Calling the shots

Discipline, hard work, unselfishness.

That has been sort of a holy trinity for Lorenzo Romar in his improbable basketball trail.

Those traits fueled his rise from a high school player no one wanted to a five-year NBA career.

They lifted him from obscure player-coach for a traveling Christian basketball team, Athletes in Action, to coach of a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

They now define the Washington Huskies (29-5), who play Louisville in an Albuquerque Regional semifinal today (4:10 p.m., CBS)

“We’ve taken on his qualities,” Huskies guard Brandon Roy said of Romar. “We’re a makeup of our coach.”

Romar, 46, was hired by Washington, his alma mater, three years ago after three years at Pepperdine, three years at Saint Louis and a stint as an assistant to Jim Harrick at UCLA that included the Bruins’ 1995 national title.

When he was hired at Washington, Romar said one of the first things he did was seek advice from longtime Arizona coach Lute Olson about how he turned that program around. Romar expected to hear about offenses and defenses; what he got from Olson was a discussion about discipline.

Discipline: From Day 1, if one of Romar’s players showed up late for a meeting, he was locked out. If a player didn’t play team ball, he was benched.

Most notably, Romar held out two starters, Will Conroy and Bobby Jones, for the first 4 minutes of last year’s first-round NCAA game against Alabama at Birmingham because of minor curfew violations. The Huskies started slowly and lost 102-100.

Did Romar have second thoughts?

“Not once,” he said. “There are situations where you have to make tough decisions. You may lose a battle, but hopefully in the end you win the war. I think our team learned from that.”

Romar doesn’t curse, and neither do the Huskies – most of the time. They don’t wear headbands. Romar used to have a ban on goatees, though he has bent on that.

“He’ll negotiate with you a little bit,” Conroy said.

What he won’t negotiate is hard work.

Hard work: The Huskies were 10-20, 10-20 and 11-18 in the three years before Romar arrived. They started 0-5 in the Pacific-10 last year. Since then they are 43-9.

They’ve done it by defending tenaciously and, especially important given their lack of height, rebounding fearlessly.

“Hard work, that’s the topic of all our discussions,” Roy said. “The only thing we really ever get in trouble about is lack of effort. You can miss shots. You can dribble the ball off your foot. But effort, that’s a given.”

Romar grew up in Compton, Calif., and loved basketball, but it took basketball a while to love him back.

He was cut from two high school teams and had no major college offers. He went to Cerritos College, a junior college, and then to Washington.

“I was kind of a mutt as a basketball player,” Romar says.

There was something about him, though. A 6-foot-1 guard, he was tough and played hard and smart, and he squeezed out five NBA seasons, mostly with the Golden State Warriors.

Then he joined Athletes in Action’s touring team. He was with it seven years, the last four as player-coach. During that time, his Christian beliefs solidified.

“I use those principles with the team,” he said. “The word Bible doesn’t come up, but I use the principles all the time. That’s how my life is run. That’s all I know.”

As a player-coach, because he could bench a guy if he didn’t pass him the ball that tended to instill unselfishness.

Unselfishness: Mighty mite (5-7) guard Nate Robinson scored nine points in Washington’s first-round win against Montana, and it didn’t bother him. Then Robinson took over the next game and scored 23 points against Pacific, and it didn’t bother anyone else.

The Huskies are second in the nation in assists. In each of their two tournament victories, they had five guys in double figures.

“One of the keys to this team,” Romar says, “is recognizing who has the hot hand. It can be any number of guys.”

So much has gone so well the last two seasons that Romar, on the eve of the tourney opener, was given an eight-year contract. A onetime basketball mutt who once thought he would be a minister, not a coach, has become a star.

“To be able to coach here, at a place I pulled for ever since I signed to play here, is unbelievable. There are universities that are rated higher and have more basketball tradition, but I feel like I’d be taking a demotion if I went somewhere else.”