In his 27 years of coaching basketball, Frank Martin has encountered few challenges he could not stare down.
It’s his trademark, his imprint on the collective consciousness of college basketball. It’s also representative of the mentality that carried him through successful stints as a high school coach and, years down the road, at Kansas State. Now, the 46-year-old Miami native is settling in at South Carolina, a 1,100-mile relocation to a program that has wallowed in on-court inconsistency since the early 1970s.
Don’t expect him to blink at that. He hasn't yet.
“He has, sometimes, a larger-than-life personality. I’ve often heard him referred to as the guy with ‘The Stare,’” said Ole Miss coach Andy Kennedy, who coached with Martin under Bob Huggins at Cincinnati. "I think in this day and age, as it relates to South Carolina, they need a personality such as Frank's."
Martin's basketball acumen will, at least in the beginning, be tested more than his disposition in Columbia, where he inherits not only a team that finished 2-14 in the Southeastern Conference but one that will compete without many of its top players from a year ago. The Gamecocks' best player, Malik Cooke, graduated. Two of the top three scorers from last year won't be returning — Damontre Harris and Anthony Gill both transferred — while the other, Bruce Ellington, may stick with the other larger-than-life personality on campus, football coach Steve Spurrier.
No, the talent is certainly not on par with the conference heavyweights.
Former coach Darrin Horn left behind a tall task – one that many would shy away from – but South Carolina athletic director Eric Hyman might have found one of the few to look the problem right in the eye.
"Obviously, one of the things he’s been really good at is recruiting and he infused that [Kansas State] program with really good talent," Missouri coach Frank Haith said. "But I think the one thing that stands out with Frank, and I think that should not be overlooked, is his ability to coach his guys up and get them to play at a certain level with intensity and passion."
Martin will desperately need both of those intangibles present and accounted for in the early going. It still might not be enough.
In the Gamecocks’ division alone, Billy Donovan boasts multiple national titles at Florida, Vanderbilt hoisted the 2012 conference tournament trophy and Missouri enters the fold fresh off a top-5 finish during last year's regular season. And while South Carolina's top returning scorer averaged just 6.8 points per game last season, Kentucky has reloaded with more NBA-caliber talent validated by a newly-stitched banner hanging from the rafters of Rupp Arena.
Frank Martin has heard all the names, and he respects them immensely. His optimism overflowed through the phone lines on Monday's teleconference when he called the SEC "the most underrated league in the country."
He's well aware of the path ahead.
"Getting them to understand the differences in how we’ll play, the structure, the understanding, the trust is a new system – which is the most important part because you’re asking players to change so they have to trust in the change – that takes time," Martin said. "It just doesn’t happen. That’s been the biggest challenge."
The Big 12 infusion into the SEC standings should, to some extent, lighten the burden.
Martin knows Missouri and Texas A&M well from his time at Kansas State. Arkansas coach Mike Anderson is one season removed from his own stint at Missouri. Indeed, there were many familiar faces at the conference coaches' meetings a month ago. But coaching fellowship won't prevent league foes from readying themselves to keep South Carolina a conference afterthought.
The only way the new Gamecocks coach is to truly know the mettle of his young roster — and to accurately gauge his SEC competition — will be to see it in live-game action on the typically hostile nights in Rupp or Thompson-Boling Arena or the O’Connell Center.
"I don’t care how many scouting reports I read, you don’t really have a feel for teams and style of play completely off of film," he said. "You feel it when you go in and compete against those teams and you see it firsthand. You gotta go through it."
He'll go through it soon enough with this inexperienced squad. He'll take his lumps, too.
Martin said that it wasn't until halfway through the first season that his former Wildcats began to jell, to form the confidence in his rough-and-tumble style that, as his career 117-54 record attests to, is proven at the Division I level.
Although his new rivals may disagree, expect it to take even longer this time around.
"He imposes his will from Day One. I’m sure he’s in the process of doing that with the South Carolina program and I don’t have any doubts that he’ll have that program winning and winning big soon," Kennedy said.
Kennedy's glass-half-full approach for this South Carolina roster is likely a product of the unknown, a consequence of blind prognostication.
Frank Martin, on the other hand, has seen the deterrents ahead.
But he won't take his eyes off them.
