Cut and paste from todays The Athletic. Behind a paywall but I get enough out of it to subscribe.
Schultz: Kennesaw State has become Georgia’s rare positive hoops story
KENNESAW, Ga. — Soon after taking his first head coaching job in the spring of 2019, Amir Abdur-Rahim sent a late-morning text to his players.
“Our first team workout is tonight at 6 o’clock.”
It didn’t seem like that big of a deal until one of the players responded.
“Hey, is this mandatory?”
This was the moment when it all hit home just how big of a challenge Abdur-Rahim had taken on at Kennesaw State.
The basketball program didn’t have a winning season since leaving Division II in 2005. The Owls went 6-26 the season before he took over. Spring workouts were options. Weight training: optional. Study hall: optional. With 11 straight losing seasons, just showing up also may have been optional.
It was so bad in that ensuing first season that Abdur-Rahim went 1-28, and even the one win over Gardner-Webb came with a level of heartache: The Owls had only seven players because the coach suspended five for either skipping class or being late to a shootaround.
Other college basketball states would consider this an embarrassment. In Georgia, it’s just a normal Tuesday.
Maybe that’s changing. Kennesaw State is 16-6, including 8-1 and tied for first place in the Atlantic Sun. The Owls have won six in a row. That’s as many wins as the program had in Abdur-Rahim’s first two seasons (6-47).
They’ve already set a record for wins since moving to Division I and have a realistic chance to win the conference and go to the NCAA Tournament for the first time. Despite playing in the ASUN, Kennesaw State has the second-best NET ranking in the state at 124 — behind Georgia (111) and ahead of Georgia Tech (188), Georgia Southern (222), Mercer (241) and Georgia State (250). This is a positive backdrop for an athletic program that slides up a notch on the food chain to Conference USA in 2024-25.
KSU’s campus gym, the Convocation Center, was rocking the other night with more than 1,900 fans for a lopsided win over Austin Peay. The crowd included three dudes dressed in banana costumes Kennesaw State has become Georgia’s rare positive hoops story — and no, other than the school color yellow, I don’t get the connection either.
“There is none — but those are my guys,” Abdur Rahim said later.
This is no small feat — not just for Abdur-Rahim, whose four-year growth surely will catch the attention of larger programs, but in Georgia, which for too long has been a relative wasteland for basketball. The state produces great talent at the AAU and high school levels, only to see those players leave for other campuses.
The bar is low in the Peach State. This isn’t North Carolina or Virginia or Texas or California. Nobody expects multiple NCAA Tournament teams. But, you know, maybe just a nice story once in a while.
Mark Fox took over a wrecked Georgia program and in his second season went to the tournament in 2011. It didn’t last. Mercer upset Duke in 2014. Didn’t last. Josh Pastner led Georgia Tech to an unlikely ACC title. That seems longer ago than two years.
Ron Hunter built a fun program at Georgia State — before the school let him walk out the door to Tulane — going to the tournament three times in five years and becoming a cult hero after, 1) celebrating a Sun Belt title win to the extent that he suffered a torn Achilles; and 2) then going YouTube viral when he fell off his rehab stool in a tournament upset over Baylor.
It’s Kennesaw State’s turn. The Owls could be what Hunter aspired to build at Georgia State. Another VCU. Another College of Charleston. A strong mid-major that consistently contends for conference championships and NCAA berths.
It shouldn’t be that hard in Georgia. Eight of the 16 players on KSU’s roster are from the state. So it turns out that sometimes players want to stay home. They just need to be given a reason.
Abdur-Rahim knows the state. He’s from Marietta and played at Wheeler High School, 15 minutes from the KSU campus. He spent a year at Georgia Tech as director of player development under Brian Gregory and a season at Georgia under Tom Crean, where he helped recruit Anthony Edwards, a carryover from a relationship he had built when he was an assistant at Texas A&M.
“For me, this is home. It’s not a stepping stone,” he said.
He can sell his vision because he worked in solid programs at Murray State, College of Charleston and Texas A&M and he comes from a family of athletes. His 12 brothers and sisters include Shareef, who played in the NBA for 13 seasons and whom Amir admired for his work ethic.
“I watched him while he was making $80 million over six years and he still worked like he had nothing,” he said.
Amir recruited Atlanta in previous jobs. He frequently drove through the KSU campus and saw its growth from “two buildings” to what it is today. The school had six single-digit win seasons since 2008-09. Most saw the program as a dead end. He saw it as “a gold mine.”
“And sometimes you’re just ready to bet on yourself,” he said. “I just figured if I was ever going to get a job, it was going to be a place where I had to build, so I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I knew we could recruit here. I knew we could create that culture and identity. That first season was hard, but for me, it wasn’t about winning that year. When I hired my staff, I tried to find people I knew I could lose with.”
Interesting wording, but it makes sense.
Hard work: no longer optional. The Owls start four guards but they outrebounded Austin Peay 50-26.
It also helps that 12 of the 16 players are upperclassmen, including three seniors and two super seniors. If Abdur-Rahim can avoid losses in the transfer portal, this team won’t be a one-year wonder.
“It’s not necessarily the wins that make me feel good, it’s the people I’ve been able to do it with,” he said. “You walk through a 1-28 season, you have to have some high-character people that come to work every day. That’s what I reflect on.”
Every once in a while, there’s a good college basketball story in Georgia.