Tales of The Wanderer: J'Wan Roberts, Kelvin Sampson and the heart of Houston's Final Four run

New York Times

03-04-2025

Kelvin Sampson always starts the first day of his basketball camp teaching the fundamentals of shooting, with 120 young campers looking on from the 3-point line, eyes locked on Houston's venerable basketball coach. But on Day 1 of camp in June 2019, Sampson saw a few sets of eyes looking behind him past the basket at the Fertitta Center, and he could feel someone approaching.
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Sampson turned to find 17-year-old J'Wan Roberts, a newly arrived, 194-pound freshman, staring at a schedule he'd been handed the night before.
'Coach,' Roberts said, holding out the piece of paper. 'Do you know where this building is?'
'Just oblivious to what's going on,' Sampson said recently, retelling the story. 'I'm looking around going, 'This dude for real?'
'So from that day on, he had his nickname: The Wanderer.'
Last month Roberts, six years older and 25 pounds heavier, walked onto the Fertitta Center floor from out of the same tunnel during Houston's Senior Day festivities and toward his coach.
The years zoomed by in Sampson's head as Roberts approached: the Peach Jam game where Houston's staff discovered a skinny kid from the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2018, the many film sessions the Wanderer spent in the coach's crosshairs, the Final Four in 2021, summer trips abroad in 2019 and 2023, heartbreaking NCAA Tournament and personal losses, and a hard-earned ascent to becoming one of the best forwards in college basketball.
Sampson's eyes got heavier with every step.
Look at him now. The Wanderer.
'You think about why we coach, you know?' said Sampson, who put his arms around his sixth-year senior, held on for 12 seconds and wept as the fans' ovation continued. 'Right there at that basket where he's walking toward me, right to my right is where he started. And now, this is where he ends up.'
Kelvin Sampson nearly made it through the ceremony, but J'Wan Roberts got him. pic.twitter.com/2fc0SW1dzQ
— GoCoogs.com (@gocoogs1) March 4, 2025
Houston will arrive at the Final Four this week as a team built around a family. Sampson's son, Kellen, is an assistant on staff and the program's head coach-in-waiting. His daughter, Lauren, is the director for basketball operations. Assistants Quannas White and Hollis Price were the starting backcourt on Sampson's 2002 Final Four team at Oklahoma. And then there's Roberts, who has been around for more than half of Sampson's 11-year tenure at Houston and is so ingrained in the place that all of his teammates look to him for guidance.
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'Not many kids you have for six years, and not many of them that you'd want for another six,' Sampson said. 'Some of these seniors, I'm glad they're seniors. Wan? I could coach him for another six years. He's almost like one of my children.'
Sampson is most comfortable working with those he's molded. These days the Cougars are landing big-time prospects — the next recruiting class has three top-25 recruits — but before Houston was a program those players would consider, Sampson and his staff had to identify players with upside others couldn't see.
Kellen had one of those for his dad to check out at the 2018 Peach Jam, the final tournament of Nike's EYBL circuit attended by almost every high-major coach in the country. On Court 2, they were all there to see future Illinois 7-footer Kofi Cockburn. Sampson remembers Roberts attempted one shot in the game — a dunk — but he ended with double-digit rebounds, four or five blocks and a win.
'There was never a kid that was put on this earth to play for us more than that undersized post guy that was left-handed,' Sampson said. 'I said, 'That kid is us.' And all these years later, he's still the undersized four man. Can't shoot. He just wins. And we've always been pretty good at evaluating winners.'
Roberts admits he was naive when he arrived. He grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands and was always the tallest and strongest on St. Thomas — the next closest was Aliyah Boston, the 2023 WNBA Rookie of the Year. The ease with which he dominated then made it easy to hit cruise control.
Roberts moved to Killeen, Texas, in the summer of 2015 to live with his aunt so he could face stiffer competition. Still, when he arrived at Houston that summer of 2019, it was clear he wasn't ready, mostly because of his body but also because of his temperament.
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'I didn't understand the reason behind why they played so hard and never took plays off,' Roberts said. 'Coach has a standard, which you have to play to. My definition of playing hard was not his definition of playing hard.'
Even though Roberts redshirted his first year, Sampson was all over him when his effort dipped. He felt targeted, but eventually he came to the realization that Sampson saw something in him that he didn't see in himself. Roberts 'surrendered to the program,' he said.
But every now and then, the Wanderer returned.
Jan. 17, 2023, at Tulane. Houston is ahead by 13. Tramon Mark misses a layup. Roberts goes for the rebound, doesn't get it, then casually jogs back down the court. Tulane's Kevin Cross, his defensive assignment, lopes behind him and then turns on the burners. When Cross catches the ball for an uncontested dunk, Roberts is still at the 3-point line. Then he motions like someone else needed to get back.
'I was so tired,' Roberts said. 'Didn't run full-speed. It was real bad.'
The play is familiar to everyone in the program, because the next day Sampson must have played it 20 times, never saying a word — play, stop, rewind, head shake, play. Sampson slowed the final replay down. Then he threw the remote at the monitor. For two straight weeks, Sampson started every film session with that clip.
'I was looking to get a reaction from it,' Sampson said. 'The right reaction from him.'
He got the right reaction, but Roberts still did things on the court that infuriated him: getting beat on an out-of-bounds play against Alabama, a bad close-out against Baylor, another out-of-bounds play against Texas Tech, and those are just this year.
'While other people are doing simple math — 2 plus 2 is 4 — sometimes J'Wan is over there trying to figure out how to get that Rubik's Cube set,' Sampson said. 'You can look in J'Wan's eyes, and I can always tell. I can look into his eyes and you can see all the way to Beirut. Because he's not here with you tonight. And the reason I (replay the film) every day is sometimes it takes more than one viewing to get him to realize that Coach is probably right. I shouldn't have done that. I've got to do better.'
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But here's what Sampson loves: Every time, Roberts takes the coaching without complaint.
'The best,' Sampson said.
'When you're around a coach that's been doing this for 40 years, he's won at every level, you tend to realize that everything he says is right,' Roberts said. 'Whatever he's telling you, he sees something that he's been seeing 40 years ago to now. He knows everything. If he gets on, let it happen.'
Roberts is the model example of the year-to-year improvement players make in the Houston program, becoming exactly what Sampson wanted him to be.
Early on he was just an energy guy who would defend and rebound, but he had a strong lefty hook and he's a gifted passer. Once those other skills were ready for use, Sampson started to make Roberts a big part of the offense from the mid-post in 2022-23, and he has upped his usage every year since.
This year, Roberts has been able to put the Cougars on his back for stretches. He led the comeback overtime win at Kansas, scoring a career-high 24 points, with the Cougars continuously feeding him at the left elbow.
Sometimes it still takes some prodding.
In the second round of the NCAA Tournament against Gonzaga, Roberts struggled the first half when the Zags took away his left hand. At halftime, Sampson reminded him he's left-handed.
'J'Wan played hard the first half, but that was it,' Sampson said. 'Now second half, he competed. He was the best player on the floor. Went to him four straight times and he scored eight points. They had nobody who could guard him.'
Foul trouble limited Roberts in the Elite Eight, but Houston had a similar game plan when he was on the floor. He scored nine points on 4-of-6 shooting in a 79-60 rout of Tennessee.
As the seconds ticked away in the final minute, Roberts danced on the sideline, celebrating his second Final Four. A few feet away stood Sampson, arms folded, stoic and almost trying not to smile.
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Sampson had a reason — he said later he was thinking about his friend down the sideline, Volunteers coach Rick Barnes — and when he's in that mode, most of the Houston players are scared of trying to snap him out of it.
But not the Wanderer.
'I think Wan is the one player to get Coach out of his shell, laughing,' junior wing Terrance Arceneaux said. 'He's the only person I know, if Coach (is) heated, he will grab him by his shoulders and start massaging. I mean, him and Wan's relationship is different.'
Roberts used to be quiet. Once he became a leader, he was the lead-by-example type. But a few weeks ago when he was sidelined at the Big 12 tournament with an ankle injury, he turned into a mini Sampson, delivering messages similar to his coach and talking so much that in one huddle Sampson had to tell him to let him coach.
And along this run to the Final Four, Roberts has been dropping nuggets of wisdom — like 'Never rush to be somewhere, just stay the course, believe in yourself' — that make it clear all of those film sessions, all of those years of listening to his coach have turned him into the exact player Sampson knew he could be.
'It doesn't say Roberts on my jersey, you know, it says Houston,' Roberts said. 'So I'm playing for those guys. I'm playing for the coaching staff. I'm playing for the fans. It ain't about me. So I can't afford to be in the game and take plays off. 'Cause you know that one play might be the turning point of the whole game.'
Roberts says he wants to wear that jersey as long as he can, and it's hard for Sampson to imagine coaching his team next year without him.
Which is why Sampson let his guard down on Senior Day and let the tears flow.
'That one hit me different,' he said. 'Wan will have left an indelible mark on this program that will last forever.'