Wiffle ball, fried ice cream and ‘idyllic’ times on the Palouse: Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, children have fond memories from time at Washington State

WICHITA, Kan. – Picture this scene from the late 1980s: A Wiffle-ball game unfolding on a residential street in the hills of Pullman. Kelvin Sampson on the mound, John L. Smith behind the plate. Sampson’s children in the batter’s box, peppering grounders and line drives all over the black asphalt. Unforgettable Palouse nights they wish could have gone to extra innings.

“Just kind of idyllic. It was wonderful,” Lauren Sampson said. “We lived on one of the hills. My dad would come home and he was our all-time pitcher and we’d play streetball games. John L. Smith, who was the football coach at Idaho, he was our catcher. … We’d close down the street and play streetball games. You’re just riding bikes and playing hide-and-go-seek and kick the can.

“It was just kind of the idyllic childhood.”

The daughter of Washington State’s former basketball coach, now a director of external operations for her father at Houston, shows impressive retention nearly 40 years later.

There were the WSU caravan rides they took to Colfax. The fence in Colfax decorated with wheels. Lauren hardly skips a beat while replaying the hits of her childhood Friday afternoon from Houston’s locker room at Intrust Bank Arena, one day before Kelvin’s top-seeded Houston takes on eighth-seeded Gonzaga in the NCAA Tournament’s Round of 32.

She remembers everything down to the fried ice cream at Alex’s Restaurant, a Mexican establishment that’s no longer around.

There’s also this flashback, from a Washington State baseball game: “We have a picture at the house and it’s (Kelvin) at a baseball game and they were like milking a cow as a promotion.”

The family spent nine years in Pullman from 1985-94 – a formidable time for Sampson as a first-time Division I coach and his two children who now serve in different capacities for Houston’s program.

The youngest, Kellen, is a top assistant and Houston’s coach in waiting, set to take over the program that has won back-to-back Big 12 Conference regular-season championships when his father retires.

Kellen was born in a Butte hospital but never lived there. Kelvin, who’d been coaching at Montana Tech, was hired as an assistant to WSU coach Len Stevens two weeks before the birth of his son.

“I got my butt straight to the Palouse,” Kellen said.

Memories started flooding back for every member of the family during media sessions . Kelvin has plenty from inheriting a WSU program that had four straight losing seasons when he took over then endured three more early on in his tenure.

“Washington State was obviously the hardest, toughest job in the Pac-10,” he said.

“If it would have been a good job, they never would have hired me. They would have hired a real coach, somebody that was really good. I was 31 years old. You know, my first contract was two-year deal for $82,000. For you guys that are challenged by math, that’s $41,000 a year.”

Sampson’s teams went 30-57 in his first three seasons, experiencing rotten luck along the way. Many of WSU’s best players dealt with health and injury setbacks, depleting thin rosters. One of those involved Spokane native and Central Valley product David Sanders, who had to use a medical redshirt due to a viral blood infection.

“Lost him for the year in December before the Pac-10 season started. Then I had another kid from Snohomish,” said Sampson, briefly pausing his story to flex his knowledge of various Washington locales. “You can tell I was in Washington state. Most guys don’t know of Snohomish or Chelan, Moses Lake, Ellensburg. See, I’m down with the state of Washington.

“We lost those guys. You don’t have any depth as you are building the program. You are pretty good one through five or one through six.”

WSU went just 7-22 and 1-17 in the Pac-10 during the 1989-90 season, losing 18 straight games at one point.

“In this day and age,” Sampson said, “I would’ve been fired.”

But rather than pulling that lever, then-athletic director Jim Livengood went the other direction, giving his young coach more slack and support. The Cougars didn’t go through another losing season under Sampson, finishing 73-46 the next four years and advancing to the 1993-94 NCAA Tournament – the program’s first in 11 seasons.

“Can you imagine in a fishbowl experience that it is now with social media and everything, not winning a conference game and your AD waiting for you when you got home going, ‘Hey, you got it,’ ” Lauren said. “It allowed him to figure it out.”

Sampson, wife Karen, Lauren and Kellen did a lot of the problem-solving at the dinner table, using salt and pepper shakers to diagram plays and basketball concepts.

“The other half was, how do we get people at the games?” Lauren said. “What we grew up doing is very much what we’re doing now.”

Other up-and-coming coaches in the area took notice of Sampson’s success at WSU, including a young graduate assistant on Dan Fitzgerald’s staff at Gonzaga.

“Guys, he was a great coach at Washington State,” Gonzaga’s Mark Few said. “I mean, that was back in the day when the Pac was really rolling now, and he was going against (Arizona coach) Lute (Olson) and some of those teams. I think he just adapts to the level of players that he’s able to get at each spot and coaches the heck out of them, and that’s why they’re so good.”

Aspects of Sampson’s rebuild at WSU helped him turn things around at Houston, a program that lacked tradition and culture, had subpar facilities when he got there in 2014 and boasted just one NCAA Tournament appearance in the 22 years prior to his arrival.

The Cougars – those at WSU, not Houston – had gone to March Madness twice under former coach George Raveling, but their last appearance before that came in 1941.

“The thing he speaks about so fondly is he had to learn I may not be able to go team for team against these guys, but I’ve got a chance to build a program and can my program beat their program when it comes time?” Kellen said.

“So that means my camp has to be the best basketball camp it can be, that means I’ve got to be the most engaging head coach in the conference with our student section, I’ve got to do the best job with our marketing, our tickets, our promotion.”

Kellen alluded to an “apples to apples” comparison between his father’s rebuilds at Montana Tech, WSU and Houston.

“Of course, an apple reference with Washington,” he said.

Kellen grew up watching WSU players like Mark Hendricksen, Dale Reed and Terrence Lewis. He alluded to worshipping Bennie Seltzer, the former All-Pac-10 guard who went on to coach Kellen as an assistant at Oklahoma and returned to WSU as an assistant.

“Bennie Seltzer is my godfather. I thought the sun rose and shined on him,” Kellen said. “… But really, his last couple teams at Washington State, I could tell you their boot size and their blood type.”

The Sampsons left WSU and Pullman behind when Kelvin took the head coaching job at Oklahoma in 1994, but they retained many of their treausred memories from a decade-long pit stop on the Palouse.

Lauren called up another on Friday afternoon before Houston took the practice floor , continuing prep work for Gonzaga.

“We did a couple summers there where the rule was every summer, if we went out to eat, it had to be walkable. The entire city is just hills,” she said. “My dad’s sister looked at us at one point and said, ‘Is it a money thing? I’ll pay for gas. I will step in. Is it a financial thing? We will help.’

“I’m still friends with a lot of my friends from that era. … So I have nothing but great memories.”