RALEIGH, N.C. — One of the most historic houses in Raleigh rises out of a small hill, almost hidden, off of Daniels Street and steps away from the Village District near downtown. Since its construction in the mid-1950s the city has changed all around it. A new apartment building towers over the backyard; new condos are opening next door. Parts of old Raleigh are being repaved and built over.
Drivers pass by the old house all day, unaware of who used to live there. Sometimes the front yard is in need of a good mowing. The driveway is often crowded with cars parked at odd angles. A small old boat, long out of the water, rests up against a fence. Few people know anymore that a long time ago the house was built for Everett Case. The memory and knowledge of the man slowly fades.
It is not a stretch to say Case is the grandfather of ACC basketball, or that North Carolina can trace its roots as a college basketball haven directly to him. In the 1940s and early ‘50s, his teams at N.C. State captured the attention of the South. Rival schools tried to catch up. The Dixie Classic, and then the ACC tournament, became must-see theater at State’s Reynolds Coliseum. A state’s love affair with college basketball began.
It is fair to wonder these days about the degree to which it endures. Indeed, the fervor surrounding North Carolina and Duke remains high, even if the sport itself has been relegated to one month per year of national relevance. Around here, change has come quickly. Mike Krzyzewski coached his final game last April. Roy Williams did the same the year before that. Duke and UNC are attempting to retain their place with the most inexperienced leaders they’ve had in decades.
And at N.C. State, even in the midst of a promising season, it often feels as though the Wolfpack has never been farther away from its storied past than it is now. Kevin Keatts, in his sixth season as State’s head coach, is attempting to lead the way back. Yet empty seats, or almost entirely empty sections in the upper deck, have become the usual for State’s home games at PNC Arena. Apathy has become as formidable an opponent as any. Decades of turmoil and defeats, of failed coaches and coaching searches, of near misses and what-ifs, have taken a toll.
What Case built, and what endured for decades, might as well be ancient history, a myth. Before he died in 1966 he shared his wish to be buried in a cemetery off of U.S. 70, west of town, “so he could wave to his boys as they headed to Durham to play Duke,” as a 1999 retrospective story in The N&O described it. It has been a long time since the Wolfpack traveled that way to Durham.
It has been almost as long since State shared a national basketball stage with Duke and UNC. The Wolfpack on Saturday travels to North Carolina for the 104th time. It will be the 243rd time the two schools have played since their first meeting in 1913. This one’s important, with both teams two games out of first place in the ACC.
More broadly, this is the rare recent State-UNC game in which both enter with similar stakes, and hope. The Tar Heels have controlled the series throughout the past three decades. In men’s basketball, the rivalry between State and Carolina is mostly one in name only, a relic a little like that old house off of Daniels Street: It’s there, and the foundation hasn’t changed, and it kind of looks like it did. But it isn’t close to what it once was.
Almost 60 years have passed since Case’s death. Forty have gone by since State won the 1983 national championship, and in the process sent Jim Valvano running around the court in Albuquerque, looking for someone to hug. Thirty years have passed since Valvano died. And it has been that long, give or take, that N.C. State has traveled a college basketball wilderness. No other program with as much historical success has endured such a prolonged malaise.
The question becomes more glaring as the years pass: Whatever happened to N.C. State basketball
NC State’s comedy of eras
The answer begins in December of 1989, when the NCAA Committee on Infractions imposed several sanctions against Valvano’s program. The scandal, and the specter of serious impropriety, was months away from costing him his job. He was in his final season, after the UNC Board of Governors concluded State committed “academic abuses” to keep players eligible.
The NCAA investigation, meanwhile, corroborated none of the salacious details in the book “Personal Fouls,” which led to the investigation in the first place. Instead, the NCAA found that players profited from the sale of sneakers and complimentary game tickets. For that, State endured a postseason ban in 1990, a 12-scholarship limit through ‘92, and a year of recruiting limitations.
The unofficial penalty proved far more severe: The Wolfpack lost its place and has never regained it.
The before-and-after is clear enough. Through 1990, State had won as many national championships (two) as UNC, and two more than Duke. The Wolfpack had won two more ACC tournaments (10) than Duke and one fewer than UNC. State ranked seventh all time in Associated Press poll appearances (289), behind only UNC, Kentucky, UCLA, Louisville, Indiana and Duke.
Every school among the top 25 most-ranked teams through 1990 has either been to the Final Four or won their conference at least once in the 33 years since. Every school except for one. The simplest explanation for State’s futility — that it has never recovered from the scandal that led to Valvano’s departure — is accurate but hardly complete.
The school has been through four head men’s basketball coaches and is on its fifth. It’s on its fourth athletics director. The team left Reynolds and in 1999 moved into a new arena. The people have changed, the setting has changed. Throughout it all, the Wolfpack has remained in a basketball purgatory — the occasional high mixed with years upon years of disappointment.
The comedy of errors — or eras, for the pun-minded — began with Les Robinson’s arrival as head coach in 1990. In reality, though, Robinson, an affable alum who played for Case in the 1960s, never had a chance. He has developed a go-to one-liner that he repeated during a recent interview: With a backcourt of Chris Corchiani and Rodney Monroe in his first season, he said, “I was one of the best coaches in the country.”
“The next year, I had two guards with an average SAT of 1250, and I was one of the most horse-[expletive] coaches in the country.” He released a bellowing laugh.
Robinson, as Corchiani put it, “was playing five-card poker with only a card and a half” due to the scholarship limits and the emphasis on recruiting players who wouldn’t present an academic risk.
“Without a doubt, that’s where it started,” Corchiani, who in 1991 left school as the NCAA’s all-time leader in assists, said of the origin of State’s decline. “Why it’s been so difficult to turn it into a prominent program (since) — that’s harder to pinpoint.”
Corchiani played on Valvano’s last team and Robinson’s first — N.C. State’s last NCAA tournament team before enduring a 10-season tournament drought. With rosters of fringe ACC players, State finished with losing records in Robinson’s final five seasons. He lost to Campbell and Florida Atlantic at home. The old ACC tournament play-in game, which featured the league’s 8th- and 9th-place teams, became known as the Les Robinson Invitational.
Yet in his six seasons he was also 5-7 against UNC, a mark of relative excellence compared to State’s 15-53 overall record against the Tar Heels over the past 33 years. After one victory against the Tar Heels, Robinson returned home to find that his neighbors, a pair of UNC fans, had left a bottle of champagne on his back porch. They’d printed off a picture of Dean Smith and taped it to the bottle with a text bubble, Smith saying, “I surrender, I surrender.”
Over the phone, Robinson, now 80 and living independently but “in a retirement center,” as he put it, laughed at the memory. He likes telling old stories, reliving the past. He’s a long way from the stress of trying to revive an embattled program.
“I knew it was going to be tough because of the circumstances,” he said. “But I knew what it was. I was willing to go along with it, and do the best I could, and come back to my alma mater and hopefully straighten things out. But it was a tough challenge.”
After all these years Robinson still has that champagne bottle, the one with Smith’s picture. It’s a reminder. Even in the lowest moments came joyous relief, however fleeting.
Sendek sent packing
In the span of a week and a half in March of 1980, Duke and N.C. State introduced new basketball coaches. Duke hired a little-known 33-year-old from Army with a consonant-filled last name, one Krzyzewski slowly spelled and pronounced for reporters at his introductory press conference. State hired the vivacious and quick-witted Valvano, who’d just turned 34.
One became one of the greatest coaches, regardless of sport, in American history. The other became synonymous with courage amid an unwinnable fight, and the namesake of one of the country’s most prominent fundraisers for cancer research. Krzyzewski and Valvano made the people who hired them look wise.
The opposite of a successful coaching search, meanwhile, is whatever happened at N.C. State in 2006. In hindsight, Lee Fowler, now 70 and mostly retired but then State’s director of athletics, wishes there hadn’t been a coaching search at all.
“Probably my biggest regret is not standing more behind Herb Sendek,” Fowler said during a recent interview, “and allowing him (to leave). I mean, he had the best class recruited that we had ever had when he left to go to Arizona State.”
By the mid-2000s, Sendek, and then Fowler, could do no right in the eyes of a weary and despairing fan base. It’d been a long 15 years. Sendek, who succeeded Robinson in 1996, first reached the NCAA Tournament in his sixth season. By then N.C. State supporters had long grown tired of him. His greatest offense, in addition to the lack of winning, was his perceived lack of personality. If Jimmy V was a master at cracking jokes, Sendek was a natural at becoming the butt of them.
He spoke in a detached philosopher’s tone of “day-tight compartments” and “chopping wood.” He never conveyed much passion for the rivalries with UNC and Duke. The Wolfpack reached the NCAA Tournament in each of his final five seasons, but advanced past the second round once — and never beyond the Sweet 16. Only one of his 10 teams finished a season among the top 25.
One of the great what-ifs for N.C. State over the past three decades, though, is this: What if it holds onto a 15-point second-half lead against Duke in the 2003 ACC tournament championship game? What if the Wolfpack stops J.J. Redick from unleashing a barrage of 3-pointers that ignited Duke’s comeback?
Sendek just might’ve won over his critics by winning the ACC. His program just might’ve reached the next level. Instead, he approached the hump without ever getting over it. He left for Arizona State on his own accord in 2006, a mutual parting that brought relief to Wolfpack fans.
Soon enough, Sendek’s departure became a case of “be careful what you wish for.” Fowler began an arduous, bumbling search that lasted more than a month, and further reduced N.C. State to a punchline. To hear him recount it, more than 16 years later, is to hear a man recall the almosts and should-have-beens of near-success.
A cursed coaching search?
It wasn’t all Fowler’s fault, necessarily. By 2006, the State basketball job had become immersed in a cauldron of toxicity. Fans were angry. National writers took aim at N.C. State fans for chasing away Sendek, whose teams made the postseason and stayed clean off the court. Early on in the search, Fowler thought he’d found his man in John Beilein, then the head coach at West Virginia.
“We had Beilein hired as the coach,” Fowler said, “and we had to go to the booster club” to work out the details of his hiring, particularly his buyout from West Virginia. And then, Fowler said, “it got out that we were hiring him, and the fans just wore him out.”
Fowler had already ordered a red jacket in Beilein’s size for the introductory press conference. Once it leaked that Beilein was a leading candidate, though, the inevitable comparisons began. At the time, the internet was just beginning to take its modern form. Social media hadn’t yet emerged, as it’s known today, but college sports message boards and blogs were becoming more influential.
“The word got out” about Beilein, Fowler said, “and they started writing (about) him and on the internet, they blasted him with, ‘You’re another Herb Sendek person, we don’t want you, don’t come here.’ ”
These days, administrators have long grown wise to limiting leaks, and the role of online fan discourse. Back then, though, Fowler was navigating a new world. He found himself looking over his shoulder, with a desperate need to hire a big name but maintain secrecy. The longer the search lasted, the more the pressure increased. There were talks with Rick Barnes (then of Texas) and John Calipari (Memphis) and Tubby Smith (Kentucky).
When Calipari visited Raleigh, Fowler sent one of his daughters to pick him up at the airport. Fowler snuck Calipari into PNC Arena (then the RBC Center) for a tour, all the while trying to dodge security cameras. Landing Calipari would’ve been the home run State fans craved (and a hire open to questioning, given Calipari’s reputation and how Valvano’s tenure ended) but during his visit “he never would talk money,” Fowler said. “So I knew that he was not interested in us.
“He was more interested in solidifying his position at Memphis.”
Fowler’s search ended, after much futility, with Sidney Lowe, the beloved point guard on the ‘83 team. Lowe, though, came with an abysmal NBA record, and he hadn’t yet earned his college degree — a requirement for the job. After getting it, he lasted five seasons, all of which hovered around .500. Beilein, meanwhile, eventually left West Virginia for Michigan, where he won four Big Ten championships (two tournament, two regular season) and led the Wolverines to two Final Fours.
The final twist of State’s cursed search — one whose ramifications continue to this day — came hours before the school was set to announce Lowe’s hiring. Fowler said that’s when he heard from Tubby Smith’s agent, who called to say Smith “was ready” to come to State. Earlier in the search, Smith had told Fowler he was staying at Kentucky. By then it was too late. Fowler had settled on Lowe.
It was a decision that helped seal Fowler’s fate at State, too. The university in 2010 bought him out of his contract three years early. In the days before widespread memes, he’d become one — the target of online ire and mean jokes; the fall guy, fair or unfair, for the dysfunction of N.C. State athletics.
“They got personal with my family and that sort of stuff, which really affected my wife and three girls,” Fowler said of his critics. “So that was the worst part of all of it. ... It’s one thing to question what I did or can do or can’t do.
“Anyway,” he said after a pause, “I’m way over it. I’d say if you asked my wife and girls, they wouldn’t tell you that.”
Is Kevin Keatts the answer?
During his senior year at Ferrum College, a small private school in the hills of Southwestern Virginia, near his hometown of Lynchburg, Kevin Keatts first developed an interest in coaching. It was unplanned. Keatts was a starting guard on Ferrum’s basketball team, and his head coach, Bill Pullen, suffered serious injuries in a car crash. Keatts began helping Ferrum’s lone assistant.
“I kind of got that bug after that,” he said in his office before the start of this season.
So began an improbable rise. He went from assistant jobs at Southwestern Michigan to Hargrave Military Academy, where he eventually became its head coach. He left for an assistant position at Marshall, missed Hargrave, went back and spent eight more years there, amassing a record of 262-17. Rick Pitino hired Keatts as an assistant at Louisville in 2011. He became the head coach at UNC-Wilmington in ‘14 before arriving in Raleigh in 2017, the successor to Mark Gottfried, State’s most recent head coaching casualty.
It’s easy to understand Keatts’ ascent. He comes straight out of the pages of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” — a firm handshake, a smile, the eye contact. He said he was “a winner” when he became N.C. State’s head coach and there was nothing in his record to suggest otherwise. He radiates positivity. That might have worked against him last year, during a miserable 11-21 season. It was the Wolfpack’s worst since 1993, and its third-worst since the formation of the ACC.
Nonetheless, Keatts tried to put on a happy face. At times it gave the impression of a disconnected leader. State suffered through injuries and dysfunction. When the season ended with a Tuesday defeat in Brooklyn in the ACC tournament, Keatts wasted no time in bringing the team back home. Upon its return, he spent several days alone in Wilmington. He brought his laptop and watched the losses over and over. Keatts, the self-described winner, had never lost like he did a year ago.
“A very humbling experience,” he said. “I think the true sign of character of a man is if you can ever look yourself in the mirror and be able to say you’ve got to make some changes and do things differently.
“And so for me, it was very humbling. But it was necessary. I never went through anything like this in my life, so I didn’t have previous experience to fall back on. I didn’t have anything. And so I made some calls to some folks who had went through this.”
Between 1946 and 1990, N.C. State had four men’s basketball coaches. One of them, Press Maravich, only coached two seasons before resigning to go to LSU, where his son, a gifted player named Pete, would be able to play. State’s other three coaches in that span — Case, Norm Sloan and Valvano — all have statues outside of Reynolds, and all are revered for different reasons.
In the past three decades, it has been a merry-go-round. Robinson to Sendek to Lowe, to Gottfried in 2011 and then to Keatts in 2017. Debbie Yow, N.C. State’s athletics director from 2010 through 2019, hired both Gottfried and Keatts. Gottfried started off well enough, with four consecutive NCAA tournament appearances — and two Sweet 16s — before his program went off the rails. He was fired after back-to-back losing seasons, and amid an NCAA investigation surrounding the recruitment of Dennis Smith, Jr.
During both coaching searches, Yow said, she was struck by two perceptions that had taken hold — a “theme,” as she described it, that’d persisted since Sendek left State in ‘06. One perception was that it’d be impossible to compete at a high level, with UNC and Duke so close by. The other was that Wolfpack fans were too demanding, too discontent with the kind of above-average-but-not-great results that Sendek and Gottfried usually delivered.
“And I did not buy into either concern,” Yow wrote in a text message. During a separate interview, speaking of the fans in particular, Yow said, “I’m glad they’re passionate. I’d rather have that any day than an apathetic group.”
Yet apathy has set in, too. PNC Arena, with nearly 20,000 seats for basketball, hasn’t been close to full this season. Not even a game against Duke, in what turned out to be a runaway Wolfpack victory, came close to selling out. It often makes for a sad, sobering scene: N.C. State’s championship banners hanging up in the rafters, surrounded by swaths of empty seats, with Keatts trying to win back whatever support he might’ve lost a year ago.
“I don’t let people from the outside judge me,” he said. “I know who I am at the core.”
‘Shoulda never left’
There’s one more part of the answer. It involves not people, but a place. A building.
From Case’s old house on Daniels Street, it’s about a 25-minute walk to Reynolds Coliseum. The walk goes past the belltower at the edge of campus, where traffic was backed up more than an hour before State’s annual Heritage Game at Reynolds in December against Coppin State, and diagonally across campus and through a tunnel under the railroad tracks and up some stairs and there it is. Walk in, and the place still smells like popcorn, same as ever.
The first time Corchiani walked into Reynolds, “I had never seen anything quite like it,” he said. It was part of the reason why he chose State over Duke, and maybe was the last recruit who ever did.
“Electric,” he said.
“I tell people that if State hadn’t left Reynolds,” Robinson said, “they would have won at least 20 to 25 percent more of the games they’ve played since then, that they’ve played in the big arena. That’s not an exaggeration. That building was worth 10 points to the home team.”
“During my nine years as athletic director, one of the consistent themes from alums and fans was the question of whether or not we could ever return to Reynolds,” Yow said, and the answer was, and is, always no. The reason: Money, for one. And, second, State is locked into its lease at PNC Arena through 2096, though there are windows to renegotiate.
The Wolfpack women still play in Reynolds and, undoubtedly, the renovated arena — now with an N.C. State athletics hall of fame and a capacity of 5,500, less than half of what it was originally — has contributed to the emergence of that program. For the men, the annual December game in Reynolds is a special treat, a reminder of what it’d be like to play in a true college environment.
“Shoulda never left here,” one fan said to another, walking into the building in December.
“Awesome, isn’t it?” said another, looking wide-eyed.
This is where David Thompson became the best college player in ACC history; where State returned to celebrate two national championships. Now maybe it was a cautionary tale: Bigger and more modern isn’t always better. Some of Valvano’s players, growing older now, stopped for pictures in the concourse. The band sounded louder. The 5,500 in attendance made more noise than crowds double the size at PNC Arena.
It was a brisk 10-minute walk to Hillsborough Street and it has changed a lot, too — many of the old haunts long gone, a city in reinvention, for better or worse. State basketball is like those old buildings that have been knocked down, except the rebuild keeps on stalling. There’s just the memory of what was.
Out at Oakwood Cemetery near downtown on a recent Wednesday afternoon, someone left flowers next to Valvano’s headstone. A basketball was left at the foot of it.
“Never give up,” it said on the ball, in fading black marker; three words that became Valvano’s most lasting, a mantra for anyone working to keep the faith. Ten minutes away, Case’s old house stood near a corner, dwarfed by the apartments behind it, the man who once lived there more and more of a ghost.
He no longer could wave to his boys while they rode by on the way to Durham. The buses don’t go that way anymore. Change is constant and nothing stays the same. For N.C. State, and its beleaguered basketball program, and fans, maybe that’s cause for hope: After three decades filled with a lot of misery, the pain can’t last forever.
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Staff columnist Luke DeCock contributed to this story.
