Kevin Keatts’ eight -year career as chief coach of the NC State male basketball team has reached an abrupt ending. On Sunday, the University announced its decision to separate from Keatts.
The measure occurs less than a year after Keatts trained Wolfpack to the Championship of the Atlantic Coast Conference and Final Four. NC State ended the regular season 2024-25 with a 12-19 record.
The Atlético director, Boo Corrigan, issued a statement thanking Keatts for his “contributions” and also recognized last year’s deep race in the NCAA tournament.
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“I want to thank coach Keatts for their contributions to NC State and for always representing the university with class,” said Corrigan’s statement. “He will always have an insolent place in the history of Wolfpack for the achievements of his team 2023-24 and appreciate the passion he brought to this role. We wish him already his family the best in the future.”
Keatts described the last eight years “a dream come true.”
March 1, 2025; Atlanta, Georgia, USA; The Wolfpack chief coach of the state of North Carolina, Kevin Keatts, apart against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in the first half in McCamish Pavilion. (Brett Davis-Imagn images)
“When entering this new era of university sports, I believe with all my heart that I am leaving the program in a better position to succeed than when I started, and that the basketball program will continue to thrive when it is supported at the necessary level to compete,” Keatts wrote in a social networks publication on Sunday.
Keatts was 151-113 in NC State, including 69-84 in the ACC game. His teams obtained three offers from the NCAA Tournament, the last one when Wolfpack followed a five -day trip in his first ACC tournament title since 1987 with a fair race as unexpected to the first final of the program from the late Jim Valvano led the “Cardiac Pack” to the 1983 NCAA title.
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But he could not sustain that impulse when this season became a clash, with the reorganization of the Wolfpack through the transfer portal, which had worked well enough to ensure that NC State was to the offers of the consecutive NCAA, which proves to be a great failure. NC State had only 5-15 in the League game.
March 1, 2025; Atlanta, Georgia, USA; The Wolfpack chief coach of the North Carolina state, Kevin Keatts, apart against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in the second half in McCamish Pavilion. (Brett Davis-Imagn images)
The dismissal occurs after Keatts faced multiple challenges in his mandate, beginning to stabilize a staggering program on the court and then work for years in the middle of the shadow of a federal corruption investigation into sport that was linked to the possession of the predecessor Mark Gottfried.
February 19, 2025; Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA; The Wolfpack chief coach in the state of North Carolina, Kevin Keatts, reacts in the first half at the Dean E. Smith center. (Bob Donnan-Imagn images)
That case was around for years before the program was placed in a year of probation in December 2021.
He arrived in 2017 since UNC Wilmington promising that “Kevin Keatts is a winner” at his introductory press conference. In many ways, it coincided with that, particularly after the program had touched back in the last two seasons of Gottfried after four consecutive offers of the NCAA.
Keatts began with a season of 21 wins that included eliminating the teams of Duke, UNC and Arizona highly classified before arriving at the NCAA.
