Davidson coach Matt McKillop intent on giving Grant Huffman the last run he deserves

Twenty minutes after the Davidson men’s basketball team’s final home game of the season, a reporter asked head coach Matt McKillop if he could succinctly explain what Grant Huffman has meant to the program.

The coach crinkled his forehead as he tried to find the right words.

“I don’t know if I could succinctly do it,” he said.

It’s a tough task.

Huffman, after all, has played substantial minutes at Davidson in all four of his years there at a time when that’s increasingly rare in college basketball. He’s seen so much happen in that time, too.

There was the NCAA tournament game against Michigan State he shined in as a sophomore, the national coming-out party of Davidson’s next point guard. There was the season after that, Huffman’s junior year, when head coach Bob McKillop retired and handed the sacred head coaching mantle off to his son and spawned a new generation of Davidson basketball.

There was this year, too, riddled with nuisance. A promising start derailed by a key injury to senior and leading scorer David Skogman early in the year. A nation-leading 10 losses of five points or fewer. All of that culminating to a difficult Atlantic 10 tournament ahead — one in which the Wildcats will need to win out to realize their NCAA dreams.

How could McKillop be succinct capturing all of that?

“I had such a great relationship with him from his freshman and sophomore years as an assistant coach,” McKillop said. “And I obviously became head coach in between his sophomore and junior years, that summer. We had a lot of new guys, a lot of young guys, but I needed somebody on the team to show the trust they had in me and the belief they had in me, to not question or falter from that. Day One, I felt like Grant was excited that I was his head coach.

“And that makes it a lot easier for the new guys, the freshmen. Most of them had come to play for my father, and had actually gone through a few practices with him before he decided to step down. So that gave me confidence, that gave me belief in myself. And at the same time, I think it allowed Grant to get better and better because he and I had that great relationship.”

As the Atlantic 10 tournament begins later this week, Huffman begins what could be his final run in a Davidson (15-16, 5-13 A10) uniform. The Wildcats are the 13 seed and play Fordham on Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. in Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

Huffman is a senior with one year of eligibility remaining — he was a freshman during the Covid-shortened year of 2019-20 — and his plans for next year have not yet been decided. Still, he said, he plans to play this season’s postseason conference tournament singularly focused.

“The goal is to have no regrets,” Huffman said. “And I don’t think you can have regrets if you give everything you have.”

He certainly has nothing to regret this year. The 6-foot-4, 190-pound point guard out of Aurora, Ohio, has started all 30 games played as a senior and is the only player on the team to have logged more than 1,000 minutes. He leads Davidson’s active roster in points per game (12.8), assists (5.2) and is the team’s second-leading rebounder.

It’s true McKillop considers Huffman “his guy.” Huffman returns the same adoration. The senior said the team being so close so many times throughout this year despite not having their “best player” out there is “a testament to how good of a coach Matt is” and that he thinks “Matt hasn’t really gotten the credit for that” the way he deserves.

Meanwhile, McKillop is focused on finishing out the year in a way that Huffman, himself, is deserving of.

“He’s had a fantastic year leading these young guys, leading through the adversity of the close losses and the adversity of losing our leading scorer,” McKillop said.

“I wish the win column showed it the way we feel it, the way we know it,” the coach added.

Soon thereafter, the Wildcats’ head coach disappeared into the John M. Belk Arena home locker room, determined to make the best of the time Huffman and this Davidson team have left.