LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The city seemed huge. Overwhelming, Kenny Payne says. He grew up in a not-tiny but not-big town in southeast Mississippi, on five acres of land it took him three days to mow. Now, here he was, a 17-year-old at the University of Louisville and more or less on another planet. He’d come to play college basketball with $300 his parents saved up to get him started. On his first day, Payne left his wallet on the bench at Crawford Gymnasium. He finished his workout and walked back to the sideline to find that the wallet and the money were gone.
How in the world does that happen? he thought. Where am I?
“Someone probably got me,” he says, shaking his head, as if he still can’t believe he was that kid, to this day.
He’s nevertheless smiling in the front row of Louisville’s film room, more than two decades later, fresh off another community appearance on a Thursday night in early October. He didn’t run home after losing the wallet. He endured, for four more years. And now he has these stories to tell, which is kind of why he’s here, preparing for his first season as Louisville’s new men’s basketball coach, walking through the gym doors at 7:31 p.m. with yet another someone wanting more of his time.
Before this, it was a speech downtown for 200 doctors and assorted staffers at U of L Health. He didn’t have any prepared remarks, because Payne, 55, does not prepare remarks. Asked if he had even the vaguest of scripts, Payne points a long index finger to his chest. All off the heart, he says. If he had a script, he’d mess it up. So after an introduction, Louisville’s coach talks about his team and his players, about how much he values the care U of L Health provides for the less fortunate in the community and, as a corollary, about his definition of leadership. A true leader, Payne tells the group, puts others before themself. If his team is bad, he has to take the heat with humility and grace. If his team exceeds expectations, he has to credit his players and staff and leave none of it for Kenny Payne.
Then everyone wanted pictures. Everyone always wants pictures. After an exceptionally difficult few years, a city and a community and a university crave hope. Something to rally to. Louisville basketball always has been a connective fiber, until it hasn’t been. But with one of their own working from the heart, everyone wants to believe it can be again, that this won’t be another once-great program laid to rest by one failed hire after another. They want to believe their new coach knows precisely where he is: where he’s meant to be.
“He’s what we needed,” says Milt Wagner, one of Louisville basketball’s forever names, who has joined the hoops staff to help the cause. “He’s one of ours. He could be the one to bring everybody back together.”
It has been 36 years since Louisville men’s hoops won a national championship the NCAA record books recognize, but reality requires us to use a different lens. The Cardinals won a title a decade ago, even though banners came down later. As recently as December 2019, they spent two weeks as the No. 1 team in the country. But the tumult is undeniable. A self-imposed postseason ban in 2016 during an NCAA investigation into a scandal involving escorts and recruits. Firing Rick Pitino and Tom Jurich in 2017 due to the FBI’s investigation into men’s college basketball, followed five months later by the NCAA’s instruction to vacate all records from 2011 to 2015. Pitino’s departure officially changed to a “resignation” after his $40 million lawsuit against Louisville was settled. Chris Mack arriving with a seven-year contract and walking away 14 games into his fourth season. One NCAA Tournament win in the last seven years. The program has been through some things.
The Louisville community, much more starkly, has dealt with sorrow and anger and upheaval following the March 2020 killing of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker who was fatally shot by police officers inside her apartment during a botched raid attempt. Months-long demonstrations protesting police brutality and systemic racism shuttered businesses downtown as frustrated residents demanded justice and police reform.
Into this steps a first-time head coach who is also living history as the first Black head coach for Louisville men’s basketball. He’s asked to be a healer both inside gym walls and well beyond them. It’s a staggering burden, if you let it be. “It’s bigger than me,” Payne says. “That’s the best way to say it: It’s bigger than me. It’s a lot. And I don’t know if I handle it. I recognize it and I make sure I say this completely to everybody every day: I’m not letting you put this all on me. This is us. This ain’t just Kenny Payne standing up here. I need this community. I need this business. I need the Black community. I need the White (people). I need the Mexicans. I need everybody to know I can’t do this by myself. Nobody can. Nobody can.”
He understood this, and the amount of work anything worth doing requires, well before he came home again. Payne arrived at Louisville as Mississippi’s Mr. Basketball. He was a big deal. He was also the kid whose parents wouldn’t let him do anything basketball-related unless those acres of grass were cut by noon. “The whole recruiting process was such a really good experience, and that’s not always the case,” former Louisville assistant coach Wade Houston says now. “But it was with Kenny. His father was a scholar and an intellectual. We’d sit and talk about the civil rights movement, sports, parenting. After getting to know Kenny more and more, I could understand why he was the way he was.”
Once at Louisville, Payne took great care with everything, his wallet notwithstanding. Long before players worked out with trainers or got extra shots up at all hours as an unofficially compulsory part of playing college basketball, Payne spent his freshman year either in his dorm, in a classroom, or in the basketball facilities. “I never did that,” says Pervis Ellison, who arrived in the same freshman class and, of course, grew into an All-American and No. 1 overall pick. “And I didn’t do it because I was lazy – I didn’t do it because I didn’t know that was something you should do. But he didn’t do anything else. If you were looking for Kenny, go to the gym.” If teammates wandered through the basketball offices before practice, they saw Payne in a coach’s office, scouring film or reviewing concepts. “Back then, you know what we kind of thought? ‘Aw, he’s a teacher’s pet,’” Ellison says. “You don’t say that anymore. But that’s what you thought, because he was constantly communicating with the coaches. You just knew his thirst for information about the game, not only in terms of him getting better, but his trying to learn the game, was always there.”
A touch of coaching kismet, it wasn’t. Payne did it to survive. He needed to know this stuff to have a chance to play on a team flush with experience that ultimately would win the national championship. During practices, he more or less volunteered to guard Billy Thompson, the team’s leading scorer and eventual first-round draft pick. If Payne wasn’t going to beat out Thompson for minutes, he wanted to show the coaches he was willing to try, and try again. “You have this grandiose idea that you’re going to surpass all of them,” Payne says. “Well, the (reality) of it is you’re not better than them. You’re not stronger than them. You don’t understand team basketball the way they do. There’s a part of it you have to learn from them. And that’s the way I approached it. Now, it was humbling. But you saw it come together, you saw what it was to be a part of a real team, to be a part of winning, to be a unit.”
The most life-altering relationship Payne built over his four years was one of the most contentious, at least on the floor. When the late Derek Smith returned to campus for Crawford Gym pickup games, Payne was there, ready for yet another one-on-one game that wasn’t going to go his way. “He would fight me before he let me win,” Payne says with a laugh. Smith showed Payne how to work and fight and the benefits of elite conditioning – “You never thought, you just reacted,” Payne says – but Smith also personified a way to be successful and honest, to admit and confront your imperfections. Smith even got the kid from southeast Mississippi into meditation and visualization. “He forced me to think different,” Payne says.
Payne accidentally became a coach, wandering into Larry Brown’s office after watching a Philadelphia 76ers practice, the injuries piling up and the end of his playing days nigh. Brown probed Payne about his future plans and told him to finish his Louisville degree first. While back at school, Payne fundraised for U of L Health and trained players on the side. He quizzed various programs – Oregon, Duke, North Carolina and Kentucky, among others – on how they trained their wings and devised his workouts accordingly. He worked Nike’s first skills academy for elite high school players. Eventually, someone called Oregon and advocated for Payne, who by then had an ethos: Focus on the athletes, and work.
“He was probably the first person in this business that it really struck me that it’d be possible to do it with the players first on the mind,” says Josh Jamieson, then Oregon’s director of operations and now an assistant coach for Payne at Louisville. Payne famously became a force at Kentucky in recruiting and player development – perhaps you’re familiar with such names as Anthony Davis, Karl-Anthony Towns, Devin Booker and Julius Randle, just for starters – without changing that approach. “Just look at the players that have come through, that will pick up the phone and call him every other day, and come back for workouts in the summertime,” Ellison says. “That list is a who’s-who.”
And yet while many wondered when Payne would get his shot as a head coach, he didn’t. Mostly. He met with search firms along the way to discern what schools looked for in the hiring process. He says he came close to two head coaching jobs. He also says – fairly credibly – that it wouldn’t have mattered if he ever was a head coach. Some people get into the profession wanting to run their own operation. Payne says he’s always just wanted to help.
Louisville, in the spring of 2022, needed help.
Predictably, people had opinions on who should provide it. Most of them came back to one name. “I think every elected official in the state reached out to me with their opinions,” Louisville athletic director Josh Heird says. “I’m talking senators to metro council members and everyone in between. And I can promise you, every one said: Hire Kenny Payne.”
Heird, then still the interim AD, promised himself he’d run a comprehensive search. He politely told these, uh, unsolicited advisers as much. He’d never even spoken to Payne previously. But in their first conversations, Payne sold an ego-less, player-first approach that aligned with Heird’s view of how a successful modern coach operates. “Kenny’s E.I., E.Q., emotional intelligence, whatever you want to call it, is one of the highest I’ve ever been around,” Heird says. That, plus Payne’s experience working under the klieg lights in Lexington and subsequently as a New York Knicks assistant, made for an ideal profile. Payne, meanwhile, gradually had fewer and fewer reasons not to take the job. The governor of Kentucky told him to. John Calipari told him to. Mark Stoops told him to. Leaders from the Black community and Louisville business community told him to.
“When you think about it, it becomes surreal and you’re nervous about it, because you’re not doing this for money,” Payne says. “You’re not doing this to say you are going to be a head coach. You are really sitting there saying, ‘What if I don’t take this job? Will these former players that are my brothers ever be welcomed with this community? Can I bridge this gap? Can I help this program? Can I help my university?’ I owe it to them to try.”
If he couldn’t do it alone, if it had to be everyone, then it was going to be everyone. Payne built his staff upon relationships to that end. Jamieson, with whom Payne had many late-night conversations about coaching philosophies; Danny Manning, a fellow Mississippian whom Payne had known for years; Wagner, one of the program’s greats; Reece Gaines, another Louisville Hall of Famer. Maybe the biggest get was the easiest: Nolan Smith, Derek’s son, who was on the fast track at Duke and would not have come back to Louisville but for the man on the other end of the phone call. “This was a no-brainer,” Smith says. “When Kenny called me after the Final Four and offered me the position? Yes. Absolutely. Obviously tough to leave the place I was at. But when Kenny Payne calls, it’s family.”
Louisville introduced its new head coach in a room stuffed with former players, the first indication of how one decision united so many disparate entities. But sustainability mattered. Authenticity mattered. “There have been people who come through and say, ‘This is my first time inside these walls,’” Smith says. But Payne staged a practice at the Yum! Center for basketball alums, and the turnout eroded the doubt a little more. “You could have made four teams from those alumni,” Louisville forward Jae’Lyn Withers says. “Maybe five. Full roster.” Former players and community leaders returned again, en masse, for a recent ribbon-cutting ceremony of brand-new Denny Crum Hall, an athlete dorm situated across the street from the practice facility.
“That was the first one where I felt, quite honestly, this group trusts us,” Heird says.
Payne and his staff and players, meanwhile, have diligently pursued outreach. Coaches make their way around campus, introducing themselves to non-athletic staffers in non-athletic departments. Players participated in a telethon for east Kentucky flood victims and attended the announcement of a new girls campus to be built at the West End School, for whom former Cardinals great Darrell Griffith serves as an ambassador.
The weekly meeting Heird holds with Payne and assorted basketball staffers increasingly revolves around what relief the department can provide to Payne’s schedule, so he can attend to actually preparing a team for a season. “This community needed a bunch of different things,” Payne says. “It needed a Black person (as head coach). It needed a person that would not exclude people, that would be all-encompassing to everybody. A person that would open up and just talk from the heart and not just give guarded answers. It needed that. It needed sincereness. And the school needed it as well.”
It is a massive lift. It is, in some ways, one man doing two jobs.
But what Louisville needed, so far, Payne has provided. “He just avails himself to people who want to be a part of the program, and people who are used to being part of the program,” Houston says. “And that ain’t going away.”
And now comes the hard part.
On the basketball end, winning a ridiculous amount of games and building an elite college hoops monolith is all Louisville asks.
How in the world does Kenny Payne do that?
Here is what Payne says matters to him, at least foundationally: Confident, competent and conditioned athletes. He wants his teams to play instinctively, because he was at his best as a player when he just played and at his worst when he overthought it. He wants rigorous ball-sharing, because he believes the best teams are the best passing teams. He wants – as he puts it to the group during practice – “desperate defenders.” And fight. Endless fight. “I want a group of confident young people that understand the magnitude of where they are, understand the magnitude of what this basketball program means to this community, to this state,” Payne says. “Initially, we don’t know how good or how bad we’ll be. We really don’t know. But if we fight, if we fight together, if we play unselfishly, if we are disciplined about what we are doing, we got a fighting chance.”
He also told any Louisville players who stuck around that it would be the hardest thing they’ve ever done. And he has not been wrong.
Before point guard El Ellis left campus for summer break, he worked out one-on-one with Payne. One drill involved driving through two pads, finishing through contact and sprinting to the other end to do the same. Another involved sprinting from one corner of the floor to the other and only ended after Ellis made 10 shots. “I ran cross-country in high school, and played a little soccer,” Ellis says. “I still don’t think it compares to this.” Everyone else was introduced to the new standard by the first couple weeks of summer workouts. “Felt like my legs were noodles,” Withers says. When players retired to the kitchen area and training room after practices, they openly talked about how they needed to start taking care of their bodies. With good reason.
One of Payne’s most notorious drills requires players to do defensive slides between medicine balls and record 32 touches in a minute … then run to the other end to do defensive slides between cones scattered across the floor, stacking them all up until they’re all gone … then sprint to a corner of the floor to hit 10 3s … then sprint to another corner and hit another 10. There is also the “Kobe Drill,” which involves length-of-court defensive slides, down-and-back sprints and 10 made 3s before you’re done. “That’s probably the hardest drill I’ve ever done,” freshman Kamari Lands says. “Ever.”
It is, arguably, the most integral part of the plan. Long ago at Oregon, Payne struck up a friendship with track and field coach Robert Johnson. Mostly they golfed at first, but then Payne started attending Johnson’s team workouts. And inspiration hit: What if I could get basketball players to move like that? It’s no coincidence that his strength and conditioning coach, Adam Petway, has experience with college and NBA teams as well as a stint as a track and field assistant at West Chester (Pa.) University. “The most conditioned athletes are going to be the best players,” Payne says. “Will beats skill to me. That guy, if he’s just skilled, he ain’t fighting when it gets dirty.”
And this is before Louisville even gets to team basketball activity. On a Wednesday in October, practice starts with 10 minutes of jogging laps around the court, with Payne occasionally calling a player out to sprint to the front of the pack and set the pace. But even that is rote by comparison. One harrowing in-practice period is a 4-on-3 closeout drill: Three defenders chase a ball passed between four staffers on the perimeter. Surrender a corner 3 – which is nearly impossible not to do at some point – and the head coach renders pithy judgment.
“We lost,” Payne declares, and the same group tries once more.
His four most commonly uttered words at a Louisville practice? “Stop. Do it again.” (Also, they’re four words that may best exemplify the imprint of Payne’s college coach, the legendary Denny Crum.) Which raises a pretty consequential question: How is this not the absolute worst, every day?
“You want to push yourself past your limit,” Ellis says. “It’s the only way to get through. Believe it or not, he has a lot of patience, because he’s not going to let any of us fail. Even though he’s pushing us to fail, he’s pushing us to quit, he will never give up on a guy. That’s big.”
Louisville, of course, did not hire Payne to improve resting heart rates via sprints that make players slump to the floor, leaving a swath of perspiration on the wall mat behind them. It hired Kenny Payne, recruiter and talent developer, too. It hired the guy who helped restock Kentucky with five-stars annually and who helped some of those five-stars earn hundreds of millions of dollars to play professionally. To do so, Payne essentially eliminates the concept of comfort. He has perfected a coaching Jedi mind trick: Tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you what you need to achieve it.
It’s why someone like Lands, the consensus No. 47 recruit in the Class of 2022, signs up for the unknown. The 6-8 forward wants to be a pro. He figures he’ll bet on a guy who all but drew up the blueprint. “I needed someone to push me – that’s what he’s going to do,” Lands says. “Ever since I started getting recruited, I always wanted a coach to tell me what I needed to hear. What was best for me. He’ll tell you straight up. None of that other stuff.” Likewise, former five-star prospect Brandon Huntley-Hatfield hopped in a car with Payne to head to dinner during an official visit. Huntley-Hatfield’s freshman year at Tennessee had been fraught with uncertain play, low confidence and poor results. Before they left the parking lot, Payne turned to his passenger. Be real, Payne said. Tell me what you want.
Huntley-Hatfield rattled off a list comprising a one-year layover at Louisville during which he’d be one of the best players in the country, followed by a spot in the NBA Draft lottery.
Let’s do it, Payne replied.
“After Tennessee, it was pretty hard for me to trust anybody,” Huntley-Hatfield says. “I felt he was being genuine. He’s put me in position to play to my strengths. He’s never told me what I can’t do.”
It’s maybe the first true test of Payne’s touch, to turn a 6-10, 250-pound specimen who looks the part into the genuine article. And it revolves around the concept of confidence. “If you can conquer yourself,” Payne says, “the opponent doesn’t matter.” He stops Wednesday’s practice an hour and a half in, bringing the group to midcourt to single out junior forward JJ Traynor. He asks everyone how far Traynor has come, and the consensus is: pretty far. Payne notes some people wanted him to cut Traynor loose. Not dedicated, they told him. Payne told them he’d make Traynor dedicated.
“You’re going to prove a lot of people wrong,” Payne tells Traynor. “Or I’m going to ride your ass like never before.”
Still, anything that happens this year is not an endgame. Heird wants Louisville men’s basketball to be among the top operations in the country. He’s also cognizant this may not occur by April. “For me, it’s about really putting a program together,” Heird says. “Not a good year.”
The work has only just begun.
“All I’m asking you to do is fight with all you got,” Payne says. “And when you get to that barrier, I’m creating another one. Knock that one down, I’m creating another one. Knock that one down, I’m creating another one. And then when you realize what has happened, you’ll feel like you can conquer the world. May not happen this year. Hope it does. May not. But I gotta have faith that it’s going to happen. And I believe that it’s going to happen. Actually, I know it’s going to happen.”
(James Black / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
It’s 1:21 p.m. and there’s not a cloud to be found above South Floyd Street. Small packs of Louisville basketball players walk past the Don Fightmaster Playground, through the southwest entrance to the school’s track and field stadium, and into something resembling hell on earth. They’ve already completed a weight room shift. Now they strap on Catapult trackers for a special conditioning session, warming up by stepping over or under two rows of nearby hurdles. After about 10 minutes of that, the Cardinals walk to the track and line up three groups deep.
“It got hot very quick,” Kamari Lands says, to everyone and no one. “It was not hot five minutes ago.”
The six sets of sprints could be the entire workout. They are not. Not close. The entire roster begins to walk around the bend in the track and, at 1:44 p.m., Kenny Payne blows a whistle from the infield grass. The players begin to jog. Thirty seconds later, Payne blows the whistle again. The players begin to sprint. Thirty seconds after that, it’s another whistle to signal a walking interval, before another round of jogging, before another round of sprinting, and so on. The pattern continues unabated for 13 minutes. An ambulance screaming by on I-65 is a hilarious touch.
Because after two minutes, and a few gulps of water, the players start walking again.
And after 30 seconds, Payne blows the whistle.
The regiment doesn’t stop until 2:20 p.m., by which time Louisville’s players have walked, jogged or sprinted for roughly 35 of 37 minutes. Following a body-weight circuit cooldown – if you can call three sets each of lunges, squats, stationary jumps and burpees a “cooldown” – they leave the premises. Some return to the Kueber Center on foot. Some wily veterans hitch a ride on a golf cart. No need for wasted motion, after all. It’s time for practice.
If the day’s schedule reads more like basic training than preparation for a basketball season, well, this is your introduction to Louisville men’s basketball on Payne’s watch. The new head coach? He will endure. He will not settle for less than the best he can get, until he gets it. And then he might ask for more.
At a quarter past 4 p.m., after a lot of shooting and offensive set installation and rehearsal, the head coach gives the five players on the court an out: Make the shot at the end of the play, Payne says, and we’re done. The ball eventually finds its way to JJ Traynor, and he misses. And he misses again. Four straight, in all.
Payne has seen enough. “You don’t believe it’s going in,” he tells Traynor. “Therefore we don’t believe it’s going in. Therefore drive it, pass, shot. When you believe, we’ll believe.”
The action begins anew, the same choreography repeated by the same five players, and the same sequence puts the ball in Traynor’s hands in the corner.
He could drive it and pass it, like the coach said, letting somebody else hoist one to set them all free.
Instead, Traynor steps right into his shot once more.
He hits it. And Kenny Payne smiles.
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photos: Michael Reaves, Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
