Golden Moment

Greg Kampe has been the head coach of Oakland University’s basketball team for 40 years. He is the longest tenured head coach in men’s Division I basketball and yet this season was filled with firsts.

With an older roster led by senior Trey Townsend and graduate students Blake Lampman and Jack Gohlke, Kampe’s team wasn’t viewed as contenders to win the Horizon League but rather a middle-of-the-pack team, where they had been the past four seasons. Since joining the league in 2013, Oakland had won the league once, in 2017, but had never won the tournament.

After a challenging 1-3 start to the season, Oakland would go on to win 19 of their 27 remaining games and finish with a 15-5 conference record, good enough to finish as Horizon League champions, but if they wanted a shot at a March Madness bid, they’d have to win three more games in the Horizon League Tournament.

Following close games with Purdue Fort Wayne and Cleveland State, the Golden Grizzlies found themselves facing Cleveland State in the championship game. With an outstanding 38-point, 11-rebound game from Townsend, Oakland would punch their ticket to the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament.

Kampe’s teams have been to the NCAA tournament three other times in his tenure — 2005, 2010 and 2011 — but had never won a game. While they won a play-in game against Alabama A&M in ’05, the team never made it past the first round. Odds were not in their favor this year either, having to face the blue blood Kentucky, a tournament favorite with multiple players expected to be selected in the first round of the NBA Draft.

Gohlke, however, would become an internet sensation against Kentucky. Over the course of the season, Gohlke took 364 shots, only eight of them were not threes. That trend would continue as he took 20 shots against Kentucky, all threes, making 10 of them. Townsend would add 17 points and junior DQ Cole finished with 12.

In an absolute stunner, Oakland would take down Kentucky 80-76. Kampe earned his first tournament win and got to see his team take the world by storm. Gohlke was trending on Twitter, both oakland.edu and goldengrizzlies.com crashed and 8,000 OU shirts were sold to Louisville fans, Kentucky’s biggest rival.

Unfortunately, despite Townsend’s 30-point performance, the dream run was cut short by another Cinderella team, NC State, in overtime the following round. But, for one night in March, Oakland University’s basketball team was the center of attention across the United States, which no one could have imagined.

View a full recap of the 2023-24 season.