Graves May Find Success In Back Yard

Lots of things grow in the shade.

Mushrooms. Costa Rican coffee. Even forget-me-nots, symbolically enough.

Forget-me-please has been a more apt descriptive of what grows in our backyard garden of Division I women’s basketball, and especially so at Gonzaga University - where the shadow cast by the cult-status men’s team is long and dark, indeed.

Bad enough to be so, well, bad. But to be so right next to something so brilliant is an exercise in doubt, desperation, and possibly even self-abuse.

So why wouldn’t Kelly Graves want to throw himself into the middle of it?

“You’ve got to remember,” Gonzaga’s new women’s coach said at his introduction last week, “that when I got my last job, the team had banded together and got their coach fired. Not a real pleasant situation.”

By extension, he means, this is daisies and daydreams.

Seems a little dreamlike, anyway. This is a very unZaglike phenomenon - hiring away an ultra-successful coach (66 victories in the past three years) from a school (Saint Mary’s) in the very same league to resurrect a long-moribund program. Family and financial considerations drove Graves’ move north, true, but it still stretches the imagination. How can we put it - you don’t see Mark Few ogling the Portland job, now do you?

“I left security,” Graves admitted. “Women’s basketball was probably the marquee sport. Over the three years I’ve been there, we’ve had five winning teams at the school - and women’s basketball accounted for three of those.”

Yikes. The Wazzu of the West Coast Conference.

At a school which has had just three winning seasons in 16 years of Division I women’s basketball, it seems silly to be thinking of the anticipated about-face as a slam dunk. But the fact is, the Zags have never set out to hire a basketball coach and come up with someone already accomplished at this level the way Graves is - and that goes for the men’s team, too.

And so it seemed like a natural question: Does Zagmania necessarily have to be gender specific?

“I’m not going to sit here and say we can go to the Elite Eight,” Graves said. “But obviously, the men’s team here has shown the way to everyone in our conference and I hope we can do it here. I’m confident we can.”

One step at a time, of course.

The Gonzaga women have won exactly 45 games in the last six years. That’s one more than the men have won in the last two. Talking tournament is ridiculously premature, but let’s do it anyway.

“It’s realistic,” insisted Graves, without setting any sort of timetable, “just because there’s precedent here. It’s hard to say, because the nature of the women’s tournament is different. Let’s face it, the men had some upsets along the way - even though people who really know the game weren’t surprised.

“Women’s basketball is different. With the way they’re seeded and playing the early rounds at home sites, you just don’t see those Cinderella stories.”

Do tell.

While more than half the teams in the men’s Sweet 16 this year were seeded sixth or lower, the women’s version had just one survivor lower than a fifth seed - No. 11 Alabama-Birmingham. Of course, this was a virtual bachelorette party replete with Chippendale’s dancers compared to the usual women’s bracket. In 1999, for instance, seeds 1-2-3-4 advanced to every regional.

Pour yourself a ginger ale and crank up the Perry Como, if you think you can handle the excitement.

The theories for this are pretty straightforward. When Title IX began to toll, the big schools jumped in with a vengeance, the better to insulate their established men’s programs. The women’s game, popular as it’s become, has not yet developed to the point there are enough good players to go around. And since schools can offer 15 women’s rides, as opposed to 13 men’s scholarships, the talent doesn’t get spread around enough.

“The equivalent of a Matt Santangelo,” GU athletic director Mike Roth pointed out, “there’s not as many of them on the women’s side. There are still fewer impact women’s players out there who can get you to a Sweet 16.”

How about just getting you a win in the WCC tournament?

There should be enough of those, and Spokane is a good place to start. For whatever reason - and the flipside of the one Roth cited is pretty sound - Spokane has produced a slew of Division I women’s players in the past, oh, 15 years. You have to go back more than five years to Gonzaga’s Jeff Brown and Jason Rubright to find two Greater Spokane League boys grads on Division I scholarship.

The problem is, very few of the GSL’s better girls have chosen to stay in the area to play.

“I don’t know if that’s just a player issue - it’s kids in Spokane,” said Gonzaga Prep girls coach Mike Arte. “We send something like 96 percent of our kids on to college, but maybe 20 of a graduating class of 200 go to Gonzaga. The university sells itself, but kids want to get away - they feel a sense of independence.

“I think if Kelly gets one girl, he’ll get another - and once the program starts being successful, it becomes a snowball rolling down a hill.”

Which is an improvement on that snowball which has been melting in March, when the men start to heat it up.

“I’m not going to compare teams,” said Graves. “We’re not where the guys are. But what they’ve done helps legitimize the women’s program in some ways. Hopefully, we can use their success to our full advantage.”

To grow their own.