Cedar Rapids Prairie’s basketball brotherhood is proud of Kris and Keegan Murray

The most-ardent fans of Kris and Keegan Murray may be their Cedar Rapids Prairie basketball teammates from 2016-2019.

Unless Kris is drafted by twin brother Keegan’s Sacramento Kings on Thursday night, those other former Prairie Hawks will suddenly have two favorite NBA teams.

“I’m now a Kings fan out of nowhere,” Max Lampe said. “I don’t know how that happened. I grew up a Bulls fan.

“My dad and I bought NBA League Pass the minute we realized the Kings would never be on national television. I kicked my roommates off the living room TV multiple times to watch the Kings play. I became the biggest Kings fan, and the biggest Iowa fan watching Kris as many times as I could.”

After playing basketball with the Murray twins from elementary school until they were high school seniors at Prairie, Lampe played college ball at Coe.

“I liked to joke with Max and tell him that he was in my all-time top three of former Kohawk campers,” Coe Coach Bryan Martin said, “along with Kris and Keegan Murray.”

Lampe was far from the only Prairie teammate of the Murrays who went on to college athletics. Gabe Burkle is a football tight end at Iowa State. Levi Usher played baseball at Louisville and now is playing in the Kansas City Royals organization. Harrision Cook is a pitcher for Michigan State.

Griff Clark played basketball at Loras, Jake Eilers at Coe. Max Smith Drahos, the Metro boys’ basketball Player of the Year in 2017, was Wartburg’s men’s basketball MVP as a senior in 2020-21, and was a three-time all-American Rivers Conference selection.

“Max played with an intensity level second to none and was a great teammate,” Wartburg Coach Dick Peth said.

Smith Drahos was two years ahead of the Murrays at Prairie. He was the team’s leading scorer as a senior as the sophomores began earning varsity playing time.

“At that time I was a leader,” Smith Drahos said, “and I’d give them constructive criticism if they made a mistake or forgot something. They always owned up to it and worked to improve on it.”

That’s the kind of thing you consistently hear when talking to those former Hawks about the Murrays. Envy? Zero. Respect and warm feelings? Totally.

“They’re great people, the whole family,” said Cook, a five-game winner for Michigan State this spring. “It’s just fun to be around them and I’m really happy for them.”

“It makes me feel proud to play with them,” Smith Drahos said. “It’s not one of those cases of someone who was highly touted coming up. It’s two guys that worked really hard and put the work in to get bigger and improve their craft, and it’s paid off for them.”

None of those Hawks will tell you they saw future NBA players in the Murrays when Kris and Keegan came up through the ranks at Prairie.

“It’s crazy,” Smith Drahos said, “because at the time when I was a senior and they were sophomores it definitely was not on our radar. Mostly just because of how small they were at the time. I was 6-foot-1 and I was bigger than them. Division I wasn’t a guarantee for them at that time.”

“If you’d told me four years ago that Kris is on the verge of getting drafted and Keegan had a record-breaking year in the NBA (most 3-pointers in a season by a rookie), I would have probably told you that you were crazy,” Cook said. “But that’s a testament to all the work they’ve put in.”

It couldn’t have hurt the Murrays to be surrounded by other fine and serious athletes. The Hawks, coached by Jeremy Rickertsen, went 17-4 and shared the Mississippi Valley Conference’s Mississippi Division championship in 2019.

Kenyon Murray, the father of the Murray brothers, is quick to give credit to Rickertsen and his sons’ Prairie teammates. He credited all the aforementioned former Hawks and super-competitive starting guard Logan Burg.

“They had some great teammates who were committed to turning the boys’ basketball program around, ... all instrumental in not only helping Keegan and Kris get better, they helped the entire program,” Kenyon Murray said. “Behind it all is how Coach Rickertsen believed in them both and gave them a platform to showcase their abilities.”

“We were talented,” Smith Drahos said, “but in practice every day we made it a competition between each other to push each other.”

“The reason we probably did so well and we did win the conference is those two (the Murrays),” Lampe said. “We saw the hours that they put in and just wanted to live up to that, too.”

How many former Cedar Rapids-Marion high school basketball players can say they had two teammates who went on to the NBA? Come Thursday, that group will consist entirely of the fellows who played for Prairie from November 2016 to March 2019.

“They did the grunt work of the scoring so I didn’t really have to worry about that too much,” Cook said. “Which was awesome. Honestly, I just kind of settled into a role of being the glue guy, getting a rebound and giving it back to them.”

Lampe recently began coaching basketball with fifth-graders for local youth basketball program Team Iowa.

“I’ve been a fan of the Murrays since I was in fifth grade when I started playing with them,” he said. “My job used to be get a rebound and throw it to those two as quick as I can.”

Seven years later at Prairie, “Did we see (the NBA) coming?” Lampe posed. ”No, most of us, probably not. Did we believe that they could? Yeah, they were two of the most dedicated people I’ve seen in this sport.“

Smith Drahos now works for Principal Financial Group in Des Moines. Like Lampe, he bought NBA League Pass last year to watch Keegan Murray play for Sacramento.

“I went to three Kings games,” he said, “one in Chicago, one in Minnesota, and my brother lives in Brooklyn, so we went to one there.”

Come Thursday night, Prairie’s basketball brotherhood will have two players in the league to keep tabs of and proudly claim as their own.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com