21 YEARS IN THE MAKING


On the morning of March 8, Oakland was a 153-year old city in Northern California, identified by sports fans as the home of the NFL’s storied franchise, the Oakland Raiders. The blue-collar city by the bay woke the next morning to learn that they were not alone on the sports landscape. Northern Michigan could also lay claim to Oakland.

A stunning 61-60 win over Oral Roberts, in the Mid-Continent Conference championship game, and Rochester, MI had suddenly found its place on the map. A mid-range jumper from Detroit, it’s the home of the 45-year old Oakland University. Its’ men’s basketball program was headed to the NCAA tournament and its coach was a national celebrity of sorts.

For Greg Kampe the magnitude of the win became really apparent, when he awoke to a headline in USA Today and more media requests than his first 21 seasons combined. Where is Oakland? How good are these Golden Grizzlies? How did they pull off this upset? Who is Greg Kampe? Everybody wanted to know.

In the days leading up to their NCAA tournament qualifying game, against Alabama A&M, Kampe and his Grizzlies captured the curiosity of the sports world. It was something the very reserved Oakland coach was not ready for.

“I was literally doing an interview every ten or fifteen-minutes,” said Kampe. “I expected that there would be an interest in our team, but I had no idea it would be like this. It was non-stop.”

To the extent that he was almost embarrassed by all the attention, the conservative Kampe reluctantly fulfilled virtually every media request, with the understanding of how important it was to the University and the community.

But try as they did, the majority of interviewers never realized the full extent of the story. Sure it was a fairytale 12-18 team heading to the Big Dance. But as unlikely as it was that Pierre Dukes’ jumper found the bottom of the net, it was equally not surprising that a Greg Kampe-coached team had found success. Kampe is an excellent coach, but it took twenty-one years and one three-point shot for everyone to recognize the fact.

Kampe spent the first fourteen years of his career building Oakland into a very successful division II program. He won two Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletics Conference championships and had a run of twelve consecutive seasons finishing above .500. But following a 24-7 campaign (1996-97), the program began a two-year transition period to division I.

“I knew that we were going to have our struggles,” says Kampe, “but the commitment was there. You can’t make a move like that unless you are fully committed and the University was committed to doing it the right way. Did I expect to do as well as we did initially? No, but I did think we would get there eventually.”

Kampe was referring to Oakland’s first full-fledged season in the Mid-Continent Conference. Following a 12-15 season (1998-99), Kampe’s team played a full schedule in the Mid-Con. They weren’t eligible for the postseason tournament, but Kampe didn’t view that as a negative. And he used it as a motivational tool.

“Those first two seasons were most difficult because there weren’t any tangible rewards at the end of the line,” he said. “We would have had to play out of our mind to get any consideration from the NIT selection committee so that wasn’t very realistic. That changed once we became eligible for conference play. Now the kids had something to play for. The idea of making the all-conference team was very attainable.”

But Kampe got much then he bargained for.

Despite being unable to beat the Mid-Con’s perennial power Valparaiso, losing both regular season meetings, the Golden Grizzlies lost on only three other occasions in their inaugural run through the league. And by seasons end they had done the unthinkable. They had earned the right to call themselves conference champions (11-5).

It was nothing short of remarkable, when you consider that Valpo won the regular season title eight times in a nine-year period (1995-2004), with the lone exception being 2000. Kampe earned National Coach of the Year honors that season (CollegeInsider.com), despite the fact that his team finished with 13-17 overall record.

But winning awards doesn’t bring you the kind of attention, generated by being part of the dance. Thus Kampe and Oakland remained in relative obscurity. And that was just fine for the coach.

Kampe is not the type to grandstand. You wouldn’t find him holding court with his peers and you would certainly not see him working the lobby at the Final Four. Instead you will find him with his staff, quietly sitting away from all of the hoopla. If he had it his way, he would be prefer to be home with wife and two boys.

When he’s not coaching he spends time online doing marketing analysis. And the coach/day trader also spends a lot of time in his backyard, rebounding for his boys on their regulation-sized court. You would literally have to pry him away to do any sort of media responsibility. Not because he doesn’t want to talk basketball, but because he is really not interested in talking about himself.

Self and promotion are words that are not part of Kampe’s vernacular.

Jokingly Kampe will tell you that there hasn’t been much to boast about, since he broke Valpo’s stranglehold on the league. But the truth of the matter is that his teams have played well and the program has continued to move forward, even though that may not be indicated by their place in the standings.

Adversity and a yearly non-conference schedule that is ambitious to say the least, isn’t exactly the formula for impressive win-loss records. But when you watch his teams play and you understand his approach and preparation it’s easy to understand why getting to the NCAA tournament is not so shocking. The manner in which they got there is eye-opening, but it’s anything but surprising that it happened.

Spend some time with the coach and watch him work his trade and you will come away with one thought. If he were coaching in Ann Arbor, instead of Rochester, everybody would have already known the name Greg Kampe.

Nevertheless, it’s a more familiar name now.