Kelvin Sampson doesn’t remember his first win at Montana Tech. Not any of the specifics anyway. But he’ll never forget the one where his players threw him the shower. “I remember the first time we beat a really good team,” Sampson tells PaperCity. “I was about 25 and I had a 59 dollar and 99 cent corduroy suit from (JC)Penney’s. Because I didn’t have any suits. (My wife) Karen and I went to Penney’s in Butte (Montana) and went and bought a suit. It had one of those patches on the elbow.”
Sampson and his suit went right into the shower after beating an NAIA-ranked Great Falls team, the first of many memorable big-win celebrations for the coach who is now one win from the magical 800 for his career. “I remember that one,” Karen Sampson says. “We didn’t have any money and I was worried his one suit was going to shrink.”
“I couldn’t wear it the next game,” Kelvin Sampson laughs.
The Sampson World only has expanded since then, to where he’s now heading into his 37th season as a full-time college head coach with the No. 2 ranked team in America, coming off his third Final Four and first appearance in the national championship game. When the University of Houston reveals its 2025 Final Four banner before its season opener against Lehigh on Monday night (7 pm tip, CBS Sports Network), Sampson will be going for his 800th win.
It is a number that carries plenty of weight in the college basketball universe, a separating milestone. One that only 16 other coaches in Division I men’s college basketball have reached.
“It’s a credit to his longevity in the game,” ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla tells PaperCity. “Obviously not only has he been a successful coach, but his longevity is incredible. Starting at Montana Tech and now seemingly finishing his career in Houston. And this is a guy that had he not left college to go to the NBA and dealt with some of the NCAA issues he had, he’d be heading towards a thousand (wins).
“I don’t think there’s any question that Kelvin Sampson will be in the Naismith Hall of Fame based on his incredible career. He’s a Hall of Fame coach.”
For Sampson himself, it’s not about the Ws as much as it’s about the players who joined him on this journey along the way. From Montana Tech to Washington State to Oklahoma to Indiana and Houston, this basketball coaching lifer has built a lifetime network of guys who still text him after big moments in their lives and his, call him, bring their kids to UH games on the road so their youngsters can meet their coach.
Players like Blake Johnston, a guard on the Oklahoma 2002 Final Four and 2003 Elite Eight teams, who drove up to Lubbock last season with his oldest son Cooper just to spend some time around Kelvin Sampson’s program. “All the guys, even today, we genuinely love each other and are excited to see each other 20-plus years later,” Johnston says. “I want my son to see what Coach Sampson and his guys are all about.”
Johnston still marvels over one aspect of Sampson’s coaching. “Coach Sampson’s attention to detail is off the charts,” he says. “He’d have us practice for situations you never thought would happen and then at some point in the season they would.”
“So many coaches, older coaches at the end don’t have their fastball anymore. Coach’s fastball is better now than it’s ever been.” — UH assistant coach Kellen Sampson
Getting Better and Better and Better For 37 Seasons
Sampson himself will tell you that he had little choice to teach himself to be good at the details, considering how he started. “That first year (at Montana Tech), if we would have played 50 games, we would have probably lost 45,” he quips. “We just didn’t have anybody. That’s why I got the job. But they’d never had a winning season so nobody cared.
“The next year, we won the conference championship. Because I figured out I needed to do better.” Sampson laughs. “So I did better.”
And he’s kept doing better. Even as younger peers like Jay Wright, Bruce Pearl and Tony Bennett retire from coaching, citing NIL, the transfer portal and other changes in the sport they love. But Kelvin Sampson is still going and so is Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, who he used to share a bunk bed with when they helped run Jud Heathcote’s summer basketball camps as a graduate assistant and part-time assistant at MSU respectively.
“We don’t know what else to do,” Sampson laughs. “Tom, we sat together at different recruiting visits (during the summer). . . Tom and Rick (Barnes) are both a year older than me. Bruce (Pearl) had probably put some thought into (retiring). . . But I wasn’t surprised. I talked to (Kansas) coach Bill Self. He’s had his share of medical issues.
“But we’re talking about generational guys. Tom Izzo is a generational coach. So is Bill Self. So is Bruce Pearl. So is Rick Barnes. You don’t coach as long we have without being A). Good at it, and two being able to weather some storms. . . The thing about coaching and playing is it teaches you every lesson you need in life to be successful. I learned to get knocked down and taught how to get up. Then when you get up, you figure it out.”
Few coaches in any sports on any level are figuring it out at the level Kelvin Sampson is these days. He is expected to win his 800 game less than three full seasons since he won his 700th game on November 7, 2022. There are F1 drivers who don’t move this fast.
“What’s so impressive is that just three years ago, we were celebrating 700,” UH assistant coach Kellen Sampson, Kelvin’s son and the future Houston coach in waiting, tells PaperCity. “. . . He’s in his prime. We celebrated 700 in November of ’22 and here we are in November of ’25 and we’re ready to celebrate 800. That’s insane. That’s nuts.
“So I think it speaks to the totality of his career and how awesome it’s been. But it also speaks to how well he is right now. So many coaches, older coaches at the end don’t have their fastball anymore. Coach’s fastball is better now than it’s ever been.”
And on the verge of becoming historic.
“Not too many coaches can say they have 800,” Houston assistant coach Hollis Price, Sampson’s former star at Oklahoma, says. “But once he get it, he can put his name in the book.”
“It’s a magical number,” Kellen Sampson says. “And it’s a number that typically has a lot of ramifications for coaches as they try to become enshrined quite candidly.”
Those 799 wins and counting represent even more memories, moments of life that live on in the players and coaches around Sampson who experienced them. Kellen Sampson remembers his dad’s team winning a low-profile holiday tournament when he was a kid — and how great it felt.
“It was a tournament in Birmingham (Alabama) that we got a trophy for,” he says. “It was like a December holiday tournament. And I remember, you couldn’t have told me that wasn’t the national championship. I’m running around the court like a wild man in some horrible awful Christmas sweater holding up a one. Thinking, ‘Man, we did it! This is awesome.’ ”
Kellen Sampson also will never forget a Saturday win over George Raveling’s USC team when his dad was coaching at Washington State and he was finally old enough to serve as a ball boy.
Kelvin and Bennie
Lauren Sampson, Kellen’s older sister and UH’s current handle-anything-and-everything hoops chief of staff, recalls a victory parade through the town of Butte after her dad started winning conference titles at the school that never knew winning. “What stands out to me the most though, the first real vivid memory,” Lauren Sampson tells PaperCity, “is when we weren’t good and I was sick from an asthma attack. I was getting like a nebulizer treatment and he was recruiting (First Team All Pac-10 player to be) Bennie Seltzer.
“It was the team that was going to be the team that turned it around. . . I think that was the most important. Going through the losing, but during that season of losing it was the recruiting of that team.”
“The thing about coaching and playing is it teaches you every lesson you need in life to be successful. I learned to get knocked down and taught how to get up. Then when you get up, you figure it out.” — UH coach Kelvin Sampson
Karen Sampson’s remembers her husband’s very first loss for a very different reason. Then a student in a intense nursing program in Montana, Karen didn’t have time to iron her husband’s dress shirt for the game. But she figured it wouldn’t really matter because Kelvin would be wearing a suit jacket. That $59.99 suit from JCPenney.
Then Sampson ripped off the jacket and tossed it to the ground just a few minutes into the game. Followed by his tie. The move would become a Kelvin Sampson signature for decades until COVID made basketball coaches realize they did not have to wear suits on the sidelines.
But in that moment, Karen Sampson only felt dread. “You could see the creases all down his shirt,” she laughs now.
The Sampsons have come a long way since that first game night in Butte. All the way to the doorstep of No. 800. With generations of players across 37 different seasons on the ride right there with them.
No outlet covers UH basketball throughout the entire calendar year with more consistency and focus than PaperCity Houston. For more of Chris Baldwin’s extensive, detailed and unique insider coverage of UH sports — stories you cannot read anywhere else, stay tuned. Follow Baldwin on the platform formerly known as Twitter here.