New Army coach Kevin Kuwik brings enthusiasm, pedigree to basketball post

WEST POINT – The kid who grew up playing baseball in Western New York but fell in love with basketball instead calls his newest job as the 32nd head coach of Army men’s basketball “a home run.’’

Kevin Kuwik was hired more than two weeks ago but was finally introduced on Thursday at the Kimsey Center before an audience of program supporters and family members. During the interim the ebullient coach has been meeting with a host of incoming recruits, working out with a rather large group of returning players and moving forward with plans to assemble a staff and next year’s schedule.

“It’s a dream to be a head coach, first and foremost,’’ Kuwik said, a 10-year Army and combat veteran who said he respects and understands the mission of the United States Army, the U.S. Military Academy, “Army basketball and everything that it stands for.’’

Kuwik has spent the past 23 seasons as an assistant coach and operations guy for a host of college programs at Saint Michael’s, Ohio, Butler, Ohio State, Dayton and Davidson. His trail of success at those programs includes 490 wins, six NCAA tournament berths and four in the National Invitation Tournament. It’s that level he hopes to achieve for Army, recognizing full well that the Black Knights are one of only three original NCAA members who have never played in the 84-year history of the NCAA tournament, last reached the NIT in 1978 and have never reached the finals of the Patriot League since joining in 1990-91.

“I mean, just thinking of that sends chills down my spine,’’ Kuwik said of the void. He embraces this job as the “opportunity to do something that’s never been done before, together with the chance to work with – on and off the court – with amazing young men. I mean, that’s a home run.’’

Kuwik’s bosses have included a who’s who of college coaching: Thad Motta, Bob McKillop and Brad Stevens, to name a few.

“I’ve been blessed to work with some amazing coaches,’’ Kuwik said. “I can take the best lessons I learned … and try to put it together in a way that fits me. I’m not any of those guys – I’m Kevin Kuwik – but those guys have kind of pointed the way for me.’’

Kuwik believes Army has a great tradition of players and coaches – including the likes of coaches Bobby Knight and Mike Krzyzewski and U.S. Olympian Mike Silliman – but said he’s not going to lament over the past.

“Yeah, maybe we’re one step short of where we want to be but we’re not going to dwell on that,’’ he said. “We’re starting with a blank slate … we’re 0-0 and we don’t get focused on the past or the future. We just go into the gym every day; we have a championship process. We go into the weight room; we have a championship process. We go to class; we have a championship process. Everywhere I’ve been we’ve won – it’s been different at each place but the common denominator has been having a championship process.’’

Army athletics director Mike Buddie said the original list of 10-12 coaching prospects quickly grew to 50 or 60 once the hiring process began with the search committee following the dismissal of Jimmy Allen, the former assistant who was introduced as head coach almost seven years to the day that Kuwik was hired on March 29. “That’s a credit to the young men who played their hearts out every night on the hardwood and put us in a position that this job was extremely attractive to several dozen candidates,’’ Buddie said.

Said Buddie: “For those of you who have poured your souls into this place you understand that this is not a garden variety civilian institution. Our expectations are different. Our demands are different and the commitment and discipline are also different.’’

Buddie said Kuwik described “a clear vision for how we’re going to get to the Patriot League championship game, and articulated how important it is to have a rigorous optimism, to make sure that these young men love the game and enjoy what they’re doing. All of those things were extremely important to us as we continued to vet our candidates and it quickly became evident that we had found our guy, and this is completely separate from the fact that he chose to serve his country for 10 years coming out of ROTC at Notre Dame … that’s just the icing on the cake.’’

Kuwik graduated from Notre Dame with a degree in Mechanical Engineering but his passion for coaching soon took over.

“To me, If you have an engineering job you're evaluation every year sits in a file folder between you and your boss. No one really knows that you're a good engineer or an average engineer or below -average engineer. What drives me in this (coaching) profession is two-fold. One, as a coach you can't do it yourself. The beauty is, Can I get these young men to do it for themselves? The second piece is the competitive piece. My evaluation (is) in our results every day – that's not for everybody but for me that's something that drives me, that channels me.’’

kmcmillan@th-record.com

Twitter: @KenMcMillanTHR

This article originally appeared on Times Herald-Record: Army men's basketball new coach Kevin Kuwik: What to know