How Marquette’s Tyler Kolek Went From Unheralded Recruit To Potential Big East Player Of The Year

Before this season, the Big East’s men’s basketball coaches projected Marquette to finish ninth in the 11-team league. The forecast seemed understandable. After all, the Golden Eagles lost three of their top four scorers and didn’t add any high profile transfers.

Tyler Kolek, Marquette’s point guard, didn’t see it that way. At the conference’s media day in October at Madison Square Garden, Kolek was asked about the ninth place projection.

“F—- ‘em,” Kolek said.

This week, Marquette is returning to MSG for the Big East tournament as the top seed with their opening game on Thursday at noon against the winner of Wednesday’s St. John’s-Butler game. The Golden Eagles (25-6 overall, 17-3 in the conference) won their first Big East regular season title and are No. 6 in the Associated Press poll, their highest ranking in 45 years. They are likely to move up when the latest poll is announced on Monday as two teams ranked ahead of them (Alabama and Kansas) lost on Saturday.

And Kolek, who was named a unanimous first-team All-Big East selection on Sunday, is the favorite to win the league’s player of the year award, which will be announced on Wednesday. He is also one of 15 players, and the only player from the Big East, named to the late season watch list for the Oscar Robertson Trophy, a national player of the year award from the U.S. Basketball Writers Association.

Kolek, who transferred to Marquette from George Mason before last season, is second in the nation with 7.9 assists per game and sixth with a 3.3 assist-to-turnover ratio. He is averaging 12.7 points per game, as well, including 17.9 points in the past 13 games, a stretch during which Marquette is 11-2.

“I’m just glad he’s finally getting to do it on the highest stage in the country because that was his dream,” said Dwayne Pina, Kolek’s coach at St. George’s, a prep school in Middletown, R.I. “He’s living out his dream.”

It was a dream that, at times, seemed unlikely, as no Big East or Power Five conference school offered him a scholarship out of St. George’s.

Kolek grew up in Cumberland, R.I., about 25 minutes north of Providence and an hour south of Boston in a basketball-crazed family. His father, Kevin, was a 2,000-point scorer and two-time conference player of the year in 1987 and 1988 at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, a Division 3 program.

After college, Kevin played professionally for a year in Ireland before becoming a police officer in Cumberland. He continued playing in local men’s leagues, too.

Lynn Kolek, Kevin’s wife, often worked nights as a bartender at a restaurant while pursuing a nursing degree, so Kevin brought Tyler and his older son, Brandon, along to the gyms.

“I would take them to games when they were in their strollers,” Kevin Kolek said. “They would always be around it. As soon as they could start walking, they had a ball in their hand, and they were playing from there.”

When the Koleks weren’t playing basketball, they were watching games. They were passionate Boston Celtics fans and had season tickets for several years for the Providence College home games, where they watched all of the Big East’s top programs.

Tyler and Brandon were All-State players at Cumberland High School, but they later attended prep schools, so they could face better competition and receive more attention from college coaches.

Brandon, who is two years older than Tyler, played for a year at St. Andrew’s in Barrington, R.I., where his teammates included Cole Swider, who is a rookie on a two-way contract with the Los Angeles Lakers. This season, Brandon averaged 11.4 points per game as a starting guard at Franklin Pierce University, a Division 2 college in New Hampshire.

Tyler, meanwhile, decided to play at St. George’s for Pina, a former guard at Boston College who spent 11 years as a Division 1 college assistant at Bryant University and Brown University.

During the spring and summer, Tyler and Brandon played for the Middlesex Magic, a grassroots program whose alumni includes NBA players Pat Connaughton and Duncan Robinson. The Kolek family quickly impressed Michael Crotty, the Magic’s director and head coach.

“I’ve coached a lot of kids, which means I’ve got to have a lot of parents over the years,” Crotty said. “I can say unequivocally that Lynn and Kevin are two of the absolute best. Never a complaint. It’s always, ‘Hey, how can Tyler get better? How can Brandon get better?’ It was never, ‘The refs did this or somebody did that.’ It was always just about how can they be better.”

He added: “I think that both of those boys’ attitudes and the way that they attack life is about, ‘Hey, I gotta go make it happen. The world’s not gonna do me wrong. I’m gonna work hard and get it right.’”

Tyler Kolek was highly productive at all levels, including serving as the point guard on the Magic’s 17U team that went 21-1 and won three tournament titles in 2018. He was also the league’s player of the year in both of his years at St. George’s. Still, coaches from major college programs didn’t show interest.

“There’s just implicit biases that live,” Pina said. “Is he athletic enough? Can he run fast enough? Can he guard?”

That’s not to say Kolek had no Division 1 interest. Several mid-major schools offered him scholarships. In November 2019, Kolek signed with George Mason, whose coach, Dave Paulsen, was Crotty’s coach at WilliamsWMB
College. Crotty was the point guard on the 2003 Williams team that went 31-1 and won the Division 3 NCAA title.

Kolek enrolled at George Mason in the fall of 2020 just months after the coronavirus pandemic began. He came off the bench for the first three games before starting the rest of the way.

Like he had since he was a kid, Kolek impressed his coaches with his shooting and passing ability as well as his dedication. Paulson remembers Kolek wearing down a couple of times during his freshman year, which he attributed to the physical nature of the games and Kolek’s relentless work ethic. Kolek spent so much time in the gym that Paulsen occasionally gave him an ultimatum to rest.

“I was like, ‘You’re not allowed in our gym on our day off,’” said Paulsen, who is now an assistant at Fordham. “You love as a coach when you have to throw a kid out of the gym rather than try to coerce them to come in for extra shooting.”

Paulson was also struck by Kolek’s unselfishness even though he was the team’s best shooter.

“My daughters used to laugh because they could hear me in the gym, ‘Kolek, shoot it or sit,’” Paulsen said. “I just got so mad when he passed up an open shot because he’s such a good shooter and we needed him to score.”

As a freshman, Kolek averaged 10.8 points, 3.3 rebounds and 2.3 assists per game and was named the Atlantic 10 Rookie of the Year. He was content at the school until George Mason fired Paulsen in March 2021. Soon, Kolek had second thoughts and entered the transfer portal.

“He never would’ve left George Mason,” Kevin Kolek said. “He would’ve stayed there.”

Numerous high-major programs such as Virginia, UConn and Providence contacted Kolek during that time, a much difference experience than when he was coming out of prep school. When Shaka Smart left Texas to become Marquette’s coach in late March 2021, he and his staff identified Kolek as a priority. Marquette assistant Cody Hatt was the main recruiter for Kolek, while special assistant Nevada Smith spent hours watching film of Kolek and seeing how he would fit.

“It was amazing the research they did before they even contacted Tyler,” Kevin Kolek said. “They called the coaches that he played against in prep school. They called his AAU coaches…They did unbelievable research, and they knew how they wanted to use him.”

He added: “They did their research and they stressed family and being a part of the program. Once Coach Smart called him when he got to Marquette, it was just a place he knew he wanted to be.”

As a sophomore last year, Kolek started all 32 games and had a team-high 5.9 assists per game as Marquette went 19-13 and lost, 95-63, in the first round of the NCAA tournament to North Carolina, which ended up losing in the national title game.

Entering this season, Kolek worked on being more aggressive and assertive on offense through countless hours of work with teammates and coaches, including Smith, who is in charge of the offensive game plan.

Smith said Kolek has taken more of a leadership role this season, and he’s been the main reason the Golden Eagles rank fourth in analyst Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted offensive efficiency metric. Kolek is shooting 48.8% from the field and 39.6% on 3-pointers, up from 32% and 28.1%, respectively, last season.

“He’s really good at reading what’s available, seeing what’s open,” Smith said. “Teams are playing him to pass a little bit, so he’s got to score. He’s just adjusted his game. When you’re finishing the way he’s finishing at the rim and shooting the way he’s shooting it right now from the three, it becomes a tough cover.”

Kolek’s former coaches aren’t surprised with his breakthrough or his willingness to take and make shots near the end of close games in sold-out arenas.

“The one thing that has not changed at all is he’s got that competitive-slash-cocky nature,” Paulsen said. “He’s not going to back down to anyone anywhere at anytime. You just love that, that competitive spirit.”

Said Pina: “Tyler Kolek just has an edge to him that is very, very, very rare. I’ve said it all the time to people. I’ll probably never coach another kid like Tyler Kolek. I think he is that special.”

On Saturday afternoon after Marquette’s victory over St. John’s, Kolek stood on a ladder cutting down the net on the Golden Eagles’ home floor, celebrating the regular season Big East title. It was another surreal moment in an unforgettable season.

After a game last month, Kevin Kolek spoke on the telephone with his son, who was appreciative of how far he’s come.

“He said, ‘In the timeout, I was looking at the crowd and there’s 18,000 people,’” Kevin Kolek said. “He goes, ‘This is like a dream.’ It’s a dream for him and it’s a dream for me to see him play and be successful. I’m just so proud of everything that he’s accomplished.”