HOUSTON — It’s been almost 20 years, but Nebraska basketball coach Fred Hoiberg can still remember receiving a frantic phone call from his wife, Carol.
Between tears, Carol relayed that the couple’s two youngest sons, twins Charlie and Sam, were involved in a fight during a basketball game. Against each other.
“They were on the same team. Sam took a shot Charlie didn't like, and he went over and punched him and they squared up,” Fred Hoiberg said. “They were five years old.”
Sam and Charlie Hoiberg still possess that same fire – but instead of aiming their flamethrowers at each other, they’re channeling their competitiveness toward a common goal and making history together with their father.
In his seventh season as Nebraska’s head coach, Fred Hoiberg has the Cornhuskers in the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 for the first time ever, where they’ll play Big Ten Conference rival Iowa March 25 in Houston.
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Wearing No. 1 in the starting lineup will be Sam Hoiberg, who walked on at Nebraska to play for his dad and is now a fifth-year senior who has played every game of the last three seasons. On the sideline will be Charlie Hoiberg, who joined the Huskers’ staff as a graduate assistant this season after serving the last two years as a men’s basketball student manager at TCU.
The backdrop for their fateful family reunion is Nebraska’s winningest season in program history. The Huskers enter the Sweet 16 with a 28-6 record. Their 49 wins over the last two seasons are the program’s most in a two-year span, a transformation that seemed unfathomable when Fred Hoiberg was hired to resurrect the program in 2019.
This March, 10 days before Hoiberg coached Nebraska to its first-ever NCAA Tournament win in the opening round over Troy, he signed a three-year contract extension with the Huskers.
The twins turned 23 on March 21, the same day Nebraska beat Vanderbilt in a thrilling second-round NCAA Tournament game that became an instant classic. After the win, Hoiberg joked that he didn’t need to get his sons a birthday gift anymore. That was fine with them.
“We had hopes for it to be a good year, but for it to turn out this way has been not only great for the fan base and for the team, it is special for our family,” Charlie Hoiberg said. “It’s just been fun to be around them every single day and for it to have worked out like this has been pretty rewarding.”
Hoibergs grow from basement battles to Sweet 16
For most of their childhood, Sam and Charlie Hoiberg’s well-worn basketball battleground was a Nerf basketball hoop in the basement of the family home in Ames, Iowa. Sometimes the twins played each other one-on-one, and other times teamed up against their older brother, Jack. They’d play for hours, sometimes up to 200 points.
The games ended when somebody started fighting.
“A lot of it came from Sam and I just wanting to be better than the other one,” Charlie Hoiberg said. “When you have someone that you’re that close with, and you’re pretty similar in skill level in everything we did, we just wanted to win. The competitiveness between each other doesn’t come out as much anymore because we’re not facing each other and we’re on the same side. We just both want to win so bad and I think a lot of that’s fueled by our relationship growing up.”
Jack Hoiberg describes Charlie as outgoing and stubborn, the type of person who will argue until he wins. Sam is always smiling, a positive person whose sunny exterior shields a tough interior. They butted heads constantly but were inseparable, sharing a room until high school.
Basketball was all they knew. Fred Hoiberg coached at Iowa State, his alma mater, from 2010-15, and all four of his kids grew up massive Cyclone fans. Paige, the oldest, played basketball through high school. Jack played two seasons of college hoops as a walk-on at Michigan State, transferred to play his final two seasons at UT Arlington, and is now an assistant video coordinator with the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs.
The twins were barely teenagers when they helped their dad cut down the nets after Hoiberg’s Iowa State teams won back-to-back Big 12 tournament titles in 2014 and 2015.
Sam wanted to play basketball in college, but the COVID-19 pandemic limited his opportunities to be seen by college scouts and he ended high school with no Division I scholarship offers. By then, Fred Hoiberg was at Nebraska, and Sam asked if he could walk on.
Sam didn’t intend to stay long, maybe a couple seasons and then move on to get more playing time at another school. He certainly didn’t anticipate being a starter on a Sweet 16 team. But basketball has a funny way of giving you what you didn’t expect and just what you need.
“You see tales all the time about the coach’s kid just riding the bench, and so we kind of thought that would be Sam,” Paige Hoiberg said. “We all kind of thought it was just a stepping stone for him, and then he would eventually transfer somewhere else. But the way it’s turned out has been a dream.”
Although Fred Hoiberg gave his kids pointers here and there when they were in the gym together, he’d never coached any of them in an official capacity until Sam joined the Huskers.
“I think we've done a great job of keeping it very player-coach relationship in practices,” Sam Hoiberg said. “I don't think you would be able to tell if you came to a practice that I was his kid. We probably have grown a little bit closer bond from it all, but in general, just still had an amazing relationship growing up and it's maintained that way.”
Charlie Hoiberg didn’t see basketball in his future at all. He took what he called “the Paige route,” followed in his sister’s footsteps and went to college as a regular student. He enrolled at TCU, joined a fraternity and started studying on a pre-law track.
Two years in, he missed basketball and became a student manager for the Horned Frogs, which made him realize that he wanted to explore coaching as a career path. To his family’s surprise, he elected to join his brother and father at Nebraska as a graduate assistant.
“The big reason why I wanted to come back was I felt that even if I don’t follow through with coaching for the rest of my life, I’m never going to regret being home with my parents, with my brother, every single day,” Charlie Hoiberg said. “Being with them was going to be special no matter what – and then how it’s worked out has obviously been a big payoff.”
Hoibergs' homecoming a catalyst for Nebraska basketball
When Fred Hoiberg first told his wife about the opportunity at Nebraska, she had concerns.
“I was kind of like, ‘Gosh, I don’t know,’ because it seemed like a tough job,” Carol Hoiberg said. “But Fred felt very compelled to go back to Lincoln, where he was born and where his grandfather coached, and really wanted to turn it around and bring basketball back to Nebraska and to where we are today.”
It took a little while. In Hoiberg’s first three seasons at the helm, the Huskers went a combined 24-67 and won just nine Big Ten Conference games. Those years, Jack Hoiberg said, “felt like a black hole.”
In 2022-23, it looked like Nebraska was doomed again when two key players, Emmanuel Bandoumel and Juwan Gary, went down with injuries in January. Sam Hoiberg, then a redshirt freshman, was forced into action. He called his older brother Jack Hoiberg, a former college walk-on, for advice.
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“I just kept telling him, ‘You belong and you’re good enough,’” Jack Hoiberg said. “Which is not easy as a walk-on, because you’re expected to be perfect when you’re in there – and if you’re not, you have a very short leash.”
Sam Hoiberg seized the opportunity. Going forward, he never missed another game. The Huskers ended the season 16-16 and the next season made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in Fred Hoiberg’s tenure.
Sam Hoiberg’s 160 career steals rank him seventh in school history. This season, he made the Big Ten All-Defensive Team and ranked second in the conference in steals. He’s started every game for the Huskers, averages career highs in points (9.4) and rebounds (5.3), and leads the team in average assists (4.4) and steals (2.0).
Sam credits his twin brother with helping him develop the offensive part of his game.
“He can get in Sam's head a heck of a lot better than I can just with the whole twin telepathy thing, and he's able to be there for him and really be as supportive as anybody that he's going to ever be around,” Fred Hoiberg said.
Charlie Hoiberg thought back to high school, when Sam Hoiberg was one of their team’s leading scorers and dove on the floor for loose balls. To him, that was all the evidence he needed that his brother could embrace a larger role on the Huskers.
“A lot of it’s just been helping him with his confidence,” Charlie Hoiberg said. “Sam’s always been a good offensive player his whole life and when he came to college is when he became more of a defensive specialist. And I just wanted to help him realize that he can do more than that and he’s an extremely skilled person who has worked extremely hard.”
Anxiety, resolve, joy mark Hoibergs' Huskers run
In many ways, Fred Hoiberg being the architect of Nebraska’s rebuild feels like destiny.
His grandfather, Jerry Bush, was Nebraska’s head basketball coach for nine seasons from 1954 to 1963. His other grandfather, Otto Hoiberg, was a sociology professor at the university for 30 years. Both of Hoiberg’s parents graduated from Nebraska, and he was born in Lincoln.
Charlie recalled when he went to Lincoln to play in an AAU basketball tournament and his grandmother showed him the house she grew up in. He saw his great grandfather’s name on a plaque in front of Memorial Stadium. When the twins were 11, they and their parents attended a ceremony at a Huskers football game, honoring Bush’s legacy.
However, Hoiberg’s four children didn’t fully realize how deep-rooted their family ties to Nebraska were until he took the Cornhuskers job ahead of the 2019-20 season. The twins finished high school in Lincoln, and helping guide the basketball program’s resurgence has made them feel even more connected to Nebraska.
“Nebraska has fully emerged into home for us,” Charlie said.
For Hoiberg’s entire coaching career, ever since he was at Iowa State, his entire family has been emotionally invested in his teams. Adding Sam and Charlie to the mix only ratcheted up the intensity.
Carol is always a nervous wreck watching games. Paige makes family members switch seats if the Huskers are losing, in hopes that musical chairs will reverse the team’s fortunes. Jack feels more anxiety before Nebraska games than he ever did before his own college games or Spurs games.
In contrast, Fred Hoiberg is well-practiced in the coaching art of unflappability. Whether it’s a preseason exhibition or a conference tournament matchup, he attacks every game the same. His even-keel persona is consistent on the court and off. But after Nebraska beat Troy in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament, Hoiberg’s daughter observed the coach beset by an unusual reaction: relief.
“Just like, ‘Oh my gosh, we finally did it. The monkey’s off our back,’” Paige Hoiberg said. “After the Vanderbilt game, too, he felt so loose and relaxed. And now I feel like they’re just having fun at this point, like no pressure anymore, just enjoying the season.”
Against Vanderbilt, after Braden Frager made a go-ahead basket for Nebraska with 2.2 seconds remaining and the Commodores’ heave rimmed out at the buzzer, Fred Hoiberg couldn’t stop his emotions from spilling out. None of them could.
“To be able to share that moment with these guys, you get so caught up in the coaching part of it that you really don't think about it, but when that game was over and all the emotions were flooding out, to be able to share that with those two guys has been great,” he said.
The Hoibergs expect to have more than a dozen family members in the stands at Toyota Center March 26 to watch Nebraska attempt to advance to the Elite Eight.
No matter what happens, they can relish the improbable journeys taken by a father and his sons. Three paths re-converged into one jubilant road that runs through Lincoln.
“Just the amount of joy that it’s brought to this Husker fan base, you can feel it,” Carol Hoiberg said. “It’s just electric. And you know, we’ve been waiting a long time to have these feelings. It’s certainly been worth the wait.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Nebraska basketball's Sweet 16 run led by Fred Hoiberg, sons Sam, Charlie
