Role Models Spread More Than Fodder

Since college basketball begins before the bowl bids go out, we’d better start getting you in the mood.

So, who’s playing the toughest Division I schedule in the neighborhood this season?

Washington State? The Cougars, potentially, could play eight teams from last spring’s NCAA Tournament bracket, depending on how nasty things get in the Rainbow Classic. Gonzaga has five NCAA or NIT participants lined up. Eastern may get New Mexico in The Pit; Idaho will get three-time Big Ten champ Purdue with Gene Keady in full glower.

But none of those schools will see a lineup like this:

Notre Dame, Kansas State, St. Louis, Northwestern, Eastern Illinois and Boise State. All in the space of 10 days, all on the road.

That’s what you’d call Allen Sherman scheduling. You know - Hello Mudder, Hello Fodder.

As it happens, this hard-knocks schedule isn’t being tackled by a college team, but by something called the Thunder - the latest outreach brainstorm of Fred Crowell and Danny Beard of Northwest Basketball Camp.

Spokane’s team. America’s guest.

If you bother with college hoops in November, you’ll notice some odd names cropping up in the teeny type. Marathon Oil. Latvian Select. The Otis Smith All-Stars. Angola Nationals.

The NCAA allows Division I teams a pair of preseason exhibitions - one against a foreign touring team, another against an AAU club of post-collegians sponsored, usually, by some corporation or by Christ. Last year, for instance, a few Top 25 schools beat up on a team from Pella Windows - even though you’d think they’d own the glass.

Heh, heh. Sorry.

Into this happy arrangement come the Thunder, gathered by Beard from near and far for the purpose of - well, not for the purpose of being some college club’s road kill, that’s for sure.

“We want to give the collegiate teams a good game - and we’re going to be very competitive,” insisted Beard, who a year ago was taking Northwest Christian’s boys team into the Panorama League gyms in Springdale and Selkirk instead of South Bend.

“Two, we’re taking a stance against crime, violence and substance abuse. And No. 3, we’re putting some good role models out on the floor.”

To say nothing of being a virtual brochure for NBC camps.

The message end of exhibition hoops is something that dates to the granddaddy of AAU teams, Athletes in Action the still-active playing arm of Campus Crusade for Christ. Not coincidentally, NBC president Crowell once coached the Crusaders and Beard played for them.

This doesn’t mean Thunder players will grab the P.A. microphone at halftime and try to save some souls.

“We would like to sit down and meet with teams or organizations on campus,” Beard explained. “We’ve got some guys on the team who are certified in different areas - anger management, chemical dependency, psychology - and we could put together a good program if people are interested.

“But we can also have an impact with the lives of the guys we’re working with.

We can encourage them to be leaders and take stands against things that are hurting our society. If we have an impact on them, they can have an impact on their communities.”

So who are these guys?

Well, one of them is Jon Kinloch, lately of Gonzaga University, who is waiting around for a pro job to begin in Venezuela. Nate Dunham, from Whitworth’s NAIA runners-up, also has a gig abroad - in Australia.

Lewis Lofton played at North Idaho College a few years ago before finishing at Weber State. Brian Kasbar, a Yalie, was a Hoopfest champ a couple years back. Scott Harrison is a promising 6-foot-10 big man from the University of British Columbia, who could use the exposure he might get with the Thunder to get him overseas or even into the CBA.

And there’s also Spokane guys like Todd Doolittle, whose voice you hear on the GSL broadcasts and on the mobile mike at Chiefs hockey games, and Shann Ferch - now a psych professor at GU.

Ferch played at Montana State and Pepperdine, and later with AAU clubs High Five America and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. So he’s seen both sides of the exhibition dance.

“As a college player, these games were a lot more rigid and nervous and tight,” he said. “Both places I was at, you didn’t want to be losing an exhibition game. The boosters and coaches were pretty intense about that, and if you got drummed that was real bad.”

Ferch was with High Five the year it was coached by Russian legend Alexander Gomelsky, who tried to mix a half-dozen of his players with four or five Americans - with indifferent results. They played four Top 10 teams in the space of seven days.

“It was incredible,” Ferch recalled. “We played Memphis with Anfernee Hardaway, Kentucky with Jamal Mashburn, Duke with Bobby Hurley and Grant Hill and North Carolina with Eric Montross. I’d like to play the same schedule with the team we have now. We didn’t have much chemistry - guys didn’t like to play with each other too much and it showed sometimes. We were up 17 points on Memphis and lost by three.”

If the Thunder schedule seems modest by comparison, it’s only because players’ job commitments handcuffed Beard in putting it together. His window is 10 days - Nov. 7-16 - though he already has UCLA booked for Nov. 19, 1997.

“For some of these guys, this will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Beard. “To play in Notre Dame’s arena, or in front of 23,000 people in St. Louis - that’s going to be a thrill.”

More than you can squeeze, certainly, into one line of teeny type.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review