Spring 2026 49 OSU ATHLETICS P R O F I L E ↓ Lamar Hurd takes the shot during his OSU playing days. When Calabro was hired, the Blazers executives asked him what he thought about teaming with Hurd. “I’m ashamed that I didn’t think of it, to be honest with you,” he said. They made a screen test together. About 10 minutes in, Calabro recalled, “they said, ‘Stop, that’s all we need.’” As the clock ticks toward tipoff, Hurd and Calabro chatter animatedly about small forward Deni Avdija, the Blazers’ breakout player this season. “Gotta get that man to the all-star game,” Hurd says. Hurd grew up in Houston, the second son of a single mother who was herself an ardent basketball fan. On Sundays, the family returned home from church in time to watch his hometown team, the Rockets, on TV. In elementary school, he began playing — first on his Jordan Jammer, a plastic training basket, and then with a youth team — and in sixth grade, he and his older brother left home to live, for most of the week, with their coach/youth pastor. Later, when Hurd became a coach himself, it was with this role model in mind. “I wanted to be for them what my coach was for me,” he said. By the time he finished high school, he was the third-ranked point guard in Texas on a team ranked among the top 25 high school programs in the country. Recruits came calling. He committed to Baylor University in Waco, but he couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling. A few weeks later, he pulled out. On the phone, Baylor’s coach screamed, first at him, then at his coach. Hurd felt he’d made the right choice. A year later, the Baylor basketball program was wracked by scandal. There was a drug bust. One player murdered another, disposing of his body in the desert. The coach was fired. By then, Lamar Hurd was in Corvallis — safely ensconced as the starting point guard for the Oregon State Beavers. At 6:50 p.m. a buzzer sounds. As the players warm up — tonight, the Blazers face the Houston Rockets — Hurd and Calabro fill in context for the game. In a sweet intersection with Hurd’s own Houston roots, the Rockets coach, Ime Udoka, grew up in Portland. The game begins. Commentary is at times a highwire exercise in intellectual multitasking. Hurd begins to talk through fans’ high hopes for these home games before interrupting himself midstream to call a point. He and Calabro set up ideas and swap anecdotes — the analyst’s mind not so different from the player’s. After his first season, Hurd landed on several lists of NBA prospects. Then things started going sideways. He clashed with his coach. “I played the worst years of basketball in my entire life,” he said. It wasn’t all bad; even though he was injured partway through senior year, he still won the Beavers’ most valuable player award — a testament to his standing within the team — and was a first-team Pac-10 All- Academic selection. He ranked fifth in games started and tied for eighth in assists in the OSU record books. But he started to see that his sense of his own value couldn’t depend on authority figures. “It taught me to take real accountability for things I can control and to question certain things,” he said, “like, ‘How much do you really believe in yourself?’” For many college players, turning pro is the dream, and for a while after he graduated, it was Hurd’s, too. He played for a season in Germany. But back in Oregon, while awaiting a call from an NBA developmental team, he started coaching a youth program. “I loved every bit of it,” he said. “I wasn’t making any money … and I could not have been happier.” From 2009 to 2012, he ran All in One Basketball, a youth coaching and leadership organization, and then created The Other Side of Basketball, a nonprofit through which he coached and ran training camps. He visited his mentees’ schools and attended their games, encouraging self-confidence and community service as well as sharp continued COMMENTARY IS AT TIMES A HIGH-WIRE EXERCISE IN INTELLECTUAL MULTITASKING.
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