Aggers’ Eagles 0-5, But They’re Not Ciphers

Q: Who schedules a basketball game on Thursday of finals week?

A: A coach who inherited a schedule originally calling for a game on Wednesday of finals week.

College basketball is an opera - OK, maybe a rap opera with the fat lady doing her thing at the stroke of April. Hoops at Eastern Washington University is a country song, with coach Steve Aggers trying to rewrite the lyrics as fast as he can.

But then, the words don’t really matter if you can’t get that same tired twang out of your head.

The Eagles hummed a few bars of something new Thursday night before being drowned out by the University of Portland Pilots 87-72 at Reese Court, where the tranquility was a welcome cramming alternative to the bustle of the library.

Now Eastern is 0-5 in the Aggers era. Technically - numerically - that’s worse than any start perpetrated by his predecessor, John Wade. But any resemblance between these Eagles and the teams mustered during the Wade bummer is purely skin deep.

To this point, anyway, they don’t appear beaten before they take the floor.

Naturally, this could change if 0-5 erodes into, say, 2-12. Aggers knows it - and knows his job is to see that it doesn’t.

“Realistically, it’s going to be a long year,” he admitted. “I have to be upbeat. I will not concede anything. But some of this is learning how to deal with losing. That isn’t the same as accepting it.

“We need,” he sighed, “some little victories here and there.”

He’s not necessarily talking about beating Carroll or Whitman later this month. He might be talking about landing a recruit Eastern has no business being in the hunt for, or maybe even an animated throng moseying over from the dorms just for the heck of it. Maybe he’s thinking of the clean bill of academic health for his in-limbo center, Melvin Lewis - to say nothing of any active players sweating out fall quarter grades.

That’s all part of the Aggers quandary.

For the new coach stubbornly maintains there is no past - at least no recent past - but only future.

“I’m not into where we’ve been,” he said, just one variation on his theme. “I’m into where we can go. I’m into finding solutions. We have a saying around here: no sniveling. Let’s go forward and get it done.”

He swears he didn’t watch any old videotape to analyze his personnel. He insists he didn’t sleuth out any old skeletons.

But then, he didn’t have to.

The problem with only having eyes for the future is that you still have to have to live in the present, which is inevitably tethered to the past.

Take the schedule - the two Pac-10 teams to open with just a day in between and then the finals-week nonsense Aggers was able to push back a day.

Take the players - a game lot, but continually overmatched, and with no obvious hope that things will be better in a year because four starters are seniors (and Lewis would make five). How narrow-minded was Wade’s reliance on junior college recruits? Eastern didn’t bring in a single recruit for a visit prior to last year’s fall signing period.

(Aggers has already reversed that trend - signing three high school players this fall. Lump them in with the transfers and injury redshirts and they almost outnumber the available players.)

And take, finally, the collective psyche.

“These guys had been subjected to losing and humiliation so much that they were almost damaged,” Aggers said. “In any rebuilding situation, you’ve got to get guys to believe in themselves, but this was extreme. In talking to them, some wanted to vent and I tried to be a listener, to be empathetic, but I didn’t want to get into excuses.

“I’m realistic about the past here, but I don’t want to live in it.”

At times, he has no choice. Lewis sits because of a glacial investigation into a dubious summer correspondence course he took between his freshman and sophomore years in junior college 2-1/2 years ago. Eddie Neal, a point guard Wade’s staff recruited and Aggers could desperately use, just underwent back surgery for a scary injury suffered while playing laser tag.

In the meantime, those who can play do. And if they can’t win now, at least one of them will be happy if he can be a bridge to winning later.

“It’s all about the program,” said senior Curtis Porter, who had 20 points in Thursday’s losing cause.

“No matter how my senior year goes, if the guys do better next year, that’s important. It’s all about the program, about setting a tone. It’s not about me or D’mitri (Rideout) or Melvin or Adam Dean. It’s about what we’re trying to build here.”

Which, as at every other Division I program in America, is something you can dance to.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.

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