Q&A with former Shocker basketball coach Mark Turgeon about Wichita State career

It’s been nearly two decades since the last time Mark Turgeon felt the energy inside Koch Arena, a place he spent so long raising funds to help renovate.

When he arrived to Wichita in 2000, Turgeon was 35 years old and largely unproven as a head coach taking control of a moribund program with facilities in disrepair.

By the time he left in 2007, Turgeon had helped transform Levitt Arena into Koch Arena, a top-notch basketball facility, won the Shockers their first Missouri Valley Conference championship in 23 years and rekindled the basketball spirit in Wichita with a Sweet 16 run in the 2006 NCAA Tournament.

While Gregg Marshall would ultimately take Wichita State to heights no one knew were possible, Turgeon is largely credited for reviving the program and setting the Shockers on an upward trajectory back to national relevance.

Turgeon would go on to win another championship and more NCAA Tournament games during his time at Texas A&M and Maryland, going toe-to-toe with all-time coaching greats in the Big 12, ACC and Big Ten, but his time at Wichita State — and what he built — has always held a special place in his heart.

“I’m really proud of what we were able to do in Wichita,” Turgeon told The Eagle. “We pretty much built Koch Arena and the practice facility and the locker rooms with (athletic director) Jim Schaus and (president) Don Beggs and my staff. I still take great pride in Wichita State and Shocker basketball and the city of Wichita.”

Following his recent induction into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame, Turgeon will return to the Roundhouse for Thursday’s WSU game against Northern Iowa for the first time in 17 years.

Since retiring from coaching in 2021, the 59-year-old now runs a coaching consulting business from his home in Maryland and raises money to help combat Alzheimer’s disease. In a wide-ranging interview touching on different points in his WSU career, Turgeon spoke with The Eagle for nearly 30 minutes to reflect on his time with the Shockers.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On what made Wichita State so special during his coaching career...

Turgeon: “I had two kids born in Wichita. We were young, my wife and I, when we took that job and we had some great friends there. It was a great community. It was a community that really backed you. Man, they backed us. And they believed in us. And it was special. I loved everywhere that I coached and everywhere had its unique experiences, but I probably had the most fun in my coaching career in Wichita. I think we were 286 in the RPI when we took that job over and we ended up taking it to a Sweet 16. That was a special seven years of our lives.”

On how much he matured as a head coach with the Shockers...

Turgeon: “I was always confident as a head coach. I always believed in what I was teaching and what we were doing. But where I really grew was from the great leadership I had in Jim Schaus and Don Beggs. They taught me a lot about how to handle myself and run a program. They were instrumental in my success and our success there. And then I coached against so many great coaches in the Missouri Valley like Dana Altman, Tom Davis, Greg McDermott, Ben Jacobson, Bruce Weber, Matt Painter, Barry Hinson, Jim Molinari, Jim Les. I was able to cut my teeth against some absolutely great coaches. I learned so much coaching against those cats. I was young and I was able to learn and get better. I think professionally, Wichita is where I grew the most because of the coaches that I had to coach against.”

On what it was like coaching at a sold-out Koch Arena...

Turgeon: “I’ll be honest, it always weighed on me. I felt like I had the whole town resting on me to be successful. I felt the pressure at times to do great things, but what I loved is that the fans were always there for us. I remember in Year 4, we were selling out games and started to get a wait list and we lost a bad one on the road and we came home and it probably snowed about 12 inches and we were playing a team that wasn’t picked very high. I remember saying to myself, ‘Well, the sell-out streak is going to end and I don’t blame them.’ I remember walking out of the tunnel and man, if it wasn’t sold out with standing-room only again. That was just an amazing feeling to know that so many people cared so much about your program and what you were doing. I consider myself very lucky to be a part of that.”

On the double-overtime NIT loss to Florida State in 2004...

Turgeon: “The game was sold out in like an hour. From the tip, no one sat down until the end. To this day, I still don’t know how Florida State beat us. We were winning and winning and winning and then we lost. We played really well and Florida State played well and it was one hell of a game. You always have losses that stick with you and that was one of them where I felt like our kids played well enough and our fans deserved to win. They hit an incredible shot falling out of bounds in the corner away from our bench. It was the only time in the game the building got quiet. It was just an incredible atmosphere. Very cool to be a part of. That was one of those nights where the city just lost its mind and was totally into what we were doing at Wichita State.”

On when he knew Wichita State was on the cusp of something great...

Turgeon: “I always felt like we had it going in the right direction. I remember my third year when we were redoing Koch Arena and we had to play out at the Kansas Coliseum and we were playing off campus and we were practicing at the student center and our locker room was at the student center. That wasn’t easy. But we lost a home game to K-State (to fall to 3-3)and they had better players than us, but it was Year 3 and they got us. Everybody was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if this kid is going to make it here.’ I disagreed with them. I knew we were on the right track. We ended up beating (No. 12-ranked) Creighton (for WSU’s first ranked win since 1990). I loved going to the NIT and loved being part of postseasons, but I never really felt like we did something special until we made our run in the NCAA Tournament. We were getting better and doing things the right way and we had built this new arena and had this incredible fan base that was selling out every game, but I felt like we just kept coming up a little bit short until we got into the dance. And I thought we deserved to get in (2005).”

On winning Wichita State’s first Valley championship in 23 years in 2006...

Turgeon: “People forget that we sent four teams to the NCAA Tournament and two to the Sweet 16 with us and Bradley that year and we won that league by two games. We really had an incredibly successful season. I don’t think people realized how good the Valley was that year and I don’t think the league was ever the same after that year. It was just a special, special year. I remember when we won the league and we cut down the nets, everybody just savored the win. It wasn’t like people took off after the game. The building was still full when we walked off the court 45 minutes after the game. I think it was FOX who used to cover the Valley and they stayed on for 30 minutes afterward and covered our postgame celebration cutting the nets down. I was always fighting the Valley trying to tell them that we were the team of the league, not Creighton or Northern Iowa. I felt like they were giving those guys all of the love and I would fist fight anybody to make sure they knew Wichita State was the team in the Valley and we proved it that year.”

On Wichita State’s 80-73 win over Tennessee to punch a ticket to the 2006 Sweet 16...

Turgeon: “We won our first game against Seton Hall pretty easily and we were pretty confident going into Tennessee. Even though they were a 2 seed, we felt like we matched up pretty well. We were fortunate because Bruce Pearl actually worked for (Drake coach) Tom Davis and they kind of ran the same system. I wouldn’t say it was an easy prep, it’s never easy in 48 hours, but we had a game plan going against them because we had coached against Tom Davis twice a year for five years and that helped prepare us for that game. P.J. Couisnard (20 points) was terrific. Shoot, that game could have gone either way and then all of a sudden it was over. What a relief it was. Having our fan base there, it was really cool. Whenever you can do something that a program hasn’t done in a long time, it’s a lot of fun and to do it with a great fan base, people who truly cared about the program, that makes it even more special.”

On the Shockers’ 63-55 loss to George Mason in the Sweet 16...

Turgeon: “I guess growing up in Kansas, I didn’t realize there were going to be 22,000 George Mason fans who were going to be there in Washington, D.C. I figured UConn would have their share, we would have our share, Washington would have their share. But it was an incredibly charged arena and to be honest, I thought we played really well just to keep the game close. They were a terrific team playing at a really high level. I just remember coaching as hard as I could that game just to keep it close because they were playing at such a high level in such an energized building.”

On his decision to stay the next season at WSU following the Sweet 16 run...

Turgeon: “I loved my leadership. I loved the fan base. We had built that thing up from RPI 286 to a Sweet 16 team. I was really proud of what we did. I remember we had our end-of-season banquet and there were probably like 3,000 people there and it was the elephant in the room. It was bad timing and I just wanted to get that out of the way. It was absolutely the right decision at the time and I wouldn’t change a thing about that decision.”

On what went wrong during a 17-14 season in his final year with the Shockers...

Turgeon: “We had a great start and we had a big target on our back, then if you look back, we just had so many injuries. Sean Ogirri got hurt, Matt Braeuer got hurt, P.J. Couisnard got hurt. Kyle Wilson was hurt. They tried to play through it, but we just didn’t have the depth and we just couldn’t overcome the injuries. And then we just lost a lot of close games. We just didn’t have the man power. It was a disappointing way to leave, but leaving after a Sweet 16 would have been disappointing too. To not enjoy what you had worked so hard for, I wanted to stick around and enjoy that.”

On what it was like to see Wichita State continue to rise to new heights after he left...

Turgeon: “We went there and it was a low-major program and when we left there it was a high-major program. We had the recruiting going. We had 1,500 people on the waiting list for tickets. We had just got the private planes where they needed to be for recruiting. And I thought we left the program in incredible shape. We left three starters off a Sweet 16 team. It wasn’t like we destroyed it and then left. We made it great and then Jim (Schaus) made a tremendous hire. And I pushed for him to hire Gregg (Marshall) because I had a great respect for Gregg. And Gregg and I talked a lot during his time there. It was really cool to see. I still have a tremendous amount of pride in the program.”

On if he believes Wichita State can return to a top-25 program in the new landscape of college basketball...

Turgeon: “100%, no doubt in my mind they can get back there. That is one basketball-crazy town that is going to do whatever it takes to be successful. They got the right guys in there now. They got the right AD (in Kevin Saal) and they’ve got the right guy in coach (Paul) Mills. They’re going to get this thing going. I don’t think there’s any question, it’s just a matter of time. It’s not if, it’s when.”

On if he ever considered what his career would be like if he remained at Wichita State...

Turgeon: “Well thank God I left because Gregg (Marshall) took them to a Final Four. But it is one of those things now that you’re retired, you lay in your bed and wonder, ‘What if I would have stayed at Wichita State for 25 years and never left and did my whole career here?’ I don’t think about it like, ‘How many games could we have won?’ I think about what it would have been like to stay in one place and what it would have been like for my family to stay in Wichita my whole career. Then you think about what an adventure and journey my family has had. The people we’ve met all over the United States, the success we had at other places. So I wouldn’t trade it. It was God’s plan, not my plan. Every step was there for a reason and I learned a lot about myself and I got to see a lot of the United States because of it. I loved every single second of it. It was a great run and a great journey.”