SAN ANTONIO—Slightly askew from the team benches on the elevated court in the Alamodome sit two modest, black wooden stools.
This is the domain of the head coaches, an isolated spot where they can take a break during games whenever they are not cajoling, yelling or furiously waving their hands at their teams from the sideline during the men’s basketball Final Four.
Steps away lie the rest of the team benches on either side of an outsized video board. The upholstered chairs with full NCAA branding are a far more luxurious, relatively speaking, spot to take in the action but also represent a bit of a delineation. This is where the players and assistant coaches huddle together shoulder-to-shoulder before getting the short handwave from the head coach to join them a few feet away.
Though the distance between seating spots isn’t vast, it can be in terms of responsibilities.
Two of the Final Four head coaches—Auburn’s Bruce Pearl and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson—understand the dynamics, but have a unique viewpoint just behind them on their benches: their 30-something sons.
For Steven Pearl and Kellen Sampson, this weekend offers a potential glimpse at their own futures, making the move several feet up and over into the big chair as they take on opponents led by coaches in their peer group.
“Motivates me for sure. I mean, there’s a competitive tick that certainly rages. I don’t look at it as they got a head start. I look at it as they’re doing an awesome job of blazing a trail for our generation. And our generation is going to be spectacular,” Kellen Sampson says. “People talk about this changing landscape, it’s our generation that is only going to know this landscape and we’re going to navigate it and we’re going to be fine.”
The ties between generations are even more intertwined in the first game at the Final Four.
Florida’s Todd Golden, 39, got his start at the power conference level by serving on Bruce Pearl’s staff at Auburn for two seasons—first as the director of basketball operations during the 2014–15 season and as an assistant coach the following season. While the pair has met several times since the former arrived in Gainesville, the connection in San Antonio has been heightened.
“Even though I only had Todd for two years, he helped lay the foundation, helped getting some of the recruiting started that helped us in our fourth year,” Bruce Pearl said. “Todd and Megan [Golden] had just gotten married. They were newlyweds. They had their first son while he was at Auburn. I was one of the first to hold his son. There’s a close connection. All the while he becomes best friends with his fellow assistant, Steven Pearl. The relationship has lasted.”
Golden played alongside Steven Pearl on the USA squad that won the gold medal at the 2009 Maccabiah Games in Israel. Both chat regularly and are frequent companions on the summer recruiting circuit despite having to clash for players, conference wins, and, soon, a berth in the national title game.
“We FaceTimed on Sunday after they beat Michigan State. We were shaking our heads like, ‘Man, we’re legitimately going to the Final Four,’ competing against each other,” Golden said. “A long way from when we first got down to Auburn, I was director of basketball operations, he was the assistant strength coach. You can remind him of that when you see him. Like I said before, Bruce and Steven are incredibly important to me, have been really impactful with the opportunities I’ve had. I’m just really grateful for my relationship with them. I think it speaks volumes about the way we build our programs, that we’re both still alive right now.”
“We literally talked about it in the beginning of the year, talking about how it would be crazy if we met each other in the championship game,” Steven Pearl says. “I gave him some s— the other day because I was like, if you guys had done better in the regular season, [Florida] could have been the No. 2 or No. 3 overall and we would have met Monday as opposed to Saturday. It’s wild because we actually talked about this months ago, which makes it even more surreal and insane that we are meeting in San Antonio for the chance of winning the national championship.”
Steven Pearl also thinks about being in his friend’s shoes longer term. While he’s been connected to a few openings at smaller mid-majors over the past few years, the pull of coaching with his father has kept him on the Plains.
“I think about it. It’s just having the right opportunity to come about more than anything,” says Steven Pearl, who also played for his dad with the Tennessee Volunteers. “Obviously, we’d love for it to be at Auburn one day. But if something really good comes up in the meantime, I’ll look to aggressively pursue that. But I’m in a really good situation where I’m at right now being the associate head coach at Auburn, and obviously, we’re having a lot of fun.”
The dynamics at Houston are slightly different even if there’s a similar, if deeper, family combination at the arena.
Kellen Sampson also played for his dad while the two were together at Oklahoma and has been with him during this entire 11-year run with the Cougars, having also been an assistant at Appalachian State and Stephen F. Austin. His sister, Lauren Sampson, is the Auburn director of basketball operations and came aboard in 2016.
They have helped their dad reach the Final Four for a third time and been integral to elevating the Cougars in the transition to the Big 12 amid a historic stretch for the program.
“The only reason I took the Houston job was to get my family back together. We’d been apart. I had just gotten fired. Kellen got fired. Lauren didn’t like her job,” Kelvin Sampson said. “For me, it was where can I go where they’ll let me hire my children? If they had had a nepotism law where I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t have taken that job.”
Uniquely, Kellen Sampson is not just a regular assistant who happens to share the same surname as the head coach this week either.
He signed a contract in June 2023 with Houston that also designates him as the head coach-in-waiting whenever his father steps down and retires—perhaps if the Cougars win it all on Monday.
“Family is such an outstretched word here because we are connected,” Kellen Sampson says. “That opportunity to be a head coach elsewhere [has come up] and the question my wife asks me is, ‘Is it worth taking our kids away from their grandparents? Is it worth whatever your dad’s got left? Would being a head coach for four years be worth missing out on this?’ No, I’m going to treasure the hell out of what we’re doing.”
From one generation to the next, it is certainly unique to this year’s Final Four.
