Celebrating Cuonzo Martin’s Success

The Boiling Point: Former Purdue great and assistant coach Cuonzo Martin has Missouri State in line for the NCAA Tournament after winning the school’s first Missouri Valley Conference title.

The Gene Keady coaching tree has a couple thriving branches right now, and one of them is down at Missouri State where Cuonzo Martin is in his third season. If you’ve never met Martin, he’s a great guy and a Keady disciple everyone should root for (until he gets a job in the Big Ten and faces Purdue twice a year).

If you don’t know his story then check out this great feature written in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Keady had this to say about Martin in the story.

"“I don’t like to put labels on any of my players,” said Keady, now assisting at St. John’s. “But in 50 years of coaching, he’s the best leader I ever had. We’d make adjustments at halftime, and he’d go out and do them. He’d have everybody on the floor straightened out.”"