ST. LOUIS — SLU’s Travis Ford has coaching in his bloodlines. Travis’s dad, Eddie, was a longtime high school coach in Kentucky; there is even a photo of a young Travis sitting under his dad’s seat during a game.
So was there ever a doubt that Ford would follow in his father’s footsteps and make coaching his profession?
No, but there was doubt in the young coach’s mind about whether or not he could make it his life’s work.
Before that, let’s retrace his steps from Madisonville North High School.
You might be old enough to remember that his college career began at Mizzou. He was an important bench cog on a very good Tiger team that was an upset victim in the NCAA Tournament and was then hit with penalties for recruiting violations. So, in the summer of 1990, he left Columbia to play for Rick Pitino at Kentucky. As a junior and senior he was named All-SEC, averaging 14 points and seven assists in his senior season.
By 1997 he had his first job as a head coach at Campbellsville University, a private Christian school that played at the NAIA level. A 28-3 record in his third year running the Eagles caught the eye of officials at Eastern Kentucky University, and he was hired to coach the Colonels at the ripe old age of 30.
But the job the young coach had ahead of him would be enough to get him started on collecting grey hairs.
“Probably the worst Division One program in the country,” Ford rememberd. “I think the five or six previous coaches had been fired.”
His first two EKU teams only added to that billing; Ford coaxed seven wins out of his team each season. Years three and four saw incremental progress, upping the win total from ten to fourteen, but the whispers were that Year Five would be make-or-break for Ford’s program.
“We had just continually gotten better and better but it was time to say, ‘All right, something needs to happen," Ford said.
It would be, as the coach recently looked back on his career, The Turning Point.
“You were on that fine line in your first Division One job," Ford said.
But Ford had his first EKU recruiting class heading into their senior year, and along with that experience he knew he had the tools required to be a successful coach.
"It requires you to enjoy competition, be a tireless worker, and it’s about relationships," he said.
Living proof of that relationship-building credo: one of the seniors on that team, Michael Haney, was from Ford’s hometown of Madisonville, Kentucky. Haney was the team’s second-leading scorer.
That 2004-2005 season was, in the coach’s words, “an incredible ride.”
The Colonels headed into conference play 8-3, including a win on the road at Dayton. They then picked up steam after a slow start in the Ohio Valley Conference, finishing the regular season in second place and on a four-game winning streak. Their 19 wins at that point was the most an EKU team had produced in over a decade.
The ride didn’t stop there. The Colonels beat Tennessee State at home to open the OVC tournament, and then moved on to Nashville and knocked off Southeast Missouri State and Austin Peay to capture the league crown and an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament. For the first time since 1979, the Colonels were going dancing.
The tournament committee, whether intentional or not, put together a dream matchup for Ford and his Little Team That Could. They would face Big Blue, the Kentucky Wildcats, in the opening round at Indianapolis.
What a storybook tale it would be if Ford could spring an upset against his alma mater, the state basketball behemoth. But that’s why stories like that usually only live in storybooks; EKU gave the Wildcats a workout, but eventually lost, 72-64.
For Travis Ford, he had completed the rebuilding job. Later that spring he would take on another project at UMass, and jobs at Oklahoma State and then Saint Louis University. have followed. But in the nearly two decades since that Turning Point season, the coach hasn’t forgotten its importance – to his career, and to the teams he has coached and will coach down the road. They provided a message that he preaches often.
“There’s always a certain time that’s going to make the game go one way or the other – no different than that OVC run that probably changed my coaching career," Ford said.
Ford also admitted that, like perhaps every coach, the business of relationships becomes a much more personal thing as the years go by. Such is the case with his last, and most successful Colonels team.
“I’m still close to a lot of those players that played for me at Eastern Kentucky. We kind of turned that program around," he said.