Single Post

WACO, Texas — Someone is here to see Scott Drew, and that means the Baylor coach is about to issue a Ping-Pong challenge. The table is one of two in the Bears’ $212.6 million arena and practice facility — the other is outside the locker room — and a match is often the best way to get Drew in one spot for a few minutes. (Watch out for the nasty spin on his serve.)

The path to the Ping-Pong table passes through an entryway where the 2021 national championship trophy is on display; Drew insists everyone who walks through those doors takes a picture with the trophy. The tables are one of Drew’s many specially requested touches inside the complex, which opened this year right on the Brazos River and just down the street from a revitalized part of Waco.

Just outside of town, 20 minutes from his program’s sparkling new digs, Drew’s dream house is under construction. The size of the place makes Drew a little uncomfortable, but he’s excited about the basketball court inside, with a floor installed by the same company that worked on Baylor’s new Foster Pavilion: “That’ll be cool for recruiting.” For now, the Drews still live in a much more modest brick home down the street, purchased when he was hired in 2003. Back then, he picked it out by asking which of the school’s coaches were winning and which neighborhood they lived in.

These days, Drew is the answer to that question. He is a rock star in the city, as synonymous with Waco as “Fixer Upper.”

“He’s become part of the brand,” athletic director Mack Rhoades says.

“Life would not make sense” if Drew were not the head coach at Baylor, says assistant director of basketball operations Matt Rogers, who was a manager for Drew in his first four years at the school, back when Baylor was the worst job in high-major hoops. When Drew was introduced in 2003, he surprisingly proclaimed he came to win a national championship.

“You’re a little bold on that statement,” his father told him at the time.

“That’s what I believe,” Drew said.

Somehow, he made it happen. Now he has one of the best arenas in college basketball and has the only program in the country to be a top-three seed in four straight NCAA Tournaments and is the only coach with a top-20 pick in four straight NBA Drafts. On Monday, Drew will unveil his newest team — led by expected one-and-done V.J. Edgecombe and two star transfer portal pickups — against No. 6 Gonzaga. It’s the marquee matchup of college basketball’s opening night.

All of this is pinch-me, miracle type stuff.

This March, the job got even better when Louisville tried to hire Drew and Baylor responded by giving him an extension, allocating more money for his assistants and promising more NIL dollars for his roster.

With Drew and his staff set to move into their new facility that summer and his dream house close to completion, his utopia was set. Then came a plot twist: The one job Drew always knew he would have to consider came open, and he was Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart’s first call.

---

On the eve of this April’s national championship game, Rhoades was watching ESPN and saw on the bottom ticker that John Calipari and Arkansas were in discussions for Calipari to be its next coach. A relaxing night suddenly became much less relaxing.

“Here we go,” Rhoades remembers thinking. “Because I knew. Scott and I have a relationship that we’ve talked about, hey, if there was a job out there, this would be the job. That’s one we had talked about in the past, so I knew.”

Drew and Barnhart became close during the 2021 NCAA Tournament when Barnhart was the tourney chair and Drew’s team went on a run to the title inside the bubble. They bonded over their faith — “Spiritually, we’re aligned,” Drew says — and Drew picked Barnhart’s brain about what it was like to win a national championship.

“He’s as respected an AD as any in the profession,” Drew says. “Doesn’t have many enemies. And there’s a reason why. He’s a high-character man, and I just valued his opinions and agreed with a lot of what he stated and said.”

Drew was no stranger to overtures from interested schools; coincidentally, the first one he ever considered was from Memphis in 2009 after Calipari left for Kentucky. In recent years, other teams have called — college and NBA — and his interest was minimal, but Rhoades was right. This one was different.

Drew thought back to Christmas break 1992 during his senior year at Butler, where he was a team manager. He had planned to go to law school after graduation, but he felt pulled to coaching and told his dad Homer Drew he’d like to try that instead. It just so happened Homer had a spot available on his Valparaiso staff. That Christmas, Drew was given Rick Pitino’s book “Full-Court Pressure: A Year in Kentucky Basketball,” with Pitino’s face cut out from the cover photo and Drew’s in its place.

“One of my favorite Christmas gifts,” Drew says.

The week that Kentucky called, Kelly Drew told her husband about one of her dreams as a child. Kelly, who grew up in the small town of Cape Girardeau, Mo., always wanted to live in one of three cities: Charleston, Boston or Lexington.

“Was God telling us something?” Drew asks. “The other two places don’t have high-major basketball.”

On the morning of April 10, Kentucky sent a private plane to Temple, Texas, to pick up Kelly Drew and bring her to Lexington.

There was no need for Scott to go to Lexington — he knew the job and knew he could work for Barnhart — but he wanted Kelly to get a feel for the place. There was just one problem: Kentucky fans were tracking flights to try to figure out who was going to be the Wildcats’ next coach, and they had tracked the UK plane’s path to Temple, just 40 miles south of Waco.

That morning Drew called his friend Eric Shero, a banker in town who often loans his plane to Drew for recruiting trips. Drew asked Shero where they could go to lunch and not bump into anyone who would know him. Drew had an idea: They would go to a local spot, and he would tweet out a picture that proved he was not on that plane. Shero had just the place.

Mi Casita is a mom-and-pop Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town that banks with Shero. It’s connected to a Domino’s, and you need to know where it is or you might miss the turn. Drew and Shero took the first booth on the left in the middle section and ordered tortilla soup, then Drew had the waitress take their picture. Right between Drew and Shero in the picture was a dessert menu with “Mi Casita” in plain sight. He took his phone off airplane mode to tweet it out and put his phone back in airplane mode.

Great lunch spot in Waco on a rainy day. No better friend and supporter than Eric Shero and Alliance Bank!💯 pic.twitter.com/OP2OfYNhnZ

— Scott Drew (@BUDREW) April 10, 2024

Soon after Drew hit Post, the phone rang at Mi Casita, and the caller asked if Scott Drew was there. Owner Teresa Salazar didn’t know who Drew was; the caller offered that one guy at his table would be wearing white and the other wearing black. Salazar handed a cordless phone to Drew, and the Kentucky fan on the line made sure Drew knew how much he was wanted at Kentucky.

Thero’s watch started buzzing. He had 160 text messages or phone calls before they left the restaurant.

“This is going to be a problem,” Thero remembers thinking. “Our bank has a Twitter account, and it was blowing up.”

Oscar Salazar, who runs the social media for his family’s restaurant, was down the street at King’s Barbershop getting his hair cut during Drew’s visit. He dropped by the restaurant afterward, and one of the employees asked if he could come in to work. “Why?” Oscar asked. “What do you need help with?”

“Check your phone.”

Oscar gets a notification every time someone leaves a review of Mi Casita on any platform; he had over 200 notifications.

“Scott Drew, Scott Drew, Scott Drew,” Oscar says. “I’m like, who is that?”

Within an hour of Drew sending out that tweet, the restaurant got over 100 calls, either Baylor fans calling to tell the staff to ask him to stay in Waco or Kentucky fans trying to get Drew to Lexington.

“Wednesday mornings are busy,” Oscar says. “But that Wednesday night, we were full house from that point to closing.”

The restaurant makes everything from scratch and doesn’t have a freezer. For the next week, they were scrambling to keep up with the uptick in business, making extra trips to the store and making extra of everything.

Drew returned home and waited for Kelly. That night, they had a decision to make.

---

In 1976, after four seasons as an assistant at LSU under Dale Brown, Homer Drew made what seemed like a strange decision, leaving to become the head coach at Bethel College, a small NAIA school in Mishawaka, Ind. In his last year at LSU, Homer spent around 200 nights in a hotel. His wife Janet used to joke that when he came home, the kids thought he was a burglar.

“It gave time for me to be a father as well as a coach,” Homer says of the move. “As I look back, it was a wonderful decision that God helped me make.”

The three Drew children saw Goodman Auditorium, where Bethel played, as their playground.

“Football, basketball, baseball, whatever you want to do, we had our own gym,” Drew says. “And I didn’t understand that at the time, but looking back on it, that’s a grown man’s decision putting his family first to sacrifice his career, per se. Because if it was about his career, he would have stayed at LSU and been a head coach at a young age at a Division I program.”

Drew says his spiritual growth allowed him to see the value in making sure he weighed everyone’s opinion. He leaned on three local pastors he knew well for advice “because I felt like God called me to come to Baylor, and when he calls me to go somewhere else, I need to go no matter what it is.”

They told Drew that God was going to make it apparent in his heart and in his family’s heart whether to go or not: If God wanted him at Kentucky, he’d know. He thought about all of the times his father sacrificed for his family. Homer Drew had turned down Saint Louis in 1999 because he wanted to make sure Scott had the opportunity to eventually succeed him at Valpo. Drew’s greatest regret in his own career has been his work-life balance.

“You focus so much on your passion and what you love to do,” Drew says. “Sometimes you’re home, but you’re not present. And I mean, most coaches’ kids, they never get a dad that coaches them. Never get a dad that’s there at their games, practices. When I get done, that’ll be my question. Did I miss too much?”

When Kelly got back to Waco, the Drews gathered in their living room for a family meeting.

Drew had told Rhoades that he’d have a decision for him on Thursday morning. The two talked during the week, with Drew giving him updates on what was happening. Rhoades told Drew that the school had done everything it could during the Louisville process, Rhoades working with Drew’s agent Bret Just to incentivize Drew to stay. In the days before Drew’s Kentucky decision, Just called to check on Rhoades and see how he was doing, but there weren’t any negotiations.

And when Rhoades spoke to Drew, he did not try to sway him.

“The conversations that Scott and I had on Kentucky were about life,” Rhoades says. “Not about the job. Not about the resources. I knew it was real. I knew he was deeply, deeply considering it.”

On Thursday morning, Rhoades sat in a comfy chair in his office waiting for Drew to call to give him an answer. The call came in about 9 a.m.

“Probably a little later than I would have liked,” Rhoades says.

But he liked the answer.

---

When Drew got to Baylor, he approached then Kansas coach Roy Williams, who had dominated the Big Eight and Big 12 for years, and asked for his advice.

Williams said that you have to win your home games because it’s so hard to win on the road in the Big 12, harder than any other league.

“That always stuck with me,” Drew says. “The Ferrell Center was a good arena, but it didn’t give us the home court advantage you have to have if you want to compete for league titles year in and year out. I mean, anything can happen in a short window. But what’s sustainable? What do you need to sustain?”

Drew is proud of Baylor’s new arena, making sure anyone who visits gets the full tour. Inside the practice arena on the far wall are two pictures of the national title team: one of the team posing with the trophy and another of the group gathered in a prayer circle. “National Champions” is written in all caps in the middle of the wall, with “2021” and “JOY” underneath. JOY stands for “Jesus, others, yourself,” and it has become the program’s mantra under Drew.

That wall illustrates how strange it’d be if someone else took over. It was on the minds of Drew’s former players during decision week.

“I think they understood like, man, we started something here at Baylor and we want to see it through with Coach Drew,” says assistant coach Tweety Carter, who was the first McDonald’s All-American to play at Baylor. “Seeing somebody else come through here would be hard for our past guys.”

Homer Drew’s old boss Brown, who coached for 25 seasons at LSU, is famous for sending motivational emails to his former players and keeping in touch. Scott Drew has always wanted that feel at Baylor. He even created a vet week in the summer, when former players return to play with and/or mentor his current players.

“When I left Valpo to come here, I’m still in touch with the Valpo players, but for 10 years you’re in touch with them daily or every year,” Drew says. “And when you go to a different place, you lose some of those.”

This season will be Drew’s 22nd at Baylor, and his former players and friends in the community tugged at his heartstrings that week with the messages that poured in.

“Those were meaningful,” Drew says. “You think, man, they can be that thoughtful and that heartfelt. That’s really impressive, you know? Hopefully if you’re doing a good job, you have deep roots. Just like anybody, you work for a place over 20 years, it’s harder to say goodbye than it is at the place you spent two years.”

Drew is uncomfortable talking about the Kentucky week because everyone has moved on. He did return to Mi Casita, where they have hung the infamous picture and named that booth “Drew’s Table.” Drew and Shero went back and signed the wall. It has become a popular spot. A few weeks back, a family from Kentucky came in on a busy Friday night and waited 20 minutes for that booth to open up, the five of them squeezing in.

#RespectMyDecision 🤣 pic.twitter.com/5FlAz61hUX

— Scott Drew (@BUDREW) April 17, 2024

Drew didn’t have much time to reflect once his decision was made because he needed to hit the transfer portal to build another title contender. And Kentucky quickly pivoted, hiring former player Mark Pope.

“They got a great coach. They got a great staff. They got a great program. They’re going to have an enormous amount of success,” Drew says. “And (former Baylor assistant Alvin Brooks III) is there. So we’re always going to cheer them on.”

Earlier in his career, Drew might have jumped. In 2009 when Memphis called, he didn’t consult his family. That’s why Drew was willing to open up about this process. Maybe how he came to his decision will help somebody else.

Drew says he wants to keep what was said in his living room that night private, but the message was clear: “Everybody wanted to do God’s will. If everyone felt like God was calling us to go, we’d have gone. We felt like God was calling us to stay. So we stayed.”

It’s hard to see Drew ever leaving now that Baylor has gotten to the point where its head coach can turn down Kentucky. Rhoades says several coaches elsewhere in the athletic department called to tell him how significant it was for the school that Drew would say no to one of college hoops’ most storied programs.

Drew will never say never — that would mean he’s in control of his destiny — but he’s come to realize he’s a changed man. And the program he’s changed forever has never felt more like a forever home.

“When you’re younger, you think you want to hit it big,” he says. “You want to be able to retire. But when you get older, you’re like, retire’s eternity. It’s heaven and hell. So that’s what drives me.”

(Photo: Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)