by HOUSTON – University of Houston Men’s Basketball Head Coach Kelvin Sampson (Lumbee Tribe) was named one of four finalists for the Werner Ladder Naismith Coach of the Year Award on Wednesday.
This is the fourth National Coach of the Year honor for which the fifth-year Houston coach has been named a finalist.
For his team’s impressive performance in 2018-19, he was previously recognized as a finalist for the Henry Iba Award, the Jim Phelan Award and the Ben Jobe Award earlier this season.
Sampson has twice been honored as National Coach of the Year. He first collected the honor from the Associated Press in 1995 following his first season at Oklahoma and earned the accolade from the National Association of Basketball Coaches in 2002 after leading the Sooners to the NCAA Final Four
Rick Barnes (Tennessee), Chris Beard (Texas Tech) and Tony Bennett (Virginia) joined Sampson as finalists for the Naismith Coach of the Year Award.
Fans can support Sampson by visiting naismithtrophy.com/vote between March 22 and April 3 to cast their ballots. Fan vote will account for five percent of the overall final vote.
Fans also may cast a vote on Twitter by visiting the @MarchMadness Twitter page on March 23.
The Werner Ladder Naismith Trophy for Coach of the Year will be awarded at the Naismith Awards Brunch presented by Mortensen during the NCAA Final Four in Minneapolis.
ABOUT KELVIN SAMPSON
In 2018-19, Sampson has led the Cougars to a 31-3 record, the program’s first outright regular-season conference championship since 1984, Top-10 rankings in both national polls and a No. 3 seed in this week’s NCAA Tournament.
His Houston team won its first 15 games to open the season for the program’s third-longest winning streak in school history and followed that with a 12-game streak after enduring its first loss at Temple in early January.
After winning 19 straight games in H&PE Arena as their home arena underwent a $60-million renovation, Sampson’s Cougars won their first 14 home games in the Fertitta Center and owned the nation’s longest home winning streak at 33 games until late February.
With the Cougars’ win at SMU in mid-January, Sampson became only the 52nd coach in NCAA history to reach 600 victories in his career. That win also gave him 100 in his Houston career and made him the fastest coach in UH history to reach that total.
In 2019, he was named the American Athletic Conference Coach of the Year for the second straight season, becoming only the second coach in program history to win accomplish that feat and the first since Hall of Fame Coach Guy V. Lewis did so in 1983-84 in the Southwest Conference.
