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| Kansas State men’s basketball coach Frank Martin signals to his team during a game last season at Bramlage Coliseum. It’s been a long road for Martin, who will begin his third season today as the Wildcats take on Pittsburg State at 3 p.m. at Bramlage Coliseum. Kansas State Sports Information. |
"Then when I watched Frank coach, I saw where he got it from. Frank was a no-nonsense coach that really got the most out of his players and was someone his players really appreciated."
Barnes would commit to Miami, but a friendship was forged between Martin and Keeling.
In the summer of 2000, Keeling had some movement on his coaching staff. He met with Martin at a Nike basketball camp, where he would offer him an assistant coaching job at Northeastern. Martin accepted the offer. Two years later, Barnes transferred to Northeastern.
"Frank was everything I thought he would be," Keeling said. "He was just the perfect assistant. If I gave him a drill to run, he was a taskmaster for the kids. They had to do the drill exactly the right way or he wasn't letting them out of the drill.
"He was very, very intense. But when we left the court and the kid had a problem, or I went to him and said 'hey Frank, you gotta go talk to this one, he had a bad practice,' he was the perfect big brother type to put his arm around the kid. He had both of those intangibles that you need in order to go forward."
It was Martin's first opportunity in college basketball. It seemed like the culmination of a life of hard work and dedication. Little did the Kansas State coach know, it was just the beginning.
•••
Martin's parents immigrated to the United States from Cuba in 1960. They went north to New Jersey, where they lived for six years. When Martin's mother was seven months pregnant with him, his family packed up and moved to Miami.
His parents divorced in 1977 when he was 11 years old. They got remarried one year later, before divorcing once again. By 1980, his father was out of his life. He hasn't talked to him to this day.
He became the man of the household. He got a job at the age of 12 as a change-boy at a pool hall working four nights a week in an attempt to support his mother, grandmother and his sister. He's worked ever since.
"I wasn't forced to work, it was something I chose to do because I saw how my mom would work like a slave to raise my sister and I," Martin said. "I saw my grandmother at her age leaving the house at 6:30 a.m. everyday and going to sew at a factory until 6:30 p.m. I said, 'well, heck if they're doing that, I need to help.'
"When you're a kid, and you see other people have all these things and you don't have them because you can't afford them, you've got a choice to make. You either join the crew that goes around and steals and everything else or you say 'I don't wanna do that, how can I do something so I can get one of those? A bike or whatever it may be.' I chose to follow the path of work."
•••
Martin grew up near the Orange Bowl always wanting to play football, striving to be the next Larry Csonka, a star fullback for the Miami Dolphins at the time. He spent his Sundays watching the Dolphins and coach Don Shula.
This wasn't abnormal for people in the Miami area. It was the 1970s, a time when thousands of Latin American immigrants made their way into South Florida. There weren't many options when it came to basketball.
The University of Miami was in the middle of a 15-year period without basketball. Florida Atlantic and Florida International had yet to put together a program, and the NBA had yet to make its way into the Sunshine state. Football and baseball were what commanded the attention of most Florida residents.
"All we had was (University of Miami) baseball, which obviously was very successful and the Miami Dolphins," Martin said. "Football was what we did. It was my thing.
"Junior high basketball you played, I think four or five games. It was two weekends. You went out and played two or three games each weekend and then you were done."
Martin attended Miami Senior High with the vision of playing football. But during his ninth-grade year, he broke his foot playing in a neighborhood football game, putting an end to his hopes of becoming the next Csonka.
"With my father being out of my life, my mom became the protective mother and felt that I didn't need to play football because I already broke my foot," Martin said. "She wouldn't let me play, so I tried to find something else to do."
That same year, Martin attended his first Miami Senior basketball game. He fell in love with the game.
The Stingarees were a basketball powerhouse in both the state and on a national level. Since 1925, they have played in 52 state tournaments and have won 19 of them.
The 1981-83 squads were no different. Martin couldn't get on the floor. He was cut from the team during his sophomore year.
"I just wasn't good enough," he admitted.
He would never make the team. But his high school coach, Marcos "Shakey" Rodriguez, allowed Martin to stick around and work out with the team.
"He would have made a lot of teams," Rodriguez said. "Just not a team that was one of the top teams in the country when he was there. Year in and year out we were Top 10 in the country. We went three-to-four years in the state without even losing a game."
But Martin wanted to play for the best, even if it meant never getting into games.
"In Miami, you have a gazillion high schools," Martin said. "I went to the one high school that has the richest tradition in basketball in the history of the state of Florida.
"I understood the history — the place I was at. I understood that I could have gone to a smaller private school and played but no, I wanted to play there. Once I got myself in there, the more I was around it, the more I was driven to play there."
But he wouldn't see the floor.
"Not getting the chance, when you're a kid, it hurts you. But it made me a better man," he said. "It was an unbelievable experience."
Martin would become more of a manager than a player, often keeping stats for the coaches from his seat on the end of the bench.
"Everybody on the team liked him a lot," Rodriguez said. "It didn't matter that he wasn't a great player or what kind of playing ability he had. He worked as hard as he could work. He did as much as he could possibly do for a human being to try and make himself a part of our program."
Martin had to rely on outworking everyone. He was always around Rodriquez's office, watching and trying to learn some of the game's intricacies.
"He thought out information, was always attentive and that's what makes a great coach," he said.
"The best players don't always make great coaches because the game comes easy to them. People like Frank have to strive and fight for everything they get, so all the little nuances that have to be learned — he picked them up. He was always after knowledge and information."
•••
After graduating from Miami Senior High in June of 1983, Martin would enroll at Miami Dade Community College. The motivation was to play basketball.
He went to class at 7 a.m. five days a week while working part-time at a bank (a job he hated) with the hope of eventually getting a tryout for the basketball team. When September rolled around, Martin did just that. He didn't make it.
But eight players flunked out at the end of the first semester. Miami Dade would hold an emergency tryout — a tryout Martin would attend.
He received a call back from the coaches informing him he had made the team. But just a week later, while playing a pickup game at Miami Senior High, he would tear his Anterior Cruciate Ligament in his knee.
"That was a frustrating thing for me," he said. "I quit school."
"It turned out to be a good thing because he stopped messing around trying to play basketball and focused on coaching," added Rodriguez. "He was slow to begin with so he got a lot slower after that," he said laughing into the phone.
Rodriguez called Martin upon hearing he had dropped out.
"He asked me to go back to school and I wouldn't go," Martin said. "I've always done everything he has asked me to do. I said, 'well, I'm not doing it."
In a hope to get Martin to go back to school, Rodriguez asked him to become the assistant junior varsity coach for the Stingarees. At the age of 18, Martin was in the coaching business.
With four games remaining that season, the junior varsity head coach, Sergio Rouco, quit due to differences between he and Rodriguez. Martin would coach the rest of the season.
"I had never thought about coaching," Martin admitted. "I was actually there to help those guys in practice. I'd get in there and work out with them just as a means to stay in shape. But in my mind I knew I wasn't going to play anymore because I didn't want to go back to school."
When the season ended, Rodriguez asked Martin to take a group of 15-year olds to Orlando for an AAU Tournament. Martin had his doubts at first.
"I said 'for what?' (Rodriguez) said 'well if you're going to be my JV coach I need you involved in our program year-round," Martin recalled. "I coached the AAU Tournament with those 15-year olds, we won, and I just got that itch. I just said 'wow, I really enjoyed this,' and I've never stopped since."
He would coach junior varsity basketball at the school from 1985-1993, working with a staff that also featured current Alabama head coach Anthony Grant — one of Martin's best friends.
"Frank was part of a great staff," Rodriguez said. "He was a learner, and he was also a guy that always pointed things out and he'd get frustrated a lot of times because I wouldn't necessarily listen to him and he would moan about it.
"One day I had to talk to him and I said 'Frank, you need to be more specific about what instructions you give me' because he would point out some great stuff. I said to him, 'tell me exactly what I need to run, to who and at one point and then I'll do it.' After that he was great.
"Frank was very good, he was a very good assistant coach. Coaching the JV, he didn't lose too many games."
Martin eventually granted Rodriguez's wish and returned to college with the hope of becoming a head coach. He would get his degree from Florida International in 1993 and would become the varsity head coach at North Miami High that same year.
He spent two seasons at North Miami, turning the moribund program into a success before returning to his alma mater in 1995 after Rodriguez left to become the head coach at Florida International.
"I didn't want to leave because of what we were building at North Miami was so good," Martin said. "It was hard for me to turn my back and walk away from those kids who had worked so hard to do what I asked them to do. At the same time, it was the neighborhood I grew up in, it's the school I had spent half of my life in. It was just too much, so I made the decision to go back there."
He became just the school's third coach in 54 years. The pressure was immense. When he lost eight games in his first year, the alumni called for his job. That's until he won the state championship that same year. He would win three straight Class 6A state championships from 1996-98.
But Martin was dismissed by the school's former principal Victor Lopez following the 1998 season after the Florida High School Activities Association ruled Miami High had violated the organization's recruiting policy of at least five players.
Martin was never was personally accused of recruiting violations or any wrongdoing in the cases of the players involved.
He had never actively pursued jobs in coaching, but began to do so after the incident.
"I went through that experience at Miami Senior, when the whole thing got sideways there, so then I tried to pursue jobs," he said.
He had become intrigued by the college game. Several of his friends, including Grant, had become college coaches. So he began to look around.
He traveled to the Final Four at St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1999 and interviewed for assistant coaching jobs. He missed out on both of them. Martin was left without a college job. A sinking feeling set in.
"I was a little disheartened by it," he said.
Unable to get into college basketball, he would become the head coach at newly-created Booker T. Washington High School in Miami in 1999. He would spend just one season there before finally getting his break into the game.
•••
When Keeling began recruiting Florida, he pursued becoming friends with Martin. Martin always had some of the best prep players in Florida. Keeling, like several coaches in the nation, wanted to sign some of them. But he also knew Martin was a fit for the college game and was more than just a coach with good players.
"I think a lot of people looked at Frank and thought well, maybe he's somebody you could hire because you could bring in his players," recalled Keeling. "I looked at him and said 'here's a guy who would be perfect to coach our defense, that I would like to sit beside me on the bench and just hear what he had to say about the game as the game was going on.'
"When I watched him on the floor as a high school coach, I projected that into the college game, and I had come from high school also. I really think when you can get an assistant who has had his own team and had the experience of coaching his own team, they are invaluable, because they really come to you as a head coach and they understand the ins and outs of coaching a game."
But when Martin walked out onto the court for his very first game as a college assistant, there was an initial shock.
"I'm coming from coaching high school basketball down in Miami, down at Miami Senior and even North Miami, we had a lot of people at our games," he said. "We'd walk out in the arena and it was packed.
"Well, here I am, I come up the stairs, open the door to go on the floor for the first college game ever and there's maybe 50 people in the gym and I was like, 'wow, what am I doing?'"
Keeling left Northeastern following the 2001 season. Ron Everhart, who is currently the men's basketball coach at Duquesne, replaced Keeling and elected to keep Martin on his staff. There was work to be done. The Huskies had averaged less than nine wins in the previous six seasons before Everhart's arrival. But that didn't slow them.
In Martin's final two seasons as an assistant, the Huskies had turned things around, combining to go 35-26.
"It was from there and not having a lot of success — we just went from that environment to when I left, every time we played that little gym was packed, we were winning games," Martin said.
•••
Bob Huggins became familiar with Martin back in 1990 when he was recruiting Cesar Portillo, a player at Miami Senior High. From that day on, their friendship took off.
He helped Martin land the assistant coaching job at Northeastern, and helped convince Everhart to keep him on the staff when he took over for Keeling in 2001 at Northeastern.
"Even though in 1990 I was still a junior varsity basketball coach at a high school, he had time for me every time he saw me," Martin said. "That friendship just continued to evolve and evolve."
In 2004, Huggins had been in talks to bring Everhart to Cincinnati to work for him as an assistant. On a Thursday night, Everhart made the decision not to go.
The following day, Martin was enjoying an early dinner with his girlfriend Anya (now his wife), when his phone rang.
"Little did I expect that Huggs was going to call and offer me a job on the spot," Martin said. "He called and said he needed a guy he could trust, and when someone you believe in that you consider a friend calls and says I need you, you don't ask for what, you get up and go. That's what I did.
"I didn't go for the prestige, I didn't go for greener pastures. I went because Huggs said he needed me. He could have called and said we were going to Alaska and I was there."
•••
He spent two years at Cincinnati (2004-06) before following Huggins to K-State.
Now, Martin enters his third year at the helm of the program after Huggins' departure to West Virginia following the 2006-07 season.
He has guided the Wildcats to a 43-24 record in his first two years. The 43 wins are the second-most by a K-State coach in his first two years on the job.
A surprise? Not to those who know him.
"I always thought given the opportunity, he was going to do a great job, I just never thought he would get the opportunity to become a head coach," Rodriguez said. "Once he got the opportunity, I have had all the confidence in the world that he was going to be very successful because he's very driven."
"We always knew he had a great mind," added longtime friend and coach Art Alvarez. "I mean Frank is a heck of a coach. We knew no matter what he did when he got into coaching he was going to be really good."
Rodriguez said it's that passion and drive to succeed that has enabled Martin to have so much success in his life.
"The drive comes from within, something from within his life brought that about," he said. "His evolution into athletics was involved in a group of people who were incredibly competitive and had a great will to win and that's all he knows.
"That fire that he has, that was there. Some people say you're born with that or something, but he was always very competitive and very strong-willed as a coach."
Martin, who spent years teaching mathematics at the high school level, has a passion to succeed. It's something that comes from his family, who he said he is forever indebted to.
"I love teaching," Martin said. "People have helped me and I'll never forget that. I'm here because people have helped me get here. That's why I got into teaching."
•••
Martin leans back in his chair in his office. The sun is peaking through the windows on a late October morning. It's an off day from practice — a rare opportunity for him to relax. That time is gone now.
"I put as much pressure on myself now as I did in 1985 when I coached that first game at the junior varsity level," he said. "I have a duty to those kids I coach.
"I've got a duty to the people I work with, the people who hired me, the people of Kansas State that stuck with me. Right away, they circled the wagons to protect me. I remember all those things."
Martin refuses to let success go to his head. He's gone through too much in his life to let that happen.
"I'm the luckiest person alive, I coach basketball for a living," he said. "I get out of bed, I'm happy with my job every day. I'm in a great place, great kids, great people, and I get to talk basketball all day, everyday. It doesn't get much easier in life than that."
Modest? Certainly. That's just Frank Martin.
