Vandals may take whack from WAC

MOSCOW, Idaho – Memorial Gym remains, even in only occasional use, a cozy jewel of mortar and brick, dark shadows, menacing balconies and Byzantine rafters. It’s a church that didn’t quite grow up to be a cathedral.

This weekend, it’s the home of the University of Idaho Vandals, the jazz festival having chased them out of their curtained quarters at the dome across the road.

In one respect, it’s the perfect arrangement.

Memorial Gym was built in 1928, and that’s how far the Vandals tried to set back the game Thursday night.

The proceedings were mercifully rescued by UI guard Tanoris Shepherd and a shooting display that brought the old house to life, but the Vandals still lost to UC Irvine 67-62 in overtime – their 19th, and thus a guarantee that they’ll endure only their second 20-loss season in two decades.

The last one got the coach fired. That isn’t going to happen this time.

Which is not to say that the program doesn’t find itself at a crossroads – neither here nor there, almost as the Vandals were Thursday night, at home but not their own.

There are signs of college basketball life all across the Inland Northwest. It’s business as usual at Gonzaga. Washington State, if nothing else, is the team Arizona never wants to play again – though there really is more than that afoot in Pullman. Eastern Washington is still champion of the Big Sky until someone else is. The women’s game is good and getting better.

But here, the Vandals have taken a troubling step back at the least opportune time, and not just because they had to play in the lovely old gym they abandoned 30 years ago.

Next year, Idaho will finally be delivered into the Western Athletic Conference, not the penthouse of college athletics but an improvement on the fixer-uppers where the Vandals have been doing time. The sense of relief and reward the worker bees have been feeling – this has been the Bataan of athletic upward mobility – is now mitigated somewhat by actually having to be competitive at this new level.

“We’re definitely stepping up,” said UI athletic director Rob Spear, “and we need to make sure we do a better job recruiting, a better job coaching, a better job of fund-raising and we need to improve our basketball facility situation.”

Really, the last thing the Vandals needed at this point was the reverse momentum of a 20-loss bummer.

No one takes that development harder than head coach Leonard Perry, who on Thursday night watched his team rally from miserable starts to both halves and overtime, only to lose by trading jump shots for Anteaters layups. The depth of his frustration was actually more evident at the beginning of the game, however, when he opted not to start his two leading scorers, Dandrick Jones and Anton Lyons.

“We’d lost 18 games – why not?” he said. “What’s it going to hurt? It’s not going to hurt anything, not at this point.”

That they still played 40 and 37 minutes suggests that whatever tough love was being revealed, UI’s lack of depth – and lack of talent – was going require it be a token demonstration.

“I think,” Perry said, by way of explaining UI’s slow-flow game, “the course of the season has taken its toll on some guys.”

Well, then, they’re going to love next season.

Beyond the more far-flung travel and generally more raucous arenas of the WAC, the competitive level the Vandals must aspire to is a little daunting. The WAC’s conference RPI this year is 12, compared to the Big West’s 19 – and that’s representative of how it is almost every year. Since the calendar turned 2000, WAC teams have won 61 percent of their out-of-conference games, Big West teams 43 percent.

Idaho has hardly been in the upper crust of the Big West. Four of the past five seasons, the Vandals’ RPI has been 250 or higher, out of 330 Division I teams. At the moment, there is just one WAC team below Idaho’s 279 – San Jose State.

Though most of the hoohah about Idaho’s move into the WAC has been centered on the football program, the school may actually be getting in deeper in basketball.

“I’d say so,” said Spear. “The WAC is getting more respect nationally than ever. They’ve been getting two teams in the NCAA Tournament on a regular basis, and you look at the basketball units (monetary dispersals based on NCAA wins) the WAC as a league has generated the past few years and it’s because they’ve done well in the tournament. So it’s going to be a big jump in basketball.”

Ah, but the silver lining – the four teams (Rice, SMU, Tulsa and UTEP) that are vacating the WAC premises to make room for the Vandals, Utah State and New Mexico State are among the league’s better basketball schools, at least traditionally.

Spear sees another one.

“The WAC is a step up in a competitive standpoint,” he said, “but it helps us to be able to recruit a better of athlete in here – and we’ve seen that in several of our programs already. I think we’ll continue to get a better athlete who will help us compete in a better league, just because of the association.”

Spear and the Vandals are encouraged by Perry’s fall 2004 class, the fact that two big men who’ve missed most of the season injuries return and that Shepherd will earn himself another year of eligibility by graduating this spring.

But, of course, UI will also graduate 50 percent of its scoring, too.

And, when the jazz festival is in town, they’ll always be orphans, too.

“A basketball facility is important to us if we’re going to stay a Division I school,” said Spear.

“We’ve put Leonard at a disadvantage. He starts his season with the football field down (in the dome) and he doesn’t have his basketball court up. He’s playing teams who have had five or six weeks on their home court and he hasn’t had any.

“We need to get a facility designed just for basketball.”

Of course, they have one. But it’s 77 years old.

And the last thing the Vandals need is another trip back in time.