Racer head coach gets it done – His way

6
www.racerinsider.com
RACER INSIDER
Billy
Kennedy
March 16, 2010
Photos By SUSAN MULLANE/cameraworkusa.com
Racer head coach gets it done – His way
By Will Aubrey
Racer Insider Senior Writer
Respect and faith – that's Billy Kennedy's coaching philosophy in a nutshell.
Respect for the game, for his players, and for the coaches
who have gone before him...
“I have a great deal of respect for the old coaches and the
way they handled themselves,” Kennedy said. “Hank Iba, John
Wooden, Pete Newell, and Dean Smith got it right. You prepare
your team in practice and the games are like exams.
“We practice to play and we let the players play the games.
You shouldn't have to make a lot of adjustments during games
if you do your job in practice. If you have good kids and they're
playing hard for you there may still be times when you have to
get on them. But if you have to do that very often then you aren't
going to be very good.
“You can't get too high or too low either. You have to stay on
an even keel. It's all about balance; balance in your life, balance
on the court, and balance off the court.”
And underlying all of that is faith.
“Faith is very important to me,” he continued. “I feel like
coaching is a ministry for me. I'm here to train and develop
young men. We talk about training them physically, mentally,
and spiritually.”
Kennedy grew up in Metairie,La., a suburb of New Orleans.
“I went to Holy Cross High School to play football,” he recalled. “That was my favorite sport at the time. I became interested in basketball because Holy Cross was a powerhouse.
Don Maestri was the basketball coach there and he's the head
coach at Troy State now.
“They had packed gyms
and they played for state
championships. I just fell in
love with it and jumped on the
wagon. I got cut my freshman
year but I asked coach Maestri
if I could be the manager. He
gave me the opportunity to do
that and then I made the team
as a sophomore and started for
the next three years.”
Kennedy Kennedy earned all-dis-
“It's all about
balance;
balance in your
life, balance on
the court, and
balance off the
court.”
trict honors but by his own admission he wasn't a great player.
“I was basically just a defensive player,” he said. “I could
shoot a little bit, but I just played hard all the time. Coach Maestri left before I graduated and I ended up playing for Kevin
Trower who took me under his wing and nurtured me. He married my mom so he's my stepdad now.
“Coach Maestri had a big influence on my career. He's been
the head coach at Troy State for 28 years. We're from the same
neighborhood and we've remained close over the years. His passion and his love for basketball are what I admire the most. And
he cared about people.
“My stepfather was the same way. And he was a great teacher of the game. I learned a lot of X's and O's from him. He's a
brilliant man. He's written Latin books, he's an attorney, and a
high school coaching legend. He's in the Hall of Fame in the
state of Louisiana. What we do today is based more on my high
school experience than my college experience.”
After high school, Kennedy went to Southeast Louisiana as a
preferred walk-on. He didn't get to play much so he transferred
to Delgado Community College. After one year, a broken nose,
and a broken wrist he decided to give up playing and focus on
March 16, 2010
getting his degree. So he transferred back to Southeast.
“While I was working on my degree I started coaching AAU
and I refereed some,” he recalled. “I wanted to be like my stepfather because he had an interest in me and he was close with his
players. I wanted to influence people the way he influenced me.
So I decided to get into coaching.
“I coached some really good AAU players – Robert Pack
who played in the NBA, Jaren Jackson who played in the NBA,
Tim Singleton who played at Notre Dame, and Randy Livingston who played at LSU. And I made connections in the college
game because college coaches recruited my players.”
The staff at Southeast wanted Kennedy to help them get
AAU players so they hired him as a student assistant.
“One of the regular assistants got in a car wreck and he
couldn't work so I kind of took over his position,” Kennedy said.
“So I was working as an assistant coach and scouting teams
when I was just 22 years old.”
From there, Kennedy went to work for Benny Dees at the
University of New Orleans. The Privateers made it to the NCAA
tournament where they defeated Brigham Young. Dees left to
become the head coach at Wyoming and Kennedy went with
him.
“Coach Dees was a great recruiter and a great defensive
coach,” Kennedy noted. “He was probably the best recruiter that
I've been around and he took good care of me. He was just great
with people. He taught me how to recruit and how important
recruiting was.”
After a year at Wyoming coaching future NBA players Eric
Leckner and Fennis Dembo, Kennedy took a job as an assistant
at Northwestern State in Natchitoches, La.
“It was my first full time job and I made $8,000 a year,” he
recalled. “It was a tough life. I was married and I had a little
boy. I rode a bicycle to work every day because we only had one
car. From there I went to Tulane as the third assistant making
$15,000 a year so I almost doubled my pay. My strength was
recruiting. That's what people hired me for.
“Then I went to Texas A & M with Kermit Davis and doubled my salary again so I finally had a real job. I was there a year
and then I went to Creighton for two years.”
In 1993 Todd Bozeman, who had been on the staff at Tulane,
got the head job at California. One of his first moves was to hire
Kennedy as his top assistant.
RACER INSIDER
“Earlier I mentioned the importance
of balance. This team is balanced in every way.”
Kennedy
“That was a breakthrough job for me,” Kennedy noted. “I
was associate head coach at an early age and we had the number
one recruiting class in the country. We were in the top-10 for
three years in a row so we had some really good teams.
“After Bozeman resigned I was the interim head coach.
Coach Newell and a number of people wanted me to get the job
but it didn't work out. And knowing what I know now, I wasn't
ready to be the head coach at Cal at 31 years old.”
California hired Ben Braun away from Eastern Michigan to
replace Bozeman and Kennedy worked under him for another
year. Then he left to take the head coaching job at Centenary
even though it meant taking a 50 percent pay cut.
“Coach Braun wasn't comfortable with me being at Cal because a lot of people had wanted me to get the head job instead
of him,” Kennedy explained. “And then I was trying to move
my family back toward Louisiana. It was head coaching experience and it was really good for me.
“At the time Centenary was the smallest Division I school in
the country and they only won six games the year before I got
there. I was 31 and Billy Donovan and I were the youngest head
coaches in the nation.
“We turned the program around really quick and we beat
www.racerinsider.com
7
Southeast Louisiana. Then when that job came open they contacted me about coming back to my alma mater.”
Kennedy took Centenary from six wins to 14 wins in just two
seasons. And he rebuilt a moribund Southeast Louisiana, leading them to consecutive Southland Conference championships
and a trip to the NCAA tournament in 2005. He was the National
Association of Basketball Coaches District 8 Coach of the Year
in 2004 and 2005.
But after six years in Hammond, La. he left to take an assistant's job at the University of Miami (Fla.).
“It was a good move for me financially,” he noted. “I felt like
I had done all I could at Southeast and I felt like God wanted me
to get uncomfortable again. Jumping to the ACC and working
for a good friend in Frank Haith was very attractive to me.”
After a single season in south Florida, Kennedy got the call
that brought him to Murray.
“I wasn't looking for a job but I got a call from Darren
Boatright (MSU's former assistant athletic director) while I was
on the road recruiting in Baton Rouge,” Kennedy recalled. “I
knew Darren and he asked me if I would be interested in this
job. I wasn't very familiar with Murray State other than I knew
they had always been good. When he explained how committed
the people here are to winning championships that impressed
me. That's what attracted me.
“I didn't know what I was walking into though. I didn't know
I was going to have to build a team from scratch. I did that at
Centenary and Southeast Louisiana and I didn't want to have to
do that again. I knew it was a great school with great tradition,
and great support. And I looked at the roster and it looked like a
good team coming back. I didn't know about the problems and
that was my fault. But I think God was protecting me from seeing that because if I had known everything I wouldn't have taken
the job.”
Kennedy had to scramble just a field a team in his first season. Only four players returned from the previous year. And of
those four, one had a broken foot, two had played limited minutes, and the other had redshirted.
Even so, Kennedy held it together and led the Racers to a
16-14 record and second place finish in the Ohio Valley Conference. He followed that with two more second place finishes as
he went about recruiting the kind of players he needed to run his
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