Tom Davis, directing the Iowa Hawkeyes in 1987, handed down his love for basketball to his son, Keno Davis. Keno became a student of the game while his father coached at Iowa.

AP File Photo

PROVIDENCE — Keno?

What kind of a name is Keno?

“I was named for one of my father’s old high school players,” he said. “Some guy named Keno Hawker from some small town in Illinois.”

Seems his father wanted a first name that was going to be distinctive, something to play off a commonplace last name like Davis.

So Keno it became.

Which is only fitting, for both his father and basketball runs through Keno Davis’ life like a beam of light, illuminating everything.

His earliest basketball memories were of old Roberts Center on the Boston College campus. It was the late ’70s and early 80s , Tom Davis was the coach, or Dr. Tom as he often was referred to, and Keno Davis came of age in that small gym.

The family lived on Commonwealth Avenue in Newton, a couple of miles from the campus, and he remembers his father walking to work. And sometimes he would tag along, when the names at BC were John Bagley and Jay Murphy, back in the early days of the Big East, when his father was making his basketball name.

Those were the roots, his first basketball memories.

He was a coach’s kid, and that defined everything.

When he was 11 he moved to California where his father became the coach at Stanford, and then it was to Iowa City when Tom Davis became the coach at the University of Iowa.

And it was there, as a high school senior, that he crossed some kind of personal Maginot Line, one of those decisions from which there was no turning back.

He was a high school senior then, a guard on the basketball team, one of those kids who could shoot but had some athletic deficiencies, one of those kids who knew that if he were ever going to play in college it was going to be in a non-scholarship situation, one of those kids who simply didn’t have the physical gifts to one day play in the big arenas like his father’s teams did.

So he made a decision, the first step in what yesterday took him to be announced as the new Providence College basketball coach.

He was going to be a basketball coach.

No matter that his father tried to talk him out of it, told him to be a stockbroker, told him to be a salesman, told him to be anything but someone whose career is so often defined by things out of your control. His father was afraid that Keno was simply trying to be him, the son wanting to walk in the father’s shoes, a story as old as time.

Keno didn’t listen.

Why should he have?

He already had come of age in the game, already knew the highs and lows, already had moved around the country, a life defined by the bouncing ball.

A coach’s kid.

So he went to the University of Iowa where his father was the coach and essentially became a graduate assistant as a freshman. He sat on the bench during games. He went to practices. He sat in on the coaches’ meetings. He hung out with the players. He came to know both how the coaches thought, and how the players thought, too.

In short, he was an apprentice in a basketball workshop, learning the business in ways few kids ever are able to.

“I knew then I was going to be a coach,” he said.

So there was an assistant job at Southern Indiana for two years, Southwest Missouri for six more, learning his trade in the basketball bushes, one of those young guys with a clipboards, their heads full of x’s and o’s and big dreams. Learning his trade and paying his dues. Trying to establish himself as Keno Davis instead of simply Tom Davis’ kid.

Then five years ago his father — whose contract had not been extended at Iowa after the 1999 season even though he was the winningest coach in school history — came back to coaching, this time at Drake. Keno went with him as an assistant. Last year his father retired, and Keno Davis became the Drake coach.

No longer the coach’s kid.

The coach.

The rest is history.

Drake came out of nowhere to finish 28-5 this past season after being picked to finish ninth in the Missouri Valley Conference. At one point the team won 21 straight games. And when the smoke had cleared The Associated Press named Keno Davis the national coach of the year.

That’s what led him here yesterday, the kind of young coach on the rise who seems like an ideal fit for the Friars, the kind of young coach ready to take on a big challenge. He said his father told him that the PC job was one he had to take a look at, for his father remembers those early years in the Big East, when he used to bring Boston College into the Civic Center to play the Friars.

For in a sense those are his roots.

Boston College. The Red Sox. The Patriots. The Celtics. Those early years of the Big East. The teams of his childhood. He says these are still his greatest memories, the ones he’s always carried with him, through all the years and all the moves.

And now he’s back in the Big East, the place where it really all began for his father, the place where his father once made his coaching name. Now he’s the new PC coach, complete with the praise and good feeling that came yesterday, all the promise of future cheers and a glorious new chapter in the long story that is PC basketball.

For the Friars have their new coach and his first name is Keno.

No last name needed.

Not anymore.

breynold@projo.com