Kevin Hervey’s star rising right along with UTA basketball

There was a moment this off-season that made UT Arlington coach Scott Cross realize he had someone special on his hands.

After withstanding nearly 15 minutes of a 6-on-4 toughness drill that pits four defenders against a four-man team while two guys with padded elbows make things miserable for them, Kevin Hervey had enough.

“I told Coach, ‘you think we’re not tough? Put your toughest dudes in there and let’s see if they can stop me,’ ” Hervey said. “I didn’t say us, I said me because I was so heated.”

So Cross put his four most trusted defenders out there expecting to be done within 5 minutes, but because of Hervey, his “bulldogs” couldn’t get off the court for 20 minutes.

Because of how close that brought the team together, Hervey is convinced that drill was the catalyst behind arguably the best start in school history.

One thing is for sure — UTA has a bona fide star on its hands in Hervey.

“We saw glimpses of it last year. I remember seeing him flash here and there and thinking, ‘I like this kid,’ ” Cross said. “But you could see the metamorphosis that day. He’d be angry at me for working him so hard, but you can definitely see his offensive ability.”

Recently measured at just under 6-foot-9, Hervey has been the centerpiece of a Mavericks team that knocked off Ohio State and Memphis en route to a 9-2 start. He’s scoring 17.5 points and grabbing 9.7 boards a game, all while playing a perimeter position on the court.

He’s caught the eye of the national media, and NBA scouts are starting to notice his evolution into a legitimate professional prospect.

So how did such a dynamic talent land at UTA?

For one thing, he was a late-bloomer. As a freshman at Arlington Bowie, all he did was shoot. Coaches hounded him to learn how to do something other than shoot, and it took a while for the message to sink in. When he didn’t get much playing time on the Dallas Showtime, his AAU team, he committed himself to learning what he had to do to stay on the court.

“I was 6-foot-1 and kind of chubby, and I couldn’t rebound, I couldn’t play defense. All I could do was shoot,” Hervey said. “Luckily, I grew three or four inches and I started to expand my game from there.”

He finally made a name for himself his junior year at Bowie, where he came off the bench with one goal in mind — be better than the other team’s bench players. As he started rebounding his junior year, college programs began noticing an athletic, 6-foot-5 forward with shot-making ability.

He started getting calls from South Florida, Oklahoma, Richmond and Vanderbilt, while nearby UT Arlington was in search of someone with the versatility to play anywhere on the court.

Assistant coaches Greg Young and Andre Patterson kept a close eye on Hervey’s progress, and with a number of Division I schools interested in seeing what he would do during his senior season, he had a setback.

A few months before his senior season began, Hervey felt a pop in his knee and went down to the ground. Hervey tore his anterior cruciate ligament in the most pivotal year of his high school career. He managed to return for a couple of playoff games, but his chance to lead his team was gone.

Other programs still wanted Hervey, but none of them expected him to play his freshman year. And since he’d just sat out his senior year, Hervey didn’t want to redshirt and miss two seasons in a row.

UTA felt the same way. Mavericks coaches made an official visit to Hervey’s house, where Cross said he enjoyed some of the “best bread pudding [he’d] ever had.” They made an official offer and invited him to visit the campus soon. After all, they had an ace up their sleeve — they signed Erick and Derrick Neal, two electric players with big-time potential.

“The day [he] committed, coach Cross called me and said ‘Hey Kevin, we’ve got the twins coming. Now we just need you,’ ” Hervey said.

Derrick Neal eventually opted to play football at Kansas, but it didn’t matter. Hervey signed with UTA, and he scored 13 points while starting the first game of the season as a freshman last year.

Paired with Erick Neal, Kaelon Wilson and Julian Harris, they came to be four of the most exciting freshmen in recent memory. They even made a pact after the first few games to make sure they fill the arena for UTA games by the time they graduate.

It didn’t take nearly that long. Because of what Hervey and the Mavericks have done to open this season, attendance figures have jumped 1,000 per game (2,051 to 3,052).

They’re consistently ranked in the mid-major top 25 and they’ve earned praise nationwide for their physical brand of basketball. And while they have the overall depth Cross has been building for years, they might have the first NBA-caliber player in team history.

“What makes him special is his feel for the game and his grounded nature. He never gets too high or too low, and that’s a testament to his upbringing,” Cross said.

Driven by a family who taught him to work for everything he has, he’s focused on getting his business degree. To them, basketball is secondary.

“With all these accolades I’m getting, people are saying ‘you’re great, Kevin,’ ” he said. “To my family, they still look at me as Kevin. They’re looking for a degree. They don’t look at the basketball side.”

There’s a feeling among the coaching staff that they lucked into Hervey. They rave that he’s a great kid with a great head on his shoulders, a quality they look for on the recruiting trail.

But for him to turn into one of the most intriguing players in the nation in less than two years caught everyone by surprise.

“We knew he’d be good, but we didn’t know he’d be as good as he is so fast,” Cross said.

The same could be said about UT Arlington, the upstart team that people are starting to notice.

This story was originally published December 22, 2015 at 3:21 PM with the headline "Kevin Hervey’s star rising right along with UTA basketball."