played all of the right positions to groom himself to be that guy,” Scott said. “I remember back in those days feeling like he was the guy who kind of corralled all of us and was that coach on the court for us.

“All along I knew he was going to go as far as he wanted to go. If it was his goal to be a high-major Division I coach, then I felt like he had all the attributes to make that happen. He can talk to anybody, always has been a great recruiter, very knowledgeable of the game. He’s just one of those guys who had the ‘it’ factor. You know those folks who walk into a room and people gravitate toward them? That was him.”

And so for his old friend, N.C. State’s run in the postseason, while unprecedented, isn’t a surprise.

“His core guys have really come together and found a way to play well together. Guys know their roles, and it’s really been neat and fun to watch the confidence they’ve been playing with,” Scott said. “I love all those guys talking about him and the respect he deserves for just staying the course, figuring it out, finding a way to just keep playing.”

For Keatts, the weekend will be the gratification of the long climb it’s taken to get there.

“I’m a small-college kid,” he said. “I will never forget the hard work that we had to put in to get where I’m at now.”