UMass to name Kellogg men's basketball coach
The homecoming will be spectacular and nostalgic. Don't be surprised if John Calipari is there. Don't be surprised if Bruiser Flint is there. They are the coaches who recruited and nurtured Derek Kellogg at the University of Massachusetts, where he arrived as the hotshot from Springfield 17 years ago.
For UMass and Kellogg, the circle is complete, and he will have a job that he has coveted for several years. The official announcement that he has been hired as coach will come today at 6 p.m., and for an added bit of history, the press conference will be at Curry Hicks Cage, where Kellogg began his career as a point guard at UMass before the team moved to the Mullins Center.
A week after Travis Ford bolted Amherst for richer fields at Oklahoma State, UMass, seeking to establish itself as a power in New England if not nationally, is going back to one of its own.
"It's about time," said Flint, who coached Kellogg at UMass after Calipari departed for the NBA and is now running things at Drexel. "Maybe they'll get the crowds back."
For Kellogg, 34, the return to Amherst ends an eight-year apprenticeship at Memphis, where he sat next to Calipari as the Tigers got better and better, progress that culminated with this year's run to the NCAA championship game, an overtime loss to Kansas.
Kellogg's return was not a slam dunk, but in the eyes of many, it was a layup. UMass athletic director John McCutcheon conducted a weeklong search, and Kellogg went quickly to the top of the list. Although he did not have the head coaching experience McCutcheon said he preferred, he had the UMass pedigree - a connection to the past.
The Minutemen made a Final Four appearance in 1996, Calipari's final year. Although that season was tarnished by NCAA violations that led to an official vacating of the Minutemen's Final Four spot, the excitement at the Mullins Center lingered.
The crowds - and the victories that drew them - eroded over the past several years during the coaching tenures of Flint, Steve Lappas, and Ford.
The Minutemen faithful received a jolt when Ford, whose fast-paced style produced a 25-11 record and an appearance in the NIT final this past season, took off for Oklahoma State a few days after turning down Providence.
After meeting with Kellogg last Friday in Pittsburgh and bringing him back to Amherst Monday, McCutcheon finalized the deal.
"It was about 90 percent done on Monday," said a source familiar with the negotiations, "but they just had to wait on the thing with McKillop to get it done."
The "thing with McKillop" was a last-minute call to Davidson coach Bobby McKillop yesterday morning to see if he could be enticed to say yes to UMass after saying no to Stanford, Rice, and Providence in the past few weeks. McKillop turned it down.
For Kellogg, the point guard on four Atlantic 10 regular-season and tournament champions, the point man for the steady flow of talent into Memphis the past eight years, the kid who came down I-91 in Springfield, the homecoming becomes official today.
Mark Blaudschun can be reached at blaudschun@globe.com
