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Matthew Graves familiar with being an underdog, has ‘second chance’ as Indiana State coach

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Matthew Graves familiar with being an underdog, has ‘second chance’ as Indiana State coach

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SWITZ CITY – Unless you were looking for it, you would drive right past the sign and down the hill on the county road in this picturesque spot in Greene County, where the blue skies seem to go on forever and the “chirp, chirp” of birds is the only sounds you hear.

A green sign, “Graves Court”, marks the driveway where four boys grew up playing basketball. At one time, years ago, there were multiple basketball goals of varying heights. A dunking goal. A free-throw goal. A shorter goal on the retaining wall for the youngest of the four. The boys lined the driveway to make it a “full court,” even if the dimensions were much narrower and shorter.

An Indiana version of “Field of Dreams.” If you build it, they will come. Rick Graves, the father of the four boys, put up two big spotlights from the football field to illuminate the court so the kids could play at night. The drumbeat of the basketball on the driveway replaced the birds as the dominant sounds of the night.

“We’d have a thousand kids out there until midnight,” Melonie Graves said with a smile. “The spotlights were in the room, and I’d have the window open, you’d just hear the ‘bounce, bounce, bounce.’”

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The beautiful sounds of a summer night in this community of 293. This is where Matthew Graves, the oldest of the four Graves boys and the new Indiana State basketball coach, first learned to play basketball. Graves, 49, played for Barry Collier at Butler. He started his coaching career at the high school level under state championship winning coaches Doug Mitchell and Steve Witty. He started his college coaching career under Todd Lickliter. When Butler made those remarkable national championship runs under Brad Stevens, Graves was right alongside as associate head coach. He led his own program for five years, then eventually returned to Indiana and for the past three years working under coach Josh Schertz to bring Indiana State back to national relevance.

“I’ve been fortunate to be around a lot of very good basketball minds,” Graves said.

Like Stevens, Graves’ coaching personality is more mild than wild. Uber competitive, certainly. You can’t get here without that characteristic. But he is not a yeller or screamer at officials or players. Not a rip-off-your-jacket-and-throw-it-behind-the-bench type of coach.

“I think there’s a right way and a wrong way to communicate with players, officials and your staff,” Graves said. “So, I think everybody is going to see a pretty even-keeled coach out there. You have to be your own self.”

Graves has coached for and with some of the best minds in the game. But if you want to find his biggest influence — in life and coaching — you have to come down here to Switz City, where the sign says “Graves Court.” Rick Graves does not have an official win-loss record as a college or high school coach. He certainly, assuredly, would not brag about it even if he did. But he coached the Graves boys — Matthew, Mark, Andrew and A.J. — and many others in Greene County and the surrounding counties.

If you want to want to know about Matthew Graves, this is where you start.

“There might be other dads that are just as awesome but none better,” Matthew said. “I cannot put into words how much he has shaped my life in everything I do.”

***

It made sense Matthew wanted to get into teaching and coaching. Growing up in Switz City, he had played on his father’s AAU teams, which were essentially Greene County all-star teams. They traveled around and won more than their fair share of tournaments.

In the late 1980s, the long-running rumors of school consolidation became reality. For years after the School Reorganization Act of 1959, Switz City, Worthington and L&M (towns of Lyons and Marco) avoided the fate of other merging school districts around the state. But in 1987, the schools agreed to merge to form a new school.

White River Valley, the high school located in Switz City, opened in 1990.

“The driving force behind the consolidation of the three schools is they didn’t want to get absorbed by Linton or Bloomfield,” said Dave Clark, who was the Switz City basketball coach for its last four years of existence.

Clark was hired to lead the new White River Valley program. Matthew started as a freshman on the last Switz City team. But 11 of Clark’s 12 varsity players that first year in 1990-91 started at their respective schools. Individually, the three schools had combined to win just 17 games in 1989-90.

Together, they would be better. Much better.

“You could only start five,” Clark said. “That was a motivating factor. They were smart enough to understand that we had to sacrifice to be successful. Matthew understood team play. I’d watched him since he was a sixth grader. He was a sponge and came from a good bloodline.”

That basketball bloodline came from Melonie’s side of the family. Her brother, Rusty Miller, was a dynamic guard for Switz City Central in the 1970s. He led the Tigers to what turned out to be their last sectional championship as a sophomore in 1973 and graduated two years later with 1,978 career points. Miller, who was named Associated Press third-team all-state as a senior, was listed at 5-9 and 140 pounds. That may have been stretching it. But he led the state in scoring as a senior with a staggering 38.9 points per game, including a 60-point game (40 in the second half) in an 87-85 win over Vincennes Rivet.

“Rusty was an awesome player,” Rick Graves said of Miller, who died in February of 2020 at age 62. “He would be able to play the way the game is played now. He was ahead of his time with that, back before the 3-point shot. He could play at a faster pace. If you’ve seen Matthew run, he doesn’t run that fast.”

Maybe not. But he could shoot. In White River Valley’s first season, the Wolverines reached the regional final before falling to Brian Evans and Terre Haute South and finishing 24-2. That team also included 6-6 senior Matt Burgess, who went on to start at Indiana State for three seasons. In large part due to the success and popularity of the basketball team, that first year of consolidation was a rousing success as fans filled the 3,000 capacity gym in Switz City.

“You run out of that tunnel — and people have a hard time understanding this if you aren’t from here — how does a town of like Switz City with 300 people have a gym of 3,000 that is standing-room only on Friday and Saturday night?” Graves said. “That’s just what we do here. I lived it for three years. I saw it happen. That passion is what I love about being back in the state of Indiana. The coaches are great, basketball is played at a high level and the fans are very passionate. Maybe there are too many coaches in the stands who want to offer suggestions. But I’d rather have it that way than people not care.”

They certainly cared at White River Valley, a school that became synonymous with two other words: Graves and basketball. Matthew led WRV to a 25-2 record and regional title as a junior in 1991-92 (the Wolverines lost a 60-59 heartbreaker on a buzzer-beater by Evansville Central’s Bossie Johnson in the first game of the semistate at Terre Haute).

Graves’ senior year, White River Valley played in the Hall of Fame Classic and the KMOX Shootout in St. Louis as part of a beefed-up schedule. It prepared the 326-enrollment school for a battle with 2,215-student Jeffersonville in the Evansville semistate championship. White River Valley fell just short, 61-59, to Mr. Basketball Sherron Wilkerson and the Red Devils, who went on to beat South Bend St. Joseph and Ben Davis the following week for their only state title.

“I used to give coach Witty a hard time,” Graves said of the former Ben Davis Hall of Fame coach, who he worked for years later. “I’d say, ‘You know, if we would have played you, we would have beat you. We’d argue back and forth on that. But I’d never trade that for anything. People ask, ‘Do you wish you played class basketball?’ Unless something bizarre would have happened, we would have won in 1991, ’92 and ’93. We probably would have been Class A state champs. Not that it wouldn’t have been rewarding to cut down the nets. But to be able to compete against the best, that’s something I’ll never forget. We fell a little short to a better team in Jeffersonville. But those memories last forever. I wouldn’t trade that for the world.”

Rick, with a sly smile, “blames” Matthew for class basketball.

“We always accuse Matthew of being one of the main reasons we have class basketball,” he said. “They lost the final game of the semistate to Sherron Wilkerson. If they had won state that year, small schools maybe still would have had a chance.”

That class basketball train was on the tracks by 1993, eventually going into effect for the 1997-98 season. White River Valley was the last truly small school to make a deep tournament run before class basketball was implemented. In Matthew’s senior season, he played with brothers Mark (a junior) and Andrew (a freshman). Those driveway games as kids were put to good use.

“We were able to battle each other and work out together for years,” Andrew said of Matthew. “I probably got more of an advantage out of it than he did. It was nice to have him around. At the end of the day, one ended up bleeding and going into the house. But it was good for both of us. Matthew was the best shooter of any of us, regardless of what anybody wants to say. I put him up against anybody, any day.”

The 6-3 Matthew averaged 20.0 points per game as a senior and was named to the Indiana All-Stars team after finishing third in the IndyStar Mr. Basketball vote behind Wilkerson and Anderson’s Kojak Fuller. He finished his high school career with 1,804 points.

In the fall of 1992, before his senior season, Graves signed with Butler, where Barry Collier was three years into a rebuild that would eventually change the course of the program’s basketball history and Graves’ life.

***

Timing is everything.

In the summer of 1996, Matthew was working at a summer science camp in Noblesville. He was going into his redshirt junior year at Butler, on track to becoming a chemistry teacher and basketball coach. Susan Naue, a Perry Meridian and Indiana University grad, was working the same camp.

Two years later, in 1998, Graves and Naue married.

“He married a saint,” Rick Graves said of Susan.

Matthew, as a player, was a major part of Butler’s rise to prominence (Andrew followed him to Butler after graduating from White River Valley and earning Indiana All-Stars honors in 1996). He was the third-leading scorer (9.9 ppg, 40% 3-pointers) on the 1996-97 team that earned the program’s first NCAA tournament appearance since 1962. The following year, Butler won 22 games and reached the NCAAs again as Graves averaged 12.0 points.

Matthew did not necessarily grow up rooting for Butler, but his decision to go there turned out to be one of the major decisions in his life. Melonie remembers Matthew making a visit to Butler and receiving a scholarship offer from Collier.

“We didn’t say yes right in the moment,” she said. “We wanted to make sure that’s where he wanted to go. Rick said, ‘We’ll go eat lunch and think about it.’ He thought he’d like it there, so we went back, and they said, ‘OK, you can have the scholarship.’”

Good timing. And again, when Matthew met Susan as a counselor at that science camp in ’96. Susan was struck right away by Matthew’s determination and work ethic, which became more obvious were handed down after her first trip to Switz City.

“I see a lot of Matthew in his father and Melonie is the exact same way,” Susan said. “They set the bar high, and those boys excelled academically. That was the expectation. They value family and love when we are there to visit. I count my blessings I married into the family.”

Susan later got a glimpse into the passion for White River Valley basketball when A.J. was coming through high school. A.J., a 2004 Indiana All-Star, led his team to a 23-5 record and Class A semistate appearance against Waldron as a senior, finishing as the school’s (and family’s) leading scorer with 2,041 points.

“The town shut down on Friday nights when there were games,” Susan said. “It was standing room only with people walking around the track at the top. I was not used to that. It was a sight to behold.”

After Matthew and Susan were married, Matthew started his first job teaching chemistry at North Central, where he was an assistant basketball coach under Doug Mitchell. Led by Mr. Basketball Jason Gardner, the Panthers won the Class 4A state championship.

“Some of my favorite memories are from that first year (coaching),” Graves said. “I had a first period prep, which is horrible for a teacher. I hated it. But I’d get there, get ready to go, then walk to the gym, where (Mitchell) had a P.E. class. I’d pull up a rolling chair and he and I would sit there in the gym. I spent hours talking to him. He probably didn’t realize how impactful it was for me just sitting there talking not only about basketball but life in general. For a 23-year-old, just listening to his thoughts was very interesting to say the least.”

Matthew figured he would coach high school basketball and teach. He moved on to Ben Davis, where Susan was also hired to teach. Then one day in 2001, that path changed.

“High school seemed to be it,” Susan said. “He loved teaching. Then he came home one day and said, ‘I need to talk to you about something.’”

Todd Lickliter, hired to coach at Butler in 2001, asked Graves if he was interested in joining the staff as director of basketball operations.

“At first, I said, ‘What?’” Susan said. “But then I said, ‘Now is the time. Let’s so do it.’ The opportunities that presented themselves at Butler were so unique and we met so many interesting people. All of these unique things kind of fell into our lap.”

Maybe highest among those unique opportunities for Matthew was the chance to coach his younger brother, A.J. Matthew had moved up to a full-time assistant role by 2004, coaching with then-assistants Brad Stevens and LaVall Jordan. Butler was not a great team in A.J.’s freshman season, but he was immediately an impact player.

“In the end, he was the best as far as a complete player of all of us,” Andrew said of A.J. “It’s funny, I always tell people, ‘If he would have my size or Matthew’s size, he would have been at IU or North Carolina.’ He did a lot of great things for Butler. He’ll tell you he’s 6-foot. I don’t think he’s 6-foot. But he was fun to watch.”

The 11-year age gap between Matthew and A.J. meant the oldest and youngest brothers did not grow up playing much 1-on-1. If fact, one of Rick’s memories is of A.J. working his way on to the driveway game and getting in the way of the oldest three brothers’ game.

“Matthew would kick his ball down the hill,” Rick said. “It would take A.J. 20 minutes to go down and get it and come back. Then he’d kick it back down the hill again like a football.”

But years later, as college player and coach, their relationship blossomed.

“Matthew was a great coach to me,” A.J. said. “He was my coach, but also my older brother. There were some dynamics there that might not translate well in general. But he was very supportive and taught me a lot of things. He has a good personality and demeanor about him and could get his point across as my coach. We would do workouts and shooting games together and he’d make it competitive and fun. There was such an age gap between us, I didn’t have a lot of memories of him as a player. But I was able to go to Butler and get to know him better as a coach. It was a great opportunity for me.”

A.J. set school records for games started (124) and played (130), finishing third on Butler’s career scoring list with 1,807 points. A major breakthrough for the program came in 2006-07, when Butler won 29 games and reached the Sweet 16, losing to No. 1 seed Florida. Lickliter was hired at Iowa after the season.

Stevens, who started out as a volunteer in the Butler basketball office in 2000, was tabbed as the new Butler coach and led the Bulldogs to a 30-4 season and second round NCAA tournament appearance in A.J.’s senior season.

At one time, A.J. considered following in Matthew’s steps. He did coach the White River Valley girls program for four years from 2010-14. But for the past decade, A.J. has worked as an actuary for Nyhart and lives in Brownsburg.

“Coaching at my old school was an interesting time in my life,” A.J. said. “I enjoyed the coaching part of it, and we had some success (winning a sectional in 2014). I enjoyed it but I’m not sure if I would return to it.”

But as A.J. left Butler, his oldest brother was just getting started.

***

As the years pass, the back-to-back national championship game runs Butler made as a member of the Horizon League in 2010 and ’11 seem more and more improbable.

The first one? Maybe. That team had future NBA players in Gordon Hayward and Shelvin Mack, along with Matt Howard and Willie Veasley. Hayward was gone the next year, but the Bulldogs made it back again before losing to UConn.

“You lose Gordon and the way the year goes, you are able to figure out a way to get back,” Matthew said. “That one blows my mind. I hate to use the word ‘overachieve’ because that sells the guys short, but those guys were part of a team that went on to be successful in their lives. It’s really remarkable when you break it down.”

At the end of the 2012-13 season, Graves was offered and accepted the head coaching job at South Alabama. Matthew and Susan’s daughters, Abby and Lily, were early in elementary school. Susan finished out her school year, then moved down to Mobile, Ala.

“I heard my first ‘Roll Tide!’ in the grocery store,” Susan said. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what that means.’”

On July 3, 2013, Matthew was in a meeting with South Alabama athletic director Joel Erdmann. His office at the Mitchell Center had spotty service, but after walked out his phone was buzzing. “What in the world is going on?” he thought.

Brad Stevens to the Boston Celtics? About 10 minutes later, Graves called his former colleague.

“He’s like, ‘Yeah, I decided to do it,’” Graves said. “He’s been a great friend to me. We still talk and text. I’m so happy to see what he’s still doing there at Boston.”

But the timing was decidedly not in Matthew’s favor this time. He had been promoted to associate head coach at Butler in 2010 and would have likely been the favored replacement.

“Thanks for reminding me,” Matthew said with a laugh. “People give me a hard time about that, but things happen for a reason.”

Graves was confident he could translate the tight-knit, family atmosphere he had at Butler to South Alabama. And in some ways, it did. But coaches are eventually judged by wins and losses. The Jaguars were 65-96 in Graves’ five seasons, going 14-18 his final two seasons and never finishing higher than sixth in the Sun Belt Conference.

Part of the reason for taking the South Alabama job was to “get out of the comfort zone.”

“I was fortunate to live the Butler bubble for 12 years coaching there,” he said. “It was beneficial for me to see a different way to do things and increase my network. Really, (the South Alabama experience) led to me becoming a better coach. People ask, ‘Do you have regrets about doing it?’ Really, no regrets. It is a great job. It really is. But it wasn’t a great fit for me and my personality. Ultimately, I have a lot of great memories, but when the five years was up, it was time to get back to the Midwest, where I think basketball is a little more important and we could be around family.”

Graves had no regrets about taking the South Alabama job, but there are some things he would have done differently. Susan said she believes her husband tried to take on too much himself in his first head coaching job.

“Matthew is a nice guy,” Susan said. “I think there were times where he felt like he could have been more firm with the kids and his coaches. That’s why I can’t wait to see what happens at Indiana State. I think he’s surrounded himself with people that he knows are going to get the job done and he’s going to trust them. Not that he didn’t have that at South Alabama, but he doesn’t have a problem delegating some of those responsibilities now.”

The Graves’ family returned to Indiana in 2018 as an assistant coach at Evansville. After one year there, he went to Xavier as a special assistant to Travis Steele. But his family — wife Susan and daughters Abby and Lily — did not move with him.

“I said, ‘This probably sounds crazy, but I don’t feel like you are going to be there for a long period of time,’” Susan said of the move to Xavier. “I called my father-in-law and talked to him about it. God love him he said, ‘Do what’s best for your granddaughters.’”

They moved to the south side of Indianapolis, where they have lived mostly apart physically as a family since 2019. Not ideal for a close family.

“Tears have been shed,” Susan said. “But we talked to the girls about what we’re going to do to make this work and he’s going to get home for as many things as he can. I would hope my daughters grow up to be strong, independent women because they’ve had to be resilient.”

***

Susan was right. Matthew was only at Xavier two years before he was hired at Indiana State as an associate head coach under Josh Schertz in March of 2021.

Abby was a freshman at Franklin Central and Lily was about to start high school the following year. Matthew and Susan decided to keep the living arrangement in place with the girls at a key point in their lives.

“People ask, ‘Do you miss stuff?’” Matthew said. “That’s what’s hard. I’ll see Lily play maybe half her games as a senior, if that. Volleyball was a little easier, being a fall sport. I didn’t miss as much of Abby’s games. The tradeoff is the girls have been able to do some cool stuff. There’s a picture of them in 2011 at the Final Four in Houston, eating Chick-fil-A with Brad’s kids and Micah (Shrewsberry’s) kids during our open practice. They’ve been able to come to practices, hang with the players. There’s give and take. There are some nights where — I don’t want to say depressing — but it’s been tough.”

Distance may separate Matthew from his daughters at times, but their relationship is close. Last week, Abby and Lily drove to Terre Haute to spend time with their dad on the first day of the kids’ camp at Indiana State. It’s all Matthew talked about the day before.

Abby, who played volleyball at Franklin Central, will enroll at Indiana University later this summer. Lily is a standout basketball player who made the Junior All-Stars team and has committed to the University of Southern Indiana.

“My dad is like my best friend,” Lily said. “We do everything together. He does all my basketball stuff for me, tries to be my trainer and works out with me when he’s home. He tries to be at everything he can be, even though it’s hard to do. I think it makes me appreciate him being around more when he is around.”

Abby knows she can always reach her dad via FaceTime — and does.

“We know our dad is always in the picture even if he’s not here every day,” Abby said. “My mom has been amazing. Being in Indianapolis, we are close to her family and have aunts and uncles here, too. But he will surprise us and come to as much as he can.”

One of the girls’ favorite past times with their father is visiting his hometown.

“It’s like a big family down there,” Abby said. “We’ll run into people, and they know exactly who I am, who my dad is. Everyone knows the Graves family.”

***

Nobert Graves started the business in 1964. He started out doing home repairs out of his truck, without a physical building, specializing in plumbing and heating and cooling. His sons, Rick and Joe, started helping their dad when they were in high school.

“We were cheap help,” Rick said. “When we were available, we helped him in the summer. It was truly a family business. It was just the three of us. Then we decided we wanted to be in the business, and he let us buy in. That’s when we started hiring employees.”

They moved from the truck to a physical building on Main Street in Linton before moving to a 12-acre spot along Highway 54 in Switz City in 1985. By the time Mark was in high school (he graduated in 1994), he knew he wanted to get into the family business. They transitioned from residential work to commercial service. After graduating from Butler, Andrew returned to Switz City to go into business with his father and brother Mark.

Norbert’s truck sits above the “Graves Construction Services” sign, an unmistakable landmark in Switz City. It does not take a landmark, though, for customers to ask about the Graves name in meetings. Rick is often asked if he knows the Graves boys from Switz City who were the basketball players.

“It’s a small world out there,” Rick said. “It’s easy for me to get proud when I go to some of those meetings, and they make connections and ask about the boys. I want to talk business and they want to talk basketball.”

Rick said the business never would have transitioned as smoothly as it has if Andrew had not come back from Butler after earning his business degree. Andrew, who grew up going head-to-head with Matthew on the driveway court, is glad to have his older brother closer to home.

“It’s his calling,” Andrew said of Matthew coaching basketball. “You could always see that with him. Did I think he would be a Division I basketball coach? Not really. We never had that discussion. I thought he would be a high school coach and teacher somewhere. But it’s been neat to watch his path and I’m glad he’s closer to home. Now I can watch and be a bigger part of seeing him hopefully succeed at Indiana State.”

Graves takes over an Indiana State program that is coming off a 32-win season, its most since the Larry Bird-led team that reached the NCAA national championship. But the excitement of the season and run to the NIT championship game at Hinkle Fieldhouse is dampened a bit by Schertz’s departure and mass transfer portal exodus of the team’s top players, including Robbie Avila and Isaiah Swope to Saint Louis, Jayson Kent and Julian Larry to Texas and Ryan Conwell to Xavier.

It is essentially a reset for Indiana State, which has an energized fan base but a lot of new faces. Graves hired Indiana native and former New Orleans coach Mark Slessinger as his top assistant, retained Justin Furr and hired Terre Haute native and former Indiana State star Jake Odum. Tim Johnson and Bradley Feig will round out the coaching staff.

“With expectations, there is pressure,” Graves said. “People ask, ‘How are you going to handle that?’ We’re not trying to recreate the team we had last year. We’ve got to evolve and come up with our own identity. When people see us on national TV, I want people to identify, ‘That is Indiana State’ and know how we are going to play.”

Indiana State has a motivated coach. Graves considers this a “second chance” after South Alabama. He would love to coach the Sycamores the next 15 years, take the program to the NCAA tournament and retire from Indiana State to “prove to myself that I can do it.”

“That’s probably one selfish thing I’d have to say about it,” Graves said. “I want to prove it to myself. Not to anybody else but more for me to say, ‘You can do this. You’re going to do this and be successful.’ That’s kind of what drives me.”

This is a “dream job” for Graves. After Lily graduates from Franklin Central, Susan will move to Terre Haute with Matthew. Both daughters will be nearby – Abby in Bloomington and Lily in Evansville. His parents and brothers expect to be regulars at Hulman Center.

Graves and Indiana State. It seems like a perfect match.

“It fits him,” Andrew said. “Back in the Midwest, kind of a small school atmosphere. At White River Valley, when we played, it was always David vs. Goliath in single class. Indiana State kind of fits that mold.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.

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