Kelvin Sampson left NC and never came back, but still represents the best of the state
We’ve recognized Kelvin Sampson as an incredible coach and as a Lumbee and Native American trailblazer.
We’ve excoriated him as a cheater, for breaking picayune rules the NCAA long ago stopped caring about and probably never should have.
And he’s spent his entire career in exile, in Michigan and Montana and Washington and Oklahoma and Indiana and Wisconsin and now Texas, always far from Robeson County.
Even as an expatriate, perhaps because of that, it’s time to fully embrace him as one of our own.
Regardless of what happens Monday night in the national-championship game, whether the Houston team Sampson coaches to be as tough at its core as any his father had in Pembroke can beat Florida or not, it’s time to acknowledge, finally, one indisputable fact about Sampson.
He is a great North Carolinian, forged in some of the state’s worst moments to become the best of us.
Duke flamed out Saturday night, wilting under the pressure Sampson’s teams are guaranteed to impose, yet another San Antonio scandal on the scale of Roy Williams and his Kansas sticker 17 years ago. The Triangle’s teams have never had any success in the Alamodome, but the state of North Carolina still has a dog in this fight Monday night.
“I don’t get back much,” Sampson said. “I’m not sure when the last time I’ve been to Pembroke. I know I have a lot of support there. There’s a lot of people there I still care about and love.”
Everything about Sampson’s story comes back to North Carolina in the end, his Lumbee roots, his family, his precepts. We can learn from his courage, appreciate his resilience, acknowledge the retrospective wisdom of the second chances he was given, by Gregg Popovich in the NBA and at Houston. He was raised in tobacco-stained segregation — amid bathrooms and water fountains for “white,” “colored” and “other” — only to flourish on one of the biggest stages in all of sports, one win from a national title.
Along the way, he’s taken care of his family. He played for his late father Ned, a North Carolina high school legend. Now, his son and daughter are both on his Houston staff. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
“If they had had a nepotism law where I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t have taken that job,” Sampson said.
He’s never forgotten his roots. His wife Karen, also a graduate of Pembroke High and UNC Pembroke, serves on the UNCP board of trustees, where the family endowed a basketball scholarship in the name of Kelvin’s parents.
When Houston was in the American Athletic Conference, it made regular visits to East Carolina. Sampson would spend as much as an hour after games in an otherwise empty Minges Coliseum greeting friends and family from Pembroke and its surrounds — hugging, shaking hands, taking pictures, being present.
He has taken his father’s coaching legacy and built upon it exponentially. The lessons he learned not only during the basketball season but the three months his father worked other jobs — selling insurance and encyclopedias, working in tobacco markets in Lumberton — are passed down to his players now.
All these years later, Sampson’s teams play like every possession is a chance to escape from wheeling pallets of tobacco leaves around a stifling warehouse. When you’ve sweated through that, what’s being down six to Duke in the final 40 seconds of a Final Four game?
“The feeling of coming here is not one of accomplishment for me, maybe because it’s my age, but it’s more gratitude,” Sampson said. “Just grateful that you still have an opportunity to do this.”
Neither Sampson nor his father is a member of the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. Kelvin Sampson, two wins from 800, is not a member of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. It’s time for our reckoning with his legacy, even if he’s not concerned about it.
This is the closest Sampson has come to a national title in five decades of coaching. Win or lose, we can appreciate the arc of his life, his career, even as it has taken him away from North Carolina. How he’s taken the values of his childhood in Robeson County and built a championship-caliber program upon them.
He left, and never came back, but he’s still one of us. Whatever else happens Monday, that’s what should matter.
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at www.newsobserver.com/newsletters to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports
This story was originally published April 7, 2025 at 2:30 AM with the headline "Kelvin Sampson left NC and never came back, but still represents the best of the state."
