It was the mid-1980s, and two penny-pinching friends made a deal. Whoever made it big would bring the other along.
At the time, Littell was head women’s basketball coach at Friends University, an NAIA school of about 2,800 in Wichita, Kansas, and lived in a house with three other guys straining to pay the mortgage.
One of his housemates, Kurt Budke, started work most days at 4 a.m., unloading trucks for UPS before starting his day job as the Falcons’ assistant coach. The 20-somethings were inseparable, bouncing ideas off each other and building a winning team at a program, which had been dormant.