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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Washington State seniors played huge role in stabilizing program

PULLMAN – DaVonte Lacy had the opportunity to leave Washington State for a perennial NCAA tournament contender last spring, and he thought about taking it.

Lacy, like any competitive college basketball player, had long imagined the glory of playing on one of the country’s best teams and had reason to think he was good enough to play on one.

Instead, he toiled through three injury-filled seasons playing on teams of little national relevance with an NCAA tournament berth never in sight.

Furthermore, the coach who recruited him, Ken Bone, had just been fired, meaning his senior season was sure to be spent learning a new system under a coach who would place the long-term success of a new program over highlighting players only there for one season.

When representatives of some perennial contenders contacted his AAU coach and said he could play right away for a winner, Lacy talked with his mother and academic advisors. They discussed graduating early so that he could transfer and have one season on the big stage and take advantage of the opportunity to show NBA scouts he was not just a moderate talent on a bad team.

But a conversation with new Cougars coach Ernie Kent convinced Lacy that he could do more with his senior season by being the centerpiece of WSU’s turnaround than as a one-year mercenary on a brand-name team.

“First thing he said was, ‘No one’s going anywhere,’ ” Lacy said. “He said he needed seniors to instill what he believes in and he needs senior leadership. He showed so much love and affection right away so I said, ‘All right, I’m going to go about it with you, man,’ and once I stepped up I think people followed.”

On Saturday, Lacy and WSU’s seniors will play the last regular-season home game of their college careers. Because of his decision to return, he will end his career having never participated in March Madness, barring an astounding WSU run to a Pac-12 tournament championship.

But his decision also meant that he became the anchor of a senior-led revival by WSU (12-16, 6-10 Pac-12), which already has more conference wins than his junior and sophomore seasons combined.

“(My teammates) come here every day, the fans come and watch,” Lacy said. “Who am I to say I’m going to go somewhere else and it’s better? I’m going to work my hardest to try to bring this team up to that level and I think that was a big part of my legacy. I wanted to be a four-year Cougar and give everything, not three years.”

Lacy has been WSU’s best player for half his career and leads the team in scoring with 17.3 points per game. While his return’s importance to WSU’s improvement is obvious, the difference between an uplifting season of competitiveness and another dreary 3-15 Pac-12 affair was the ability of WSU’s other two seniors to break out in their final year.

One who stepped alongside Lacy was Jordan Railey, whose past performance caused many to write him off, but whose significant contributions in the post this season have added at least a couple of wins to WSU’s total.

Railey began his career at Iowa State, where his greatest skill appears to have been fouling opposing players. He started over at WSU. After sitting out a season, he appeared in 31 games last year, starting 25 and averaging 3.0 points and 2.5 rebounds per outing.

He played like a tall guy who was told once he should play basketball, but not like a basketball player. But his perspective changed – as well as the perspective of him – when, at the end of an already solid performance against Texas-San Antonio, he sized up a defender and threw down a dunk that led that night’s highlight reels.

Railey finished that game with nine points, four rebounds, two blocks and a new outlook.

“I always say even if that game wouldn’t have happened, I still would have taken away the same thing I took away from that game, just because I was in the rhythm of that game,” Railey said. “Everything was flowing and it just kind of propelled me to the next game, and all of a sudden I wasn’t worried about thinking about anything anymore. I was just playing.”

The night before that game, he and sophomore Josh Hawkinson feasted on peanut M&M candy, a tradition they’ve continued before every game this season.

Railey has scored in double figures six times this season, including 17 points in a 69-66 win at California that ended WSU’s losing nearly two-year streak of losing on the road against conference teams.

Recently it has been Dexter Kernich-Drew, another senior who will be honored on Saturday, who has carried the Cougars. While the Australian transplant has shown flashes in the past, it’s only recently that he has been pacing the Cougars in scoring.

“I didn’t want to be a role player but I’ve had to be a role player, which I’m fine with,” Kernich-Drew said. “I’m not really too big on that stuff, but it’s been nice and it’s good to see hard work paying off …”

The Cougars were on a four-game losing streak until Kernich-Drew’s 27 points led them to a win over Arizona State. He was also the catalyst in another win last week at USC. Those two victories were by a combined seven points but will have a large impact in the way Kent’s first season is viewed.

This will also be remembered as the first season in a while that the Cougars have consistently bounced back from difficulties, never losing more than four consecutive games and pulling out surprising wins, such as the Stanford upset, when it appeared they could be about to trend downward.

“Obviously, we have moments where we don’t play well, but nothing negative ever came from what happened in a game and it never spiraled,” Railey said. “We just continued to push. It’s been a great year for me, just playing with these guys every day.”

Kent credits the way Kernich-Drew, Railey and Lacy embraced the new program and bonded with younger players as part of Kent’s family-atmosphere coaching strategy with the team’s better-than-expected performance.

“They completely bought in and, not that we changed things 360 degrees, but there still was a lot of drastic change in the program,” Kent said. “They bought into it and that’s huge, because by them buying into it everyone kind of follows suit with that.”