Greg Kampe says Oakland received donation from Louisville fan for March Madness upset of Kentucky

It has been eight days since Oakland stunned Kentucky in the first round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament, but even after their elimination from March Madness, the gifts keep coming for the Golden Grizzlies — literally, and from one city in particular.

Oakland coach Greg Kampe said in a post Friday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that the university received a check from a Louisville resident.

In an attached note, the man explained that he sends a check of a certain amount of money every year to the university whose basketball team knocks Kentucky out of the NCAA Tournament.

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This year, the man wrote, he had doubled the value of the check because of Oakland’s story, according to Kampe.

“Truly the definition of March Madness,” Kampe wrote at the end of his post.

It’s not the first time Louisville fans have found a way to support Oakland after it knocked off the hated Wildcats in a 14-versus-3 matchup that, based on the difference in seeding, will be the biggest upset of this year’s NCAA Tournament.

Last Friday, the day after the Golden Grizzlies’ 80-76 win, Kampe said $8,000 worth of t-shirts from the university’s website had been purchased by customers with Louisville-area zip codes. The sudden influx of traffic, Kampe said, caused the website to crash.

This season marked the third time in as many years that Kentucky has lost in the first week of the NCAA Tournament.

Though at least one of those other defeats came against an undeniable Cinderella — 15 seed Saint Peter’s in 2022, a small New Jersey college that ultimately made a run to the Elite Eight that year — Oakland may have offered an even more compelling story onto which a rival fan could latch.

In his 40th year at Oakland, Kampe is the longest-tenured Division I coach and something of a folk hero in the sport for his longevity and gregarious personality. The Round of 64 victory was the first in the history of a program that played at the Division II level as recently as 1997. Trey Townsend, the Golden Grizzlies’ star player, competed against the Wildcats last week as his father, a former Oakland player under Kampe, watched from the baseline as a credentialed photographer. And, of course, there was Jack Gohlke, a former Division II player who scored a game-high 32 points while making 10 of his 20 3-pointers in the victory against Kentucky, a performance that established him as the tournament’s breakout star.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Oakland receives donation from Louisville fan for March Madness upset of Kentucky