Louisville’s head coach, Pat Kelsey, had the ideal answer to Terrence Edwards Jr. welcoming his son

The Louisville Cardinals have become college basketball’s most unexpected team this season. However, head coach Pat Kelsey will tell you that this achievement was anticipated of his team. Kelsey, in just his first year as head coach, has completely transformed the program’s complexity.

As the season comes to a close, Louisville is comfortably in third place in the ACC and on the verge of earning a tournament bid for the first time in several years. What makes this even more astounding is that Kelsey is doing all of this with 12 guys who were not part of the Cardinal program just over a year before. They all now bleed Cardinal red.

Louisville took on Notre Dame on Sunday night in South Bend. The Cardinals triumphed by multiple digits, as they regularly do in conference play.This was the Cardinals’ 20th win of the season, a milestone they had not achieved since the 2019-2020 season.

The team’s most poignant tale is the birth of Terrence Edwards Jr.’s kid on Saturday. The birth of a child is always a joy, and Edwards’ ability to play the next day is simply remarkable. Following the game, Kelsey responded perfectly to what it meant for Edwards’ kid to be born.

“The men were quite excited to meet him…it was the best day of his life yesterday…Kelsey informed the media that Terrence Edwards III, or Tre, had received a scholarship offer for the class of 2048.

Kelsey responded well during a very touching period in Edwards’ life. Sports not only bring people together, but they also form lasting families, and baby Tre will be the first to earn a scholarship.

Edwards now looks forward to both parenthood and guiding the Cardinals to new heights, achieving feats they haven’t seen in years.

Hunter Cookston

Hunter Cookston started his career as a reporter for the Marion Tribune, covering local high school football, basketball, and baseball. His interest in athletics began at the age of four, when he played his first year of teeball. Growing up in Tennessee, he had strong feelings for the Tennessee Volunteers and the Atlanta Braves. Hunter is presently enrolled at Tennessee Wesleyan University, where he is pursuing a BA in Sports Communications/Management.

Pat Kelsey and Louisville land a 6-foot-11 German superstar

Things are going well for Louisville in the first year under new coach Pat Kelsey. There are 18 games left in the season for the Cardinals, and they are 11-2 in the ACC. They are third in the conference, behind Duke and Clemson.

Louisville is in great shape as they have won 12 of their last 13 games. Now, Louisville’s men’s basketball team has a key player for the future.

A story from Jeff Goodman says that German power forward Sananda Fru has accepted an offer from Louisville.

Fru is a power forward who is 21 years old and 60 feet 11 inches tall. He has played in Germany with Lowen Braunschweig. Fru averages 12 points, 5 rebounds, and 1.3 blocks per game this season and shoots 75% from the field, so Louisville got a great player when they signed him.

Fru showed off his skills a lot in Germany. Now he’s going to the US to play for the Louisville Cardinals, which should be an interesting situation to keep an eye on.

Louisville’s men’s basketball team already has a letter of intent from five-star Mikel Brown Jr. for the 2025 recruiting class.

The downside of Fru’s pledge is that he will be 22 years old when the 2025–26 season starts, but it will give him a great chance to grow with an ACC team that is on the rise again.

How Pat Kelsey Resurrected Louisville Hoops and His Passion Along the Way

After the untimely death of his mentor, Skip Prosser, the Cardinals coach nearly left the game. But in the years afterward, he’s discovered newfound thankfulness in a community that cherishes it.

Pat Kelsey dashed onto the floor at the KFC Yum! Center, grabbing a whistle from a management without pausing to begin a lively one-hour walkthrough for his Louisville Cards. That night’s opponent was the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. There wasn’t time to squander.

It was 10:05 a.m. Kelsey had spent a couple of days stewing over his zone strategy, knowing Louisville would face Steve Forbes’ confused and hostile 1-3-1 defense. By Sunday night, Kelsey and his team had discarded their strategy and started anew, using a different tactic for this game.

Kelsey gave his team a crash education in the new strategy Monday, including a lengthy film session. But there was still a lot to do on Tuesday morning, with tip-off less than nine hours away. With his practice plan tucked into the front of his gray sweatpants, Kelsey, 49, sprung into action as the starters lined up against the scout team’s 1-3-1 formation.

“James,” Kelsey addressed huge guy James Scott. “You are screening like a mofo.”

The 5′ 9″ (at best) Kelsey inserted himself for the 6′ 11″ Scott and went about his screening like a mofo—hitting the man at the top of the zone, hitting the wing, hitting the other wing—with ludicrous energy. If this were a pickup game at the Y, Kelsey would be the obnoxious opponent, acting like a Final Four berth was on the line.

The screen-like-a-mofo’s purpose was to open up passing and driving lanes for point guard Chucky Hepburn, shooting windows for perimeter marksmen Reyne Smith and Terrence Edwards Jr., and the odd backside lob for wing J’Vonne Hadley. The starting five rapidly assimilated the new plan and divided the scout team.

Kelsey then interrupted the X’s and O’s session for a high-energy, high-volume shooting battle, with music blasting around the arena and everyone roaring support. (Smith, second in the nation in made three-pointers with 91, swished so many consecutive wing threes that he began attempting to bank them in for an added level of difficulty.) After a silent foul-shooting session and a defensive segment focusing on Wake’s leading scorer, Hunter Sallis, peripatetic Pat summoned the team at 11:05 a.m. To conclude practice.

Kelsey, anticipating a tough battle similar to the Duke Blue Devils’ slog against the Demon Deacons three days prior, rang out the chant: “Rock fight on three!””

“One, two, three: rock combat!”

Before the players dispersed, Kelsey softly suggested they stop by the tiny group in the front row watching the walkthrough. He wanted them to show their respects to the ACC Network broadcasters who will call the game that night.

“Jim Boeheim’s over there, for God’s sake,” Kelsey said, both to himself and to others.

The thought that a man with over 1,000 Division I victories, five Final Four appearances, and a national championship would come see a Kelsey practice struck a chord with the Cardinals’ coach. After a lengthy career in Division I—nine years at Winthrop and three at Charleston—having Boeheim in the gym was just one of many welcome-to-the-big-time events since coming at Louisville in March.

“In 13 seasons, I’ve played two possessions of zone,” Kelsey told Boeheim, the godfather of zone defense. “We gave up baskets on both of them.”

Putting modesty aside, Kelsey is attempting to achieve something in his Louisville debut season that Boeheim has only done once in ten seasons of Atlantic Coast Conference membership with the Syracuse Orange: finish in the top two in the league. The Cardinals are now 10-2, behind the Clemson Tigers by half a game and Duke by a game. That included a comprehensive defeat against Wake Forest that January night at the Yum! Center, when Louisville led by as many as 29 points before winning by 13. The retooled zone attack ripped through Wake’s 1-3-1, to the thunderous delight of a revitalized home crowd.

With an overall record of 18-6, the Cardinals are very certain to make the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2019. Louisville is the nation’s most improved power program after finishing last in the ACC for the past two seasons.

Although Kelsey has shown to be the finest candidate for this position, he was not the first option. Athletic director Josh Heird notes that Kelsey was the first candidate he met with, although significant overtures were made to Scott Drew of the Baylor Bears, Dusty May of the Florida Atlantic Owls, and Josh Schertz of the Indiana State Sycamores.

Drew was always a longshot. May considered Louisville before choosing the Michigan Wolverines. Schertz may have received the position if Indiana State had not lost the Missouri Valley Conference tournament final and been controversially excluded from the NCAA tournament. Kelsey advanced Charleston to the Big Dance by winning the Coastal Athletic Association tournament for the second year in a succession, and then waited for Heird’s quest to be completed.

It took several nervous days to settle on Kelsey. Once there, it didn’t take long to reach an agreement.

“First chat I had with him, he stated, ‘I would crawl to this job,'” Heird said. ”

Kelsey arrived to find an accomplished program but a demanding challenge. Louisville has won three national titles, one of which was annulled due to NCAA sanctions, and the program has been beset by controversy and turmoil for nearly a decade. To get the Cardinals back in the air, the structure had to be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up.

Kelsey oversaw a total roster and staff revamp, but he did bring some continuity with him—three players and no less than ten staff members joined his move from Charleston. This was a huge step forward for all of them, but Kelsey knew they were prepared.

“I’m not saying I’m different, but not a lot of people go from mid-major to Power 5 and they take everybody,” according to him. “I took everybody, including my strength coach, our trainer, the operations guy, and so on. So they recognize me. They live, sleep, breathe, believe in what we do, our culture, and the energy we have, and they spread the word.”

The first message, which a proud but dejected and divided fan base desired to hear, was that work, good energy, and respect for the program would serve as the basis for the reconstruction. Pretty basic things, yet those fundamentals were lost over Kenny Payne’s two astonishingly awful seasons. Fans used to coaching and motivational greatness from Denny Crum and Rick Pitino witnessed Payne struggle on the bench as his team coasted through the motions, lacking of emotion. The two-year record was an unbelievable 12-52.

That everything changed immediately. Louisville added one high-profile transfer (Hepburn from the Wisconsin Badgers), three key players from power-conference programs (Hadley from the Colorado Buffaloes, Noah Waterman from the BYU Cougars, and Koren Johnson from the Washington Huskies), and a few players from mid-major teams.

The different components have melded together astonishingly effectively and quickly—November triumphs against the Indiana Hoosiers and West Virginia Mountaineers in the Bahamas overcame a crushing defeat to the Tennessee Volunteers. The Cardinals’ 40-minute effort in a road defeat to archrival Kentucky Wildcats marked a return to competitiveness. When it was followed by a 10-game winning run, seven of which were double-digit ACC victory, it was time to focus on making it back to the NCAA tournament.

“It’s so difficult to knock it out of the park with a star and then knock it out of the park in the portal,” ESPN analyst Jimmy Dykes explained. “He’s done that.”

This turnaround has been accomplished amid a veritable injury plague. Impact players Kasean Pryor and Johnson were lost for the season in November, Waterman missed four games and was limited in others due to a broken thumb, and Louisville’s most athletic player, Wing Aboubacar Traore, missed ten games. Heading into a Wednesday road game against the North Carolina State Wolfpack, Scott (mouth injury) and, most importantly, Hepburn (groin) are question marks.

Louisville has continued to win despite attrition and lineup changes. This is especially crucial for supporters who had grown tired of seeing the Cardinals fail at the first hint of adversity.

“Going through those two years [under Payne], it just wasn’t fun,” he recalls. “None of it. And then being able to see it now and experience it, this is exciting. This is fun.”

It needed a firestarter, a follower of a coach who died too young, a former player who refused to acknowledge he was too little, and Pat Kelsey.

“Who’s your starting point guard? I’m going to kick his ass.”

Kelsey’s statement to the Wyoming Cowboys coaching staff when he arrived in Laramie, Wyo., in 1993 as a pugnacious freshman pipsqueak from Cincinnati. Joby Wright, the first-year head coach, came from Miami (Ohio), where he had been recruiting Kelsey out of Elder High School. When Wright and his staff moved West, Kelsey did as well.

Backing up his boast, Kelsey started 22 of 28 games as a freshman on a 14-14 Wyoming squad. (“We stunk, which is probably why I started,” he recalls.) He scored 2.3 points per game and hit only 26.4% of his shots, although he did contribute 3.3 assists.

After one year in Wyoming, Kelsey returned home and walked on with the Xavier Musketeers to play for the new head coach, Skip Prosser, who had previously served as an assistant under Pete Gillen.

Kelsey’s playing time and output dropped at Xavier, but he carved out a place for himself on two NCAA tournament teams, where he was the top scout teamer, bench-mob man, and chemistry builder.

“For whatever reason, my shot just kind of got away from me as I got late in high school,” Kelsey tells me. “I did a lot of other things really well. Some people would say I couldn’t score in an empty gym, but I just tried to be a bulldog on defense, tried to be a catalyst off the bench and bring our team energy, fight anybody who wanted to fight, and just set the tone every day in practice.”

Kesey found his calling while sitting on the Xavier bench soaking up Prosserisms. He became an assistant at his high school, then joined his mentor’s staff at Wake Forest in 2004. He was literally and figuratively by Prosser’s side for the next four seasons, until a sudden and terrible summer day in 2007.

On July 26, Prosser went for a jog, returned to his office, lied down on his couch, and died of a heart attack at the age of 56. When Prosser was discovered, panic ensued—911 was called, paramedics responded and attempted to revive him. Kelsey, trying to help in any way he could, moved their ambulance directly in front of the Wake Forest basketball offices, just in case they needed to rush Skip to the hospital.

It was too late; Prosser was gone, but he was never forgotten—not in the coaching industry, and definitely not by Kelsey, who cites or alludes to him nearly every hour.

“Skip was a Renaissance man,” Kelsey says. “He was so interesting. He could talk about hip hop and rap, high-level politics, Irish literature writers … his vocabulary was off the charts. Some of my favorite times working for him were the times we went driving together recruiting and we would talk about everything but basketball.”

“He was a doting father. He loved his sons, he loved to read. He was a terrific basketball coach and probably his greatest attribute was he was a teacher—he was a phenomenal teacher. And unfortunately we lost him 17 years ago.”

Many Prosser staff members have gone on to become collegiate head coaches, including Chris Mack, Dino Gaudio, Mark Schmidt, Justin Gray, and A.W. Hamilton, but Kelsey is the most ardent supporter of his legacy.

“Of all Skip’s assistants,” says ESPN commentator Fran Fraschilla, “he is the closest to Skip.”

Kelsey pushed down his grief over Prosser’s death for years, immersing himself in his job while still at Wake, working under Gaudio, and then returning to Xavier as Mack’s assistant, but intensity doesn’t always promote healing. Finally, in 2011, it all boiled over in a debilitating way, and he nearly quit the profession.

In May 2011, Kelsey stated, “Four years ago, I witnessed firsthand Coach Prosser’s death in the basketball office at Wake Forest. That day, my perspective on the profession and life was forever altered. My role as a father and husband is everything to me, and the rigors of this business can make that challenging. My family and my health come first. I have allowed time to pass following the season to be sure of my decision. I am currently evaluating opportunities.

Kelsey returned to Winthrop, a high-level program in a low-level league, after sitting out the 2011-12 season and receiving counseling. The Eagles had slipped after a long run of dominance under Gregg Marshall, but Kelsey revived those ways, winning eight straight seasons and three Big South tournament titles.

Kelsey nearly left for Massachusetts in 2017, bailing out less than an hour before his introductory news conference and staying at Winthrop. As the years passed, he appeared increasingly overqualified for the job. When he finally left for Charleston, his successor at Winthrop was Skip’s son, Mark Prosser. It was a touching passing of the torch.

“After Skip passed, he took a little bit of a sabbatical,” says Nancy Prosser, Skip’s widow. “I think he’s still affected by what happened to Skip. There’s not a better human being than Pat Kelsey.”

After the post-walkthrough bull session with Boeheim and the ACC Network team, Kelsey stood on the Yum! Center court, surrounded by 20,000 empty seats. He was questioned if the fan base was ready for what he could achieve, and if he was ready for the position.

Kelsey turned slightly to the right, looking away, his voice softening and his eyes watering.

“It’s been a long road,” he says. “I started in Division I coaching 22 years ago. Your route leads you where it will take you. At the end of the day, there’s really no better scenario for me in the whole country. Basketball truly, really matters here.

“Skip used to say, never delay gratitude. I’m just blessed. I realize how lucky I am to be standing on that sideline that Denny Crum and Rick Pitino stood on. You know what I mean? It’s crazy. This is a town that takes so much pride in Louisville basketball, and I just think the city was hungry. They were kind of ready and the stars aligned. It all kind of came together at the right time.”

Pat Forde

Forde, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, has won 28 Associated Press Sports Editors writing contests and has been published three times in the Best American Sports Writing book series. He also co-hosts the College Football Enquirer podcast and is a football analyst on the Big Ten Network. Forde has previously worked for Yahoo Sports, ESPN, and The Courier-Journal in Louisville.