University of Southern Mississippi Athletics
The Man in the Arena: Kevin Holland's Basketball Narrative
2/7/2019 10:10:00 AM | Men's Basketball
HATTIESBURG, Miss. -- I'm Kevin Holland from the men's basketball team, and here is my Southern Miss story.
I want to start off first by giving everyone a little background on where I am from and how I got to Hattiesburg, Miss. I was born in San Diego, California in the fall of 1995. That was just my first place of residence that was followed by stops in Athens, Georgia and El Paso, Texas. El Paso was probably one of my most important stops, but I will give more details why later. In 2006 I moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the place I now and will forever call home. The question I receive the most is, "Why have you lived so many places, your parents must be in the military?" That is easy to assume, but my answer has always been, "My dad is a college basketball coach."
My dad, James Holland, has been a Division I college basketball coach from before my older brother (A.J. Holland) and I were even born. As many know, coaches change jobs and move their families from place to place as they take different positions at different universities. When I was born, he was coaching at San Diego State University and since then has coached at the University of Georgia, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), University of Alabama, and Western Michigan University. Remember, I said earlier that El Paso was one of my most important stops and here is why. In 2004, Doc Sadler became the head basketball coach at UTEP and my dad joined his staff. In the 2004-2005 season, they worked together to coach the team to a 27-8 record, a WAC tournament championship, and a NCAA tournament appearance. This team was led by senior standout Omar Thomas. The following season, Chris Croft joined the supporting staff. During those two seasons in El Paso, I became a close friend to the Sadler family including his wife, Tonya, and two sons, Landon and Matthew. Close enough to the extent of even carpooling together to the elementary school down the street.
Fast-forwarding to the spring of 2014, I was a two-star basketball recruit who had received a couple scholarship offers that had fallen through and received majority of interest from universities that were in Alabama, where I was going to graduate high school. Coach Sadler, who had just accepted the job at Southern Miss, gave my dad a call and offered me a scholarship strictly based on my reputation as a great shooter. I accepted the offer after an unofficial visit to campus and in the next few weeks, Chris Croft joined the staff as Director of Basketball Operations. I made my decision to sign with Southern Miss knowing that I will be playing for a staff that I had known long before I had even made a goal to play college basketball one day. I figured it would be a smooth transition, but I did not have a clue to how much I had to learn.
I came to campus on June 12, 2014. The next day at the first practice I realized I was an undersized shooting guard at 165 lbs. who was going to play point guard with no point guard experience. It was something different for me and it was something that I really needed work at. Even through my struggles in practice, Coach Sadler believed that the position that I needed to play to be successful at this level was at point guard. I was the backup point guard anyway and the team, at the time, did not need a huge contribution from me off the bench. My job was to provide solid minutes by running the offense and getting the ball moving. Some games I succeeded at doing so, and some games I did not, but the 2014-2015 basketball season was as rough on me as it was on Southern Miss basketball as a program. My freshman year, Sadler's first season, was when the NCAA investigated our program and found several violations from previous years and forced the program into a self-imposed postseason ban. Along with the ban, some of my teammates lost their scholarships and others decided to transfer after the first semester before conference games even started. Now I am going from a player who played very limited minutes and some games not even playing, to a guy who is playing almost 40 minutes a game. We were down to about seven or eight players and I got my first start on January 29, 2015 in a home game against Marshall. After the several losses, the infamous four-player finish to a game against Florida International at home, and the biggest comeback in Southern Miss basketball history against UTEP at home on senior night, we finished that season with a 9-20 record.
Year 2 (2015-2016) was not much better. Another self-imposed suspension, limited scholarships, and almost a completely new team. The positive from that year was an updated Golden Eagle logo that we can call our own, but that's about it from the program's perspective on the year. Personally, I saw the type of character that Coach Sadler had as a person when he gave me and others the option to redshirt to maximize our opportunities to play in the post-season. I took it and ran with it. I had a rough freshman year. I needed to get stronger, develop some more skills, and learn how to become a leader at the point guard position. Redshirting was not only a basketball decision for me though. It gave me the opportunity to be in school for five years and to begin and possibly complete a master's degree. It was the best decision of my life, but ultimately, I was not able to compete with my teammates and we finished that season with an 8-21 record.
Year 3 (2016-2017) I made my comeback, if that's what we want to call it. I was still playing point guard. I now looked and felt like a better player at 185 lbs. I was respected by my coaches and my teammates for the work I put in during the last season. A Southern Miss legend and NBA veteran, Clarence Weatherspoon, was joining the coaching staff. We were putting ourselves in position to be a good team. Even though we had all the right pieces, the pieces were not in the right places quite yet. I moved from point guard, to shooting guard, to small forward over one season but it showed the kind of faith Coach Sadler had in me as player. Cortez Edwards made starting appearances at point guard and shooting guard. Quinton Campbell made a name for himself and made a career out of his season efforts. Still with limited scholarships for the program, our efforts were not translating to wins yet. We finished that season with a 9-22 record.
Year 4 (2017-2018) is when everyone started to see a shift in the program. Omar Thomas, who played for my dad and Sadler at UTEP, joined the staff at Southern Miss as a Director of Basketball Operations. Tyree Griffin, a transfer from Oklahoma State, changed the speed that we played at as a team. Dominic Magee, transfer from Grand Canyon, changed the way we scored as a team. Cortez has now become the elite scorer that nobody knew he would be. I became the great three-point shooter that Coach Sadler recruited me to be. Basketball was FUN. Winning was FUN. On top of it all, we were playing our best basketball at the right time and that was in the Conference USA tournament in Frisco, Texas. We made our tournament run making it to the semifinals by defeating Florida International in the first round, upsetting the number one seed (Middle Tennessee) in the second, and losing to a Marshall team who eventually won the championship and first-round game of the NCAA tournament. In my eyes, it was a successful year regardless of what our record showed. We finished that season with a 16-18 record.
So here we are in February of Year 5 (2018-2019). I came to campus as an 18-year old. Today I am 23 years old. I received my undergraduate degree in Business Administration in December of 2017. I will complete my master's in Sport Management this spring (2019). I have had two different athletic directors, eight different assistant coaches, and eight different academic advisors. I worked with seven different strength coaches. I have been on a roster with 39 different teammates and four of which I never played a game with. One constant that I can say though is that I began and will be ending this Southern Miss journey with Doc Sadler. There's not one person from the summer of 2014 that is still here and a part of this program besides me and Coach Sadler. To this day, I have started in 99 consecutive games that I dressed out for dating back to my freshman season. I've become the veteran of this program, become a vocal leader for my teammates, and shown the work ethic that is expected of a Southern Miss men's basketball student-athlete. I have been here long enough to be a part of some of the lowest moments and always wanted to be here long enough to enjoy the highest. I may not ever know how people will judge my career at Southern Miss, but throughout the past two seasons, I have always put the team first and continued to embrace the quote by Theodore Roosevelt famously known as, "The Man in the Arena." We are playing winning basketball right now with a only conference championship in mind and our current record is 14-9. That is my Southern Miss story, and it's not finished quite yet!
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1910 -
DYK: Kevin Holland's next start will be 💯 for his career, tying for 10th in school history! #TransformationTuesday pic.twitter.com/p1nP79OiAy
— Southern Miss MBB (@SouthernMissMBB) February 5, 2019
.@SouthernMissMBB continued to roll behind yet another major team performance, including Kevin Holland's record-breaking shooting. All of the highlights here! #SMTTT pic.twitter.com/Hu3WN1lTDQ
— Southern Miss🔝 (@USMGoldenEagles) January 8, 2018
Any Peanut Butter with that JAM?!?
— beIN COLLEGE SPORTS (@beINCOLLEGE) January 5, 2018
Kevin Holland THROWS. IT. DOWN.
As @SouthernMissMBB expands their lead in the first half.
Catch all the action on @beINSPORTSUSA pic.twitter.com/WiXOXOPREJ
