By Wayne Martin
Andy Kennedy‘s office at UAB has not yet caught up with him.
The first-year Blazers’ head coach is going strong as he sends his team against Rice this weekend with a 10-2 record and 3-1 atop Conference USA’s West Division.
But his office in Bartow Arena is a bit stark, like the apartment of newlyweds whose furniture has been delivered, but they’ve not yet hung pictures or installed nooks for mementos and personal treasures.
What that does for Kennedy is leave plenty of room, and as the years go by he expects the walls to be hung with photos of nets being cut down and shelves added to accommodate championship trophies of the Blazers that are now his.
“I don’t want to win a championship just this year,” he said when he was named as the seventh head coach in program history, “I want to win championships every year.”
This Friday and Saturday Rice University comes to town. There’s a 6:30 game on Friday and a 4 p.m. game on Saturday as UAB tries to hold off challengers in a race where five of the seven teams have league records of .500 or better.
To add a little extra to this weekend’s action is the designation of Saturday’s game as the annual Bartow Classic, benefitting the Coach Gene Bartow Fund for Cancer Research.
The Bartow Classic each year honors the first UAB coach, and the man who once occupied the office where Kennedy now works. Bartow was UAB’s first coach and Athletic Director, starting the program on Southside in 1977 and building it quickly to a championship level program.
“I remember Coach Bartow made UAB Birmingham’s team,” Kennedy said. “He won championships here, and Birmingham was proud of UAB. I want to bring it back to where it was then.”
UAB attracted outstanding athletes from the start, and one of those was Kennedy. “Kids today at UAB may know who Coach Bartow was,” Kennedy said, “but they can’t really understand the impact he had on this university and this city. I know. When I came here you would drive down University Blvd. and you wouldn’t see much that looked like a university. It was a commuter school.
“Now you drive across campus and you see a vibrant, energetic, bustling college community on a growing and beautiful campus. And much of the credit for that goes to the energy, the vision and the determination of Coach Bartow.”
Kennedy was Mr. Basketball in Mississippi his senior year in high school, and many of the country’s top coaches came knocking at his door. UAB was in the group wanting Kennedy, but dropped out of the race and canceled their home visit.
“I had Larry Brown (Kansas), Dale Brown (LSU), Wimp (Sanderson, Alabama), and a bunch of others, including Jim Valvano (NC State).” Kennedy said. “UAB saw the way things were going, didn’t want to waste their time, and canceled their visit.”
So Kennedy carried his 6-7 frame, his gaudy high school statistics, his honors and his clippings off to North Carolina State. He played in 25 games, but didn’t start one. Kennedy was unhappy and needed a change.
“I was a spoiled kid who knew it all,” Kennedy said. “I was the Mississippi Player of the Year, and another guy was starting in front of me. Of course, he went on to play 12 years in the NBA.”
In addition, Andy’s grandfather was in poor health back in Mississippi, and his parents never got to see him play at NC State.
So in 1987 Kennedy made the move to UAB, sat out a year, and played three seasons with the Blazers with his parents watching every home game.
In between the playing years at UAB and his introduction last year as the new Blazers’ coach, Kennedy played three years of pro basketball, then worked as an assistant coach beginning at South Alabama, then at UAB under Murry Bartow, Gene’s son, and at Cincinnati.
“I feel I have had the opportunity to work with some outstanding coaches, and I think I have taken a little bit away from each one that is positive and makes me a better coach, Kennedy said.
“Coach Valvano and Coach Bartow were polar opposites in just about everything, and Bob Huggins at Cincinnati was Bob Huggins. But one thing they had in common was that they were builders of programs. Coach Valvano rebuilt a program at NC State, Coach Huggins has resurrected programs wherever he went, and Coach Bartow built UAB from the ground up.”
Kennedy said his coaching education started as a player. “I was learning from Coach Bartow as a player, but playing was the first thing on my mind. After I started working as an assistant, I learned more and more and the relationships were different than when I was playing.”
Kennedy said coaches and players see “eye-to-eye” about a third of the time. “But as a coach you’re helping to develop ways to beat the next guy you play,” he said. “I respected him as a coach and as a person, but when I became Murry’s assistant, Coach (Gene) Bartow wasn’t just someone I respected, he was a friend.”
Kennedy is working through changes in coaching. “Back then you had the box score, and that’s it. Coach Bartow was a shooter’s coach, and if you had a bad night, he told you about it.
“Now it’s all analytics and numbers. It’s completely different.” And moving into the job in a year of pandemic has made it even more different. There’s testing for COVID several times a week, and contact with players in practice and meetings is strictly regulated.
Kennedy stays in touch with many of the players who were with him at UAB. “My first season we went to the NIT Final Four, and the next year we went to the NCAA,” he said.
“We had some good players and I stay in touch with many of them. But some of them have passed; Alan Ogg, Larry Rembert, Michael Charles.” Jack Kramer, who played with Kennedy three years at UAB, became a fan of Ole Miss when Kennedy was coaching the Rebels and when Missouri joined the SEC.
“They live in Missouri now,” Kennedy said. “Jack’s daughter went to Missouri, and his oldest son is going to Ole Miss to play baseball. His youngest son is the basketball player, and he may have some people looking at him.”
Kennedy has two full time jobs. The first is coaching. The second is selling. “This has been a crazy year,” he said. “I need to be – I want to be – out selling UAB’s program. I want to be a program builder like Gene Bartow was when he came to Birmingham.
“But I can’t even invite people to our games. I can’t go talk to a group or interact with the students. I can’t even meet with my players except at times that at scheduled and monitored. I want a team that will compete for a championship every year, and a team that will win its share of championships. And I hope this crazy world soon returns to normal so we can play and Bartow Arena can be full again.”
There will be smaller crowds on Friday and Saturday because of social distancing measures. Kennedy’s vision is for better times next year. But that vision is not just for the coming year.
“I never regretted it (making the move as a player),” he said. “Birmingham is the most underrated city in the South, and one of the most underrated in the country. We maintained a home here when I was at Ole Miss, we have a daughter who graduated from Samford. My 12 years at Ole Miss ended in March, and in May we came to Birmingham. This is the destination job for us.”
“This is home,” Kennedy said. “This is where we came back to.”
