NC State Basketball made a home run hire with Kevin Keatts. Here’s a look at the rising star and what makes him a success.
Every summer there are coaching vacancies in college basketball. A lot of the teams looking for a new head man are always looking for the next young star in coaching, which usually results in a higher-profile school being unable to lure its target away from their current position for one reason or another.
In some instances, they get their man and it pays immediate dividends. It looks as though North Carolina State has nabbed one of the brightest young stars in college coaching when they named Kevin Keatts their head coach on March 17, 2017.
Keatts, who is just 45 years old, played four years at Ferrum College in Virginia and began his coaching career as an assistant at Southwestern Michigan in 1996. In 1997 Keatts found himself back in Virginia, this time at Hargrave Military Academy as an assistant coach. He would also have two stints as the school’s head coach over the next 16 years. In between his stints at Hargrave, Keatts also spent three seasons on Greg White’s bench at Marshall. In 2011 Keatts left Hargrave, where he lost a total of 17 games over the course of 10 years to join the staff at Louisville.
After three seasons at Louisville Keatts got his first chance to be a head man, being named the coach at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington in 2014, where he spent three more years before N.C. State came calling.