Where are they now? Kory Barnett

New Oral Roberts coach reflects on faith, Rochester upbringing

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

Kory Barnett has been the men’s basketball coach at Oral Roberts University for less than four months, and the days remain a whirlwind as he puts together a roster and coaching staff.

But having said that, the journey for Barnett, a 2008 Rochester grad, getting a Division I head coaching job was one that relied on a painstaking accumulation of tasks and was one of faith. 

“It’s like drinking through a fire hose,” Barnett said. “Every day the fire hose gets a little bit smaller. But the process was pretty wild.”

Barnett spent the 2024-25 season as an assistant coach at West Virginia on Darian DeVries’ staff. DeVries left West Virginia after one season to take the Indiana job March 19.

“Coach DeVries left West Virginia, and I was trying to figure out what was next,” Barnett said. “If that was the right move to follow there … I was just praying about where God wanted me and this job opened up and was my main focus, and I was very much locked in to put myself in a position to take over this program. I came into the interview having no idea where I was in the pecking order. Would I have a good chance? And then I ended up getting the job, and then you have the job, and nobody really talks about that moment.

“Once I was selected the head coach and they gave me that honor, it’s like OK, your press conference will be tomorrow, and you need to hire a staff, you need a whole new team, you need to figure out a budget, and now all the things. Thankfully, I had a bunch of conversations with some mentors of mine that have told me throughout the years just to be really prepared as you can and to just have like a head coach’s playbook, so when the moment comes, you have something you can turn to that you’ve already prepared for a lot of those moments so you’re not just flying by the seat of your pants every other second. So I had been somewhat prepared, but you’re never fully prepared until you’re in the moment. So it’s been chaos, but thankfully, I was blessed enough to find a bunch of incredible men to join me on this journey.”

‘CEO mentality’

Barnett said he was tipped off before Oral Roberts had a vacancy that the job might become vacant and that it might be a fit given Barnett’s strong faith and the role that faith plays in education there.

He did his research, and when the job became open, Barnett had his agent contact the person running the search firm for the university.

Barnett was asked if Oral Roberts, which is located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, pursued him or if he pursued the school.

“My name had already been thrown around, so it was kind of a mixture of both, but it was something I definitely pursued,” Barnett said.

Barnett said he interviewed twice for the job – a Zoom interview from Morgantown, W.V., with the board from Oral Roberts and another interview in person a few weeks later.

Oral Roberts athletic director Tim Johnson said he wanted somebody who fit the university and somebody who brought connections and experience in recruiting. He also wanted somebody with a “CEO mentality” who could oversee a lot.

Barnett had overseen a lot. After a four-year playing career as a walk-on at Indiana ended in 2012, then-coach Tom Crean hired Barnett as a graduate assistant on his staff.

Barnett said that role focused on player development, and he worked with players like Jordan Hulls, Victor Oladipo, Cody Zeller and Will Sheehey for a year.

Then he took a job as an assistant on Steve Alford’s staff at UCLA, where he worked in video and analytics.

“So it’s creating not only the video breakdown and studying the game and the numbers and how do we create our edge and who are we, but then it’s also creating the UCLA brand and how to sell our program and connect what we do to such a powerful brand, so I learned a lot about messaging and how to connect with recruits while I was there, and then I started my recruiting journey,” Barnett said.

UCLA fired Alford in December 2018, but Alford got the Nevada job in April 2019, and Barnett followed him there, where he took on the role of “defensive coordinator” on the coaching staff. Barnett was again broadening his knowledge base.

“So now I’m locked in on how do we get stops, what kept me up late, how do we really communicate the details to help win at a championship level,” Barnett said.

Barnett said his decision to leave Nevada and take a job at West Virginia was “one of the hardest decisions of my life,” both because of his relationship with Steve and wife Tanya Alford and because he and his family loved living in Reno. But it allowed him to work in the Big 12, annually one of the top conference’s nationally.

Barnett said he spent his year at West Virginia focusing on offense. He said the West Virginia year away from the Alfords allowed him to get “uncomfortable” and helped get him ready to be a head coach.

“I go to West Virginia and get back to offense like I was at UCLA and get to study the offense again,” Barnett said. “I think just the blessing of my journey was I got to really check a lot of boxes of what goes into an entire program and oversee it all. That way, I could find a lot of really good men who could come and join me on the staff and direct them very clearly of my expectations and what I believe leads to a championship program.”

Putting together a coaching staff

One of his first hires to his coaching staff was Kory Alford, Steve’s son, after a five-year run as the head coach at Huntington University. He said all of his staff hires have a variety of experiences learning from other coaches that he wants to mold with his own beliefs.

Barnett said he and Kory Alford had an informal agreement that when one of them would get a Division I head coaching job, that person would hire the other.

“He’s one of my best friends to be honest with you,” Barnett said of Kory Alford. “We started this journey together. He was still playing at UCLA when I first started. As soon as he was done, he joined me, and we were in the trenches together. We studied the game. We broke it down into the simplest forms. We created an offensive playbook with what our terminology would be, how we would teach it, how we would simplify it, how we would modernize it, how we would stay on the cutting edge with how the game changes, and I think him and I doing that together throughout our years prepared us for this moment.”

One of the biggest differences between being a head coach and an assistant coach is the time spent communicating with the media. Teams can build their own narrative through social media, but outside sources also play a role.

“My biggest thing to recruits or our boosters or our fans is I want them to be a part of this,” Barnett said. “It’s not just us building it. It’s whoever comes into this program, they have to know what our why is, what our focus is and really help us build a championship program in the right way.”

Barnett said that mastering the details that helps teams win on the margins during the season starts now.

“I think what happens a lot in our industry is guys don’t fully realize that it’s not what happens in November, December, January, February and March. Is it incredibly important to be locked in during those times? Yes, and you have to do a little bit of the study during the season because you’re studying your opponent, but a lot of it comes right now. June, July, August and September are so critically important because right now we’re having meeting after meeting on the details that will matter at the end of the game in those big months of January and February, and I want to be so locked in to be able to create the margin to focus on the details when we get to that moment and not have to sit for hours and stay up all night and lose a lot of our quick edge of our decision making. We need to build that in now. It needs to become a habit. Like it’s the old saying, you follow your own training.”

His goals are set high for his teams at Oral Roberts.

“I want us to be the hardest playing, most passionate, most connected team in the country,” Barnett said.

Growing up in Rochester

Barnett said he moved around a lot growing up before settling in Rochester when he was in middle school.

“Rochester was a huge pivotal moment in my life,” Barnett said. “Similar to my kids, I moved around a lot with my dad, my mom and my sister growing up. Rochester ended up being home, and I hadn’t really had a true home prior because we just moved from Florida to Michigan to Indiana to Alabama to North Carolina to Oregon and then finally back to Indiana, where we really put in roots, and I was there middle school, high school and college.”

A versatile 6-5 wing, Rochester went 66-26 in Barnett’s four years on the varsity playing for Rob Malchow. That included sectional titles in 2006 and 2007.

Malchow set the Rochester career wins record in February and retired after the season.

“Being with Coach Malchow there was awesome,” Barnett said. “I’ve tried to keep in close touch with him and follow his journey and be in touch as much as I can. Obviously, we’re both very busy, but I learned a lot just in terms of the discipline that it takes.”

Barnett called Rochester “blue collar” and a place where family really matters.

“I want the same for my kids, and it’s a place I hope Tulsa can become for us that we can build something really special here that my kids grow up, and this is the place they can always go back to and call home,” Barnett said.

Barnett’s high school career had a heartbreaking ending. Fouled in the act of shooting a 3-pointer against Plymouth with the Zebras trailing 49-46 in the final seconds of overtime in the 2008 sectional semifinals, he made the first two free throws but missed the third.

Plymouth rebounded and made two free throws and went on to win 51-48, ending the Zebras’ 17-5 season.

Had Rochester won the sectional, Barnett would not have been able to go on spring break. But since he missed, he went on spring break and met a girl from Little Rock, Arkansas, named Sarah. She was a senior like he was.

They started a long-distance relationship and will be married 13 years in August. They are parents to sons Brooks, 7, and Blake, 4.

“I joke with some of my players that just telling them the stories of you don’t know why God does things at times,” Barnett said. “You don’t know why things happen to you, but that was the best missed free throw of my life.”

Excited for Luke Smith

Barnett ascended to his first head coaching job just as his former teammate Luke Smith got his first head coaching job at Rochester. He calls Smith “one of my best friends in the world” and said they text all the time, often bouncing basketball ideas off one another.

He also called Kavan Hoff, Carter Walley and Nate Wottring “best friends” and said they have come to some of his games.

He had huge praise for Smith, who spent eight years as an assistant on Malchow’s staff before replacing him in May.

“He’s got such a heart for others,” Barnett said. “I didn’t know if he’d be able to balance it with his family just because of how much he loves his family and how great he is at the job that he has. I think it’s an incredible blessing for Rochester. I think he’s just a great human being that’s just wise in the right place. He’s a great basketball mind. He cares about his players, and I think the biggest thing for him is he wanted to give back what everybody gave to us. Both Luke and I, there are so many people who sacrificed for us to be in the positions that we are.”

‘It’s everything to me’

Barnett peppers his answers with words like “blessings” and “journey,” and he incorporates his faith into his daily routine every day at 5 a.m. It is also another way to connect with his players.

He said his faith balances against the “chaos” of coaching big-time college basketball.

“It’s everything to me,” Barnett said. “I talk about all the different things that changed my basketball coaching career, but the biggest thing – and it isn’t even close –was when Steve Alford allowed me to take over chapels at Nevada. We had a chaplain just drop out on the road. He wasn’t able to make it, so I was like, ‘Hey, do you mind if I give the Word today?’ And we have a chapel every game day, and he gave me that blessing, and then I became our road chaplain for three or four years then on, and I kept that at West Virginia, and it just gave me a different pathway to connect with our players and to talk about the spiritual side, which is everything to me.

“My Lord and Savior is why I do what I do.”