The coach’s wife who understands: Georgette Keatts enjoying NC State’s Final Four ride

Georgette Keatts was accompanying her youngest son, Kaden, to a youth soccer tournament in Phoenix in December when she said she had a fanciful thought.

“I told Kaden, ‘You know the Final Four is here. It would be great if we could come back,’” she said Thursday.

And they did come back. All of them.

Kevin Keatts has brought his N.C. State basketball team to the Final Four, where it will face Purdue on Saturday in the NCAA semifinals. His oldest son, K.J, the one they call “Ghost,” is on the team. Kaden is back with his mother, Kevin’s wife of almost 24 years.

“I’m blessed, I really am,” Kevin Keatts said Thursday. “Family is very important to you. It’s a very valuable thing ... to have that support group.

“My wife is a complete coach’s wife. She understands.”

Kevin and Georgette attended the same high school, Heritage High in Lynchburg, Virginia. They were in the same circle of high-school friends, she said, but never dated. Kevin played football and basketball. Georgette was a cheerleader.

Both went off to college, she said, but ran into each other in Lynchburg during a break in school. Kevin asked her out to lunch. She agreed. They began dating.

Flash forward and it has been quite the basketball journey for the two. Being a coach’s wife often means having to be mobile, able to pack up the family, move and get settled in elsewhere as quickly as possible. It can mean some tearful goodbyes to friends. The moms are the anchors of the family.

“It’s a lot of hard work,” Georgette Keatts said in an N&O interview. “It takes a lot of dedication and determination. Number one, you want to keep your family going. Number two, to support your husband.”

Keatts, in his seventh season at N.C. State, has weathered his critics, won an ACC championship and has his team two wins away from a national championship. But late in the season, social media was filled with the constant scuttlebutt – and some nastiness – about Keatts and whether he should or would be fired.

The criticism heightened when the Pack lost the last four games of the regular season, dropping to 17-14 overall and 9-11 in the ACC, slipping to the 10th seed for the ACC Tournament.

Mom’s advice to her sons: ignore it as best you can.

“We didn’t look too much into it and kept it as a closed circle,” K.J. Keatts said Thursday.

To which Georgette added, “Definitely.”

“(Kaden) is a 10th-grader in high school and K.J. of course a sophomore in college. They hear things and see things on (social) media from people who really don’t know what’s going on inside.

“Of course, with Twitter they can voice any opinion they want. But unless they’re inside the program, they don’t know what’s going on.”

Georgette said she would “take a peek” at social media from time to time, saying, “I try not to scroll too much, because I get it and I understand.

“You have ‘Twitter warriors’ out there who think they know more basketball than what’s actually going on. I try to tell the boys not to worry about it.”

Georgette said she went to all the home games, and that there were some butterflies. Jim Valvano’s wife, Pam, would nervously pace the concourse during Wolfpack games in the 1980s, listening to the crowd to gauge how well, or poorly, the game was going.

Georgette said she stays put in her seat.

“Growing up I was a cheerleader, I always loved sports,” she said, smiling. “So I’m always cheering and jumping up and down, yelling and screaming.”

She said a coach’s wife, much like the coach, needs thick skin. There will be comments made during game she does not like. The thicker the skin, the better.

“You do, you do,” she said. “You want everybody to be cheering for your husband, whether they’re doing good or bad. I try to keep everybody around me happy and encouraged.”

That can be hard when a team suffers some close, tough losses. Georgette said even in the darker moments of the season she sensed something good, something special could happen.

“I knew early on this team had a lot of potential,” she said. “But with a lot of transfers and new pieces, you just never know when they’re going to come together.

“You see glimpses of it early on and it was like, ‘Oh, he had a good game’ and then ‘Oh, he had a good game.’ I always thought if they could get it all together at one time, they could make a run.”

It all came together for the Wolfpack in Washington, D.C. – a run of five wins in five days to win the ACC title. They’ve now made it nine straight wins in reaching the Final Four.

And the Keatts family has come to Phoenix. During Kevin Keatts’ press conference Thursday, Georgette sat nearby.

“I don’t know how to put it into words,” the coach said. “My family means everything to me.”