‘Tip your cap, he’s the G.O.A.T.’ Kelvin Sampson’s road to 800 wins.

Before he became one of college basketball’s winningest coaches, Houston’s Kelvin Sampson was a kid in rural North Carolina sitting on the laps of his father’s high school players, packed into an old car after practice. That’s where he learned what it meant to care about people first and coach second — a lesson that carried him to become only the 17th coach in NCAA history to reach 800 wins.

“It’s both awesome and inspiring and a complete testament to how talented not just as a coach but as a human being,” assistant coach Kellen Sampson said of his father’s accomplishment. “He has an awesome way of connecting and touching everybody’s heart that he comes in contact with, and having a tremendous talent to find a way to get the best version of them.”

Making players into men and challenging them to grow in character is something Sampson has always taken seriously, long before his first win. He credits that to his father and those long car rides home after his team’s practice.

“I can’t tell you how many times I had to sit between one of (my dad’s) players’ laps. We didn’t have seatbelts back then. We didn’t have bucket seats; we had board seats. Take one of my grandma’s spreads across it, and it became a nice board seat, but we could get about eight or nine players in his car, and it may be 10 o’clock when we got home, but he would drop each one of them off.”

Those rides through the North Carolina countryside became the foundation for the way Sampson would one day run his own programs, with care, patience and a deep sense of responsibility for the people around him.

He had a few years to ponder those lessons before stepping into the coaching scene as a first-time head coach at Montana Tech at just 25. 

His first win came as an interim coach in a 55-53 victory over Carroll College on Jan. 23, 1981, before being retained to lead the program for four more seasons.

From there, Sampson headed to Washington State, where he earned his 100th win in 1989.

At Oklahoma, “Mr. Blue Shirt” notched milestones No. 200 in 1995, No. 300 in 2000 and No. 400 in 2003.

It wasn’t until 2008 that Sampson reached win No. 500 after a victory over No. 14 Purdue while at Indiana.

Then came the longest gap of his career, 11 years before his next 100 wins, brought on by a five-year show-cause penalty following recruiting violations at Indiana and Oklahoma. The sanction effectively pushed the 52-year-old coach out of the college basketball scene.

When Sampson returned to college basketball in 2014 to take over at Houston, becoming only the fourth coach ever to return to the NCAA after a show-cause penalty, rebuilding wasn’t easy.

The program was depleted upon his arrival, with just five returning players on the roster and only one NCAA Tournament appearance in the previous two decades.

“We were at the bottom, didn’t charter, didn’t feed the kids, didn’t have a film room,” Sampson said.

Just over a decade later, the Cougars unveiled their second Final Four banner in four years, months removed from the program’s first national championship appearance in 41 years.

Sampson finished his first season with a 13-19 record, his only losing season, and soon the victories came in waves. Win No. 600 arrived in 2019, followed by No. 700 three years later in 2022, which feels like yesterday to Kellen Sampson, who has been on his dad’s coaching staff since the start of his stint in Houston.

Now, win No. 800 arrived to greet Sampson side by side with his wife, Karen Sampson, who was holding a commemorative game ball after the nation’s No. 2 team defeated Lehigh 75-57 on opening night.

College basketball has changed in many ways over the years, but Sampson’s mission hasn’t, and he’s far from finished, having signed a four-year contract extension that will keep him at Houston through the 2028-29 season.

Under his leadership, the Cougars have reached six straight Sweet 16s and earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament for three consecutive seasons.

“(He’s) averaged 33 wins essentially in each of the last years with all the ever-shifting sands beneath our feet of the college landscape, and this guy keeps evolving and getting better than ever,” Kellen Sampson said.

“Tip your cap, he’s the G.O.A.T.”

It wouldn’t have been possible without former Spurs longtime coach Gregg Popovich stepping in, offering Sampson a second chance and a fresh start in the NBA, hiring him in an advisory role shortly after he was fired from the Hoosiers in 2008.

To Sampson’s surprise, Popovich ran “the Spurs very much like a college program.” It gave college basketball’s newest outcast a sense of belonging again and some form of normalcy in his new world.

Not long after, he found himself coaching again, this time as an assistant with the Milwaukee Bucks for three seasons before making the trip to Houston.

Little did he know that he would stay within the city limits to finish out one of the most unique and fulfilling careers in college basketball.

After three seasons with the Rockets and a year since the expiration of the show-cause penalty, Sampson had to act on an itch. He wanted to be a head coach again. He knew his best chance at being at the helm came in the place he had been banished from — college basketball.

Athletic director Mack Rhoades and the University of Houston came calling ahead of the 2014 season to put Sampson back on top.

“People ask why go back to college when you have one of the best non-coaching jobs in the NBA. To me, it’s real simple. I like being a head coach,” Sampson said at his introductory press conference at UH. “I think I’m geared to be a head coach and run my program. I have strong beliefs in what I think is important in the way we play. Some things are non-negotiable, and it starts with your attitude and effort.”

In many ways, the Houston program has changed tremendously since the Sampsons arrived over a decade ago. Back then, only five players were available to start the season. Now, Sampson has brought in nearly that many — in the nation’s No. 2 recruiting class alone — including center Chris Cenac Jr. and guards Isiah Harwell, Kingston Flemings and Bryce Jackson.

Yet at its core, there’s still a man preaching the same message to every Cougar who walks through the doors of the Guy V. Lewis Development Facility.

When asked about the biggest lesson he’s learned since arriving in Houston, Flemings recited the same words Sampson spoke on his first day on the job in Houston.

“Control what you can control: attitude and effort. If you bring that every single day, your game will follow.”

Sampson has lived by that creed, pushing forward even when his career seemed frozen at 500 wins.

“He means a lot,” Flemings said. “He is the best coach in the business.”

Now, he has 800 wins to prove it.

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