Column: For Steve Lutz, Brad Korn, opportunity comes from preparation

As the Southeast Missouri State men’s basketball program begins its historic quest tonight (5:40 p.m., TruTV) against Texas A&M Corpus Christi in the opening game of the 2023 NCAA Tournament at UD Arena in Dayton, Ohio, the Redhawk followers probably won’t have much familiarity with the No. 16-seed Islanders (23-10), who won both the Southland Conference regular-season titles, as well as the league tournament.

“We're similar in a lot of aspects,” second-year Corpus Christi coach Steve Lutz said at a press conference in Dayton on Monday.

The two teams should be. That is due to Lutz and third-year SEMO coach Brad Korn sharing a touch of the same coaching blood and having followed similar career paths and philosophies, which are founded on toiling in obscurity, but toiling, nonetheless.

Both Korn and Lutz have ties to highly-successful Purdue basketball coach Matt Painter, who has not only evolved through the last two decades as one of the best college coaches anywhere, but he has done so in a non-glorious fashion, much as Lutz and Korn are doing.

These guys have been handed nothing, and yet, here they are on a national stage.

Korn got his first college head coaching position during a pandemic and couldn’t even meet with his team in person for months.

“We took over in the pandemic,” Korn said Monday in Dayton, “then we got hit with the portal. It was always kind of one of those things, are we ever really going to get our head up here?”

Not only has he uttered those words, but surely, Painter and Lutz have, as well.

Hoop fans see Painter today as a multi-millionaire coach in the Big Ten, who has the odds-on favorite to win the National Player of the Year in center Zach Edey, but he began his coaching odyssey at NCAA Division III Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, where he supplemented his income by driving a forklift at a local beer bottling plant.

For myself, I still see Painter as that little kid (he was four years my junior), who swam on the Halteman Village Sundevils swim team with me, as we grew up together in Muncie, Indiana.

For Korn, who played for Painter at Southern Illinois, he’s made five different stops in 20 years, and at one time, had lived in “six different houses in 10 years.”

Nothing has ever come easy for him or Lutz, who spent four seasons as a Boilermaker assistant before returning to his native Texas two years ago.

“Steve is a tireless worker and great basketball mind,” Painter said when Corpus Christi hired Lutz.

Lutz spent 26 years as an assistant coach at seven different stops, including the scintillating (joke) outposts of Garden City Community College and Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches, Texas, before landing his first head coaching gig, and he hasn’t wasted any time.

He has led the Islanders to 46 wins in two seasons after the program had won 44 games over the previous four seasons.

“Any time you win 23 Division I basketball games, you've done something,” Lutz said. “Any time you win your league, you've done something. Any time you win the league tournament, you've done something.”

For Korn and Lutz, their paths will cross tonight with a national spotlight shining on both. But they reached this point because of the diligence put in through decades in the shadows.

“As a program, you want to obviously go directly into the NCAA Tournament,” Lutz said. “I think that that's everybody's goal. But the First Four is fantastic. This arena last year was electric. The people here in Dayton are great. If you're complaining about coming to Dayton and the First Four, you're messed up in my book. I'm not trying to be whatever.

“We're in the NCAA Tournament. Who's complaining? You don't bitch about going to the NCAA Tournament. There are a lot of teams sitting at home right now. There are a lot of teams playing in other tournaments that would trade in a heartbeat. Man, I try to look at the bright side of things rather than look at the dark side of them. We're playing.”