Brown: Kenyon Murray Sharing Advice

Former Hawkeye Talks About Raising All-Americans in New Podcast

Former Iowa Basketball player Kenyon Murray (right), father of Hawkeyes' Keegan and Kris Murray, looks talks with an Iowa fan before the team's game against Rutgers in the Big Ten Tournament on March 11, 2022 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. (Rob Howe/HawkeyeNation.com)

IOWA CITY, Iowa - I listened to Kenyon Murray’s recent Leave Your Legacy podcast. The title was intriguing: “How We Raised All-Americans.”

I’ve told Kenyon many times that he and his wife, Michelle, did a wonderful job in raising twin sons Kris and Keegan. Anyone who has interacted with the former Hawkeye basketball standouts come away impressed with both of them.

They are polite, they smile a lot and answer questions with more than cliche answers. They might have come to Iowa with a chip on their collective shoulders, especially after Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery was criticized in some circles for offering both of them a scholarship.

McCaffery got the last laugh. Keegan was a consensus first-team all-Big Ten and consensus first-team all-American after the 2021-22 season. He became the highest Hawkeye drafted ever when Sacramento took him with the fourth pick in the 2022 NBA Draft.

The twins were separated for the first time in their basketball careers last season. While Keegan was setting an NBA rookie record for made 3-pointers, Kris earned first-team all-Big Ten and consensus third-team all-America honors. He stands a pretty good chance of joining his younger brother as a first-round NBA Draft choice on June 22 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Which brings us back to the podcast. Kenyon, a 1,000-point career scorer for the Hawkeyes back in the day, had some interesting comments on his podcast. He touched on a subject he and Michelle have heard often in the last year.

“What did we do as parents to get to this point?” he said.

They wanted to give their sons balance, and encouraged them to play other sports like baseball, flag football and golf in addition to basketball.

“The one thing you can instill in your child, I believe, is the passion and the love for the process,” Kenyon said. “And that’s what I tell parents.”

There’s more time spent on the process, Murray says, than the time they actually are competing in games. The process includes things like lifting weights, ball-handling and shooting.

“You have to love being in the gym in order to put yourself in a position where you can go on the floor and produce,” Murray said.

Murray knew his sons had that inner drive as youngsters. The family would come home after multi-day baseball tournaments. Kenyon and Michelle looked forward to putting their feet up and relaxing. But soon Keegan and Kris told Kenyon they wanted to go to the gym and work on basketball. And off they went.

“In seventh grade they wanted to focus on basketball,” Kenyon said. “They wanted to be the best in basketball.”

Kenyon was their basketball coach for many years. The dual role of father and coach was challenging at times, but the fact that his sons were motivated in a sport he excelled at made it easy to take them to the gym.

To me, the most interesting point Kenyon made during his podcast was being able to adjust to his new role once the twins headed to DME Academy in Daytona Beach, Fla., for the 2019-20 season.

“I was no longer their coach,” Kenyon said. “I’m their dad.”

The Murrays made a concerted effort to support their sons without discussing how they were being coached. As parents they sat back, watched and were rewarded with lots of good basketball.

The statistics are incredible for a pair who had one Division I offer, from Western Illinois, during their careers at Cedar Rapids Prairie.

In their final seasons as Hawkeyes - 2021-22 for Keegan and 2022-23 for Kris - they scored in double figures in 61 of 64 games. They combined for 41 games of 20 points or more, and nine games of 30-plus.

Keegan was the nation’s fourth-leading scorer as a sophomore, averaging 23.5 points a game. He also averaged 8.7 rebounds.

That extremely productive season put great expectations on Kris, and he followed his brother’s footsteps with style. Kris averaged 20.2 points and 7.9 rebounds in his final college season.

“Playing for the first time without Keegan, I think Kris had an unbelievable season,” Kenyon said.

He added, “To be able to do that on the heels of what Keegan did (in 2021-22) says a lot about Kris.”

Kris went through the draft process in 2022 before deciding to return to Iowa for one more season. It was a positive move, because he’s improved his draft stock. He’s now moved to Chicago, where he’s working out ahead of the 2023 draft.

Kris and Keegan have played countless games of one-on-one on the basketball floor. Looking ahead, it’s not hard to imagine them going against each other in an NBA game. Now bad for two guys who, the so called experts said, only got offers from Iowa because they were legacy recruits.

The critics got the legacy part right. Keegan and Kris Murray have left a mark on the Iowa basketball program that will last a lifetime. They did it because of a burning desire to be the best they could be. And they did it because of parents who raised them right.