Mark Turgeon’s determination grew at Kansas, spurred Wichita State, continues at Maryland (+video)

Mark Turgeon was 5-foot-6 and 120 pounds as a senior at Topeka Hayden, where he managed to cobble together an outstanding high school basketball career despite blowing over when somebody opened the doors to the gym.

Surely, though, that’s where the basketball thing would end. There was an outside chance that Turgeon could play at the Division II level. Junior college, maybe?

Instead, he convinced Larry Brown to give him a chance at Kansas, became a point guard and helped KU to four NCAA Tournaments and the 1986 Final Four in his junior season.

So it was long ago that Turgeon learned never to take no for an answer. He has risen through the coaching ranks to land at Maryland, KU’s opponent Thursday night in the South Regional semifinals.

“When I first saw him at KU, I thought, ‘How in the hell can this guy be a Division I basketball player?’ ” said Colorado coach Tad Boyle, who was on Turgeon’s staff at Wichita State from 2000-06. “He looked like he was 14, had braces on his teeth and was skinny as a rail.”

One day, Kansas track coach Bob Timmons saw Turgeon on the track inside Allen Fieldhouse and tried to shoo him away, thinking he was some high school kid.

“Mark told him he was on the basketball team,” Boyle said. “I don’t think Coach Timmons believed him.”

Disbelievers have not been in short supply during Turgeon’s life, which probably explains the success he’s had as well as anything else. When half of your physical size is made of heart, you have a tendency to overachieve.

It wasn’t basketball talent, but basketball IQ, that got him in the door at Kansas and it became obvious early that he was headed for coaching.

That road began at Kansas, working for Brown, and led to Oregon and Jerry Green’s top assistant from 1992-97. He even went to the NBA, as a Philadelphia 76ers assistant for two seasons, to expand his resume. His first head coaching job was at Jacksonville (Ala.) State, where in two seasons he was 8-18 and 17-11.

Yet after a decade of basketball futility at Wichita State, marked by ineptitude, infighting and many, many losses, it was Turgeon whom young athletic director Jim Schaus turned to in 2000.

Don’t think Turgeon, who 10 years ago took the Shockers to a Sweet 16, has forgotten, either.

“I had a losing record at Jacksonville State, although the second year we won,” Turgeon said. “I remember waking up one morning in Jacksonville and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve got a phone interview with Jim Schaus from Wichita State today. I have no shot, but I’m going to talk to him about 9 a.m.”

That conversation made an impression on Schaus, who had been on the job at WSU less than a year and whose job depended, really, on hiring the right basketball coach.

“Often times, those things really synthesize pretty quickly,” said Schaus, the athletic director at Ohio since 2008. “You do a lot of Internet research, make calls and talk especially to people with regional ties. It gets down to a small number of people sooner than you might think.”

A day after their phone conversation, Schaus flew to Atlanta and met with Turgeon for four hours in a hotel room.

“He’s somebody I really hit it off with,” Schaus said. “I did not know Mark at the time and there were others I had conversations with about him. It just seemed like a perfect fit for me and for the program. I believe we hired him within a week.”

It was Turgeon who built what Gregg Marshall has built upon.

Success.

The Shockers were 9-19 in Turgeon’s first season, but steadily improved over the next five seasons before a relapse in 2006-07, after which Turgeon left for Texas A&M. He spent four seasons there and is in his fifth year at Maryland.

“Wichita State worked out great for me,” Turgeon said. “I was able to go home and we loved being in Wichita. We had KU fans, we had Wichita State fans and we became friends with K-State fans while we were there. Two of my kids were born in Wichita. It was a big part of my life.”

Remember, the Shockers had tried everything after Eddie Fogler left for Vanderbilt after the 1988-89 season, starting with hiring Fogler assistant Mike Cohen.

The ship quickly began to sink.

Scott Thompson, a promising young coach who had breathed life into the Rice program, couldn’t do the same at Wichita State. Nor could favorite son Randy Smithson, a former Shocker guard from the early 1980s glory days.

Those coaches presided over 11 long, arduous, hard-to-watch seasons.

Turgeon inherited a down-and-out team and an arena with few amenities. Levitt Arena, now Koch Arena, was a dump, the perfect building for the kind of basketball being played inside.

“When I took the job,” Turgeon said Wednesday, “if someone was walking into my office, someone wasn’t going to be able to get out. It was that narrow. I couldn’t show recruits the locker room on their visits because there were too many cockroaches down there. So that thing’s come a long way and I’m really proud of what Jim and I were able to do and even more proud of what Gregg (Marshall) has done with it.”

Turgeon, meanwhile, went on to breathe life into Texas A&M and Maryland, where the Terps have won 55 games the past two seasons. In every college coaching job he’s had, Turgeon’s worst record has been in his first season.

Turgeon graduated from Topeka Hayden in 1983 after leading his team to consecutive state championships.

The bigger guy on the team, 6-foot-6 Tom Meier, got most of the accolades, just the way Turgeon wanted it to be.

“There were times when we would huddle up and I would say something to the team,” former Hayden coach Ben Meseke said. “They’d go out on the floor and Mark would re-huddle them. I saw him do the same thing at KU. He’d tell people what to do or explain to them what needs to be done. It’s always been his nature.”

Jeff Johnson, the president of Flint Hills National Golf Club in Andover, was Turgeon’s KU roommate after playing high school basketball at Lawrence. They’re still great friends.

“Turg was everybody’s favorite guy,” Johnson said. “He’s charismatic, funny, hard-working and just ornery as hell. He was an absolute leader for our whole group at KU, even though he was 120 pounds soaking wet. He’d get in your face no matter how big you were. He’d fire people up, get in their faces and then back it all up with leadership.”

Johnson said the first time he saw Turgeon, on the floor during a Hayden-Lawrence game, he wondered how they found a Biddy Basketball uniform to fit Turgeon.

“There wasn’t a lot to his body, but it didn’t take long for him to prove he was in charge,” Johnson said. “And after you watched him play a little bit, he certainly passed the eye test there, too.”

Turgeon often talks about growing up with his ear against a radio listening to Royals, Chiefs and KU games. He loves the Jayhawks, of course, but isn’t rattled by coaching against them the way he was the first time he did so when he was at Texas A&M in 2008.

Not that it’s just another game, by any means.

But the short, skinny kid who was always having to prove himself is beyond that now. He has grown into coaching, which was always where he was headed.

This story was originally published March 23, 2016 at 4:10 PM with the headline "Mark Turgeon’s determination grew at Kansas, spurred Wichita State, continues at Maryland (+video)."