Former hockey GM, Texas Tech’s Mark Adams is now a coach of the year finalist
Should Texas Tech win its next game in the NCAA Tournament, Mike Krzyzewski’s career at Duke will end at the hands of the former general manager of the Lubbock Cotton Kings hockey team.
This type of feather is consistent with the rest of those by Texas Tech men’s basketball coach Mark Adams, whose career in sports includes time as a Golden Gloves boxer and a run as the GM of a minor league hockey team in Lubbock, Texas.
The irony is that while Adams is the most popular figure these days at Texas Tech and in Lubbock, there was a time when both were sick of his hockey shtick and wanted him gone.
Those days are forgotten. Today, Mark Adams is the celebrated West Texan who didn’t bail on Texas Tech.
Mark Adams and three-seed Texas Tech will play two-seed Duke in the Sweet 16 on Thursday night in San Francisco.
Don’t be surprised if Tech defeats Duke. Nothing about Mark Adams is a surprise, even if his being in the Sweet 16 is more shocking than that of 15-seed St. Peter’s.
Mark Adams should not be here, and yet no one earned this more than he did. He’s 65 years old, in his first season ever as a Division I head coach, and he’s in the Sweet 16.
On Thursday, Adams was named one of the four finalists for the Naismith Coach of the Year award; the other finalists are Tommy Lloyd of Arizona, Ed Cooley of Providence, and Greg Gard of Wisconsin.
In the spring of 1997, Adams left college basketball despite the fact he spent more than 15 years climbing his way up on the sport’s lower levels at places like Clarendon College, Wayland Baptist, West Texas A&M and UT-Pan American.
Rather than continue with basketball, he instead became the general manager and part owner (with his twin brother) of the startup Lubbock Cotton Kings of the Western Professional Hockey League. The club started play in the fall of 1999, and played in the now-demolished Lubbock Municipal Coliseum.
“Mark is a salesman. He loves selling the potatoes as much as he loves selling the meat,” said Chris Due, the Lubbock Kings former communications director and radio voice. Due is a Fort Worth native who graduated from Castleberry High School in 1994.
“He was a general manager, but he was not making personnel decisions. The coaches did that,” Due said. “Mark was speaking to the Lion’s Club. He was constantly selling. He was trying to build boxes on ice level to sell more tickets.”
This did not prevent a man who had zero background in hockey from lobbying his coaches with some sound hockey game strategy. Adams was known to visit with his coaches to talk hockey — not selling hockey — but playing hockey. Yet he couldn’t play hockey. He is West Texas born and bred. Mark Adams’ background was basketball.
“It was hard for hockey coaches to convince Mark there are five skaters on the ice with a goalie and you can’t run a box-and-one like you would in basketball,” Due said. “Mark would say to the coaches, ‘We have to get a fight going,’ because he knew it would generate interest.”
Mark Adams didn’t know hockey strategy, but he knew how to sell hockey tickets. From 2001 to 2007, the Lubbock Cotton Kings averaged over 4,395 fans, a solid figure for unaffiliated minor league hockey.
In the spring of 2004, however, basketball pulled Adams out of hockey. He left his role with the Cotton Kings to become the head basketball coach at Howard College in Big Spring.
During that time Adams and his now late brother, Matt, kept their hands in hockey but their time in Lubbock didn’t end well.
Lubbock Municipal Coliseum was in bad shape; the Texas Tech basketball teams played there from 1956 to 1999. The city owned everything “above” the ground at the location, and Texas Tech owned everything below the ground.
A new ice machine was needed to produce the actual surface for the hockey games, and there was considerable disagreement about who should pay for what, and who owned what after it was purchased.
“Mark’s point was the building can’t survive without us, and the city said we can live without the Cotton Kings,” said Due, who currently works for Lubbock Christian University in its athletic department.
In June of 2007, the Cotton Kings suspended operations and Lubbock has not had a team, or a sheet of ice, since then. The Coliseum was demolished in the spring of 2019.
By the time he returned to coaching in 2004, Adams still had some controlling interest in minor league hockey teams but his focus was basketball.
As much as he is a salesman, he’s a coach first.
“He was really good at surrounding himself with good people, but he’s going to break at you at first,” Due said. “There is a micro-manage aspect to him because he doesn’t trust you until he trusts you. Then, it’s awesome.”
Whether it’s his time as a boxer, as a low level head coach at small private Christian schools, or his time as a minor league hockey GM, Mark Adams’ path to become a Power 5 men’s basketball coach is unlike that of anyone else in his sport.
Considering that Coach K has been the ultimate salesman of the college game, it would be only fitting to have another salesman send him into retirement.
This story was originally published March 24, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
