BUTTE — When Kelvin Sampson was a 20-something-year-old in his first head basketball coaching job at Montana Tech back in the early 1980s, he certainly didn't envision the eventual heights that the game would take him to.
"When you're on a bus coming back from Havre, Montana, and it's 14 below zero you ain't thinking you're gonna be in the Final Four beating Duke and almost beating Florida in the national championship one day," said Sampson. "That was never in the cards."
Well that's exactly how things played out for the current head coach of the University of Houston whose decades-long career that has seen him make stops in NBA began in Butte. The court where he first coached is now named after him and on Saturday he was on it as he visited Tech and helped run a youth basketball camp with the men's basketball team on Saturday morning.
WATCH THE VIDEO:
"Reminding people, don't ever forget where you come from," said Sampson on his motivation for wanting to come back to Butte, which he visited with his daughter Lauren and son Kellen who are both on his staff at Houston. "I know what we've accomplished in this sport over time nationally. Places we've been. That's great. But this is where it started."
Sampson inherited a long-suffering Tech program in 1980 and over the next five seasons transformed it into a team that would win three Frontier Conference titles during his tenure.
"When I got here they had never had a winning season," said Sampson. "When I say nobody cared, take that for the time. It's not that they didn't care, there was nothing to care about. They didn't have a program."
Sampson has enjoyed a remarkable career that has taken him places he could never have imagined when he was busy turning around Tech's program over 40 years ago. But it all started in Butte, and he said for that he is thankful.
"I come from a sense of gratitude," said Sampson. "I appreciate people thanking me but I owe this place far more then they owe me."
