Everybody else found out in the last two weeks what we’ve known for more than a decade.

Kenny Brooks has nothing to prove.

The Waynesboro, Virginia native knows not only how to build a program but how to elevate that program to the next level. Seven years in at Virginia Tech, he’s lifted the Hokies to unprecedented heights: the Final Four, where they will meet LSU on Friday night.

Maybe you didn’t know much about Kenny Brooks until this week. He’s not a household name like Dawn Staley or Kim Mulkey. Nor is he one to surround himself with a lot of fanfare.

Brooks was greeted with skepticism after an inauspicious beginning at James Madison. Back in 2003, Brooks, after a five-year stint under JMU men’s coach Sherman Dillard,  signed on as a first-year assistant to JMU women’s basketball coach Bud Childers. A search of the archives will tell you that Childers stepped down in his sixth season with three years left on his contract following a medical leave of absence.

What the stories don’t share is what I know as a longtime women’s basketball beat writer. The Dukes revolted under Childers, refusing to practice. The problems dated back to the season before when Childers benched his starters in Harrisonburg for the first five minutes of a regionally televised game against Old Dominion in favor of sparingly used reserves.

Brooks was named interim coach in December 2003.

 The hire didn’t set well with many coaches in the CAA at the time. Brooks was considered a men’s basketball guy as that’s where the bulk of his experience was, and women’s basketball coaches were rankled. Further, rewarding player unrest by hiring the assistant they preferred and removing the head coach didn’t play out well with the coaching fraternity. I was there when one coach quipped at a postgame press conference, “My players would love to play for their assistants, too.”

From the outside, it appeared Brooks was hired to keep the seat warm, but quietly, he went to work, building his own culture. JMU was no stranger to success under longtime coach Shelia Moorman who preceded Childers and guided the program to four Sweet Sixteens. But Old Dominion, 1997 national runner-up, ruled. They were known as Lady Monarchs back then, winners of an unprecedented 17 consecutive CAA crowns in a league that almost never got the advantage of an at-large bid.

The re-emergence of JMU under Brooks coincided with the decline of ODU, which unceremoniously dumped its 600-win plus coach Wendy Larry in 2011.

Under Brooks, the Dukes won five CAA championships (2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016) with five NCAA appearances. He was named CAA Coach of the Year four times (2007, 2014, 2015, 2016) and ranks second to Larry in both CAA Tournament coaching victories (27) and victories in CAA games (220).

Brooks won with under-the-radar recruits — kids named Meredith Alexis and Tamera Young, Nikki Newman and Kirby Burkholder, Jazmon Gwathmey and Tarik Hislop. Dawn Evans and Precious Hall. These are women who entered the program as one player and left it at an entirely different level. It was mind-boggling to watch players pass through his program who didn’t always look as if they belonged in Division I as freshmen and thrive to the point of playing professionally as graduates. Alexis, Young, Burkholder, Gwathmey, Evans and Hall were all CAA Players of the Year; Newman was a two-time CAA Defensive Player of the Year.

Brooks discouraged the Mid-Major label to describe his Dukes, who always played as if they had a chip on their shoulder, something to prove. That culture was so ingrained that he couldn’t have been all that disappointed in 2019 when an inspired JMU team took down the Hokies in a third-round WNIT game, a matchup billed as Brooks’ return to Harrisonburg, his first since taking the job in Blacksburg three years earlier. It was a marvelous, magical, pre-pandemic night of basketball that ended with a 70-66 JMU triumph. An emotional Brooks felt the love afterward from former and current Dukes players as well as his own and an appreciative fan base that still considers the JMU graduate as one of theirs.

It wasn’t easy for Brooks to leave Harrisonburg. His daughters planned to attend the university. The Valley was home. But it’s hard to dismiss all that the Power 5 has to offer. Salary aside, perks like chartered flights, regular television exposure on your own conference network that transitions into being able to get into the homes of top recruits and the benefit of the doubt on Selection Sunday are pretty powerful.

Power 5 resources amplified Brooks’ ability to build the elite program Virginia Tech is today.

They also allowed the rest of the country to discover what we’ve known all along.

Image courtesy of Virginia Tech Athletics