Cougs’ rise from hoops oblivion
SEATTLE – Tony Bennett walked into a silent locker room inside Sacramento’s Arco Arena in March. He was about to cry.
The coach first looked into the eyes of each of his Washington State Cougars. He told them how proud he was of them immediately after their double-overtime loss to Vanderbilt in the second round of the NCAA tournament, WSU’s first appearance since 1994. Then he took a marker to a dry-erase board and wrote in huge letters “TAY.”
“Turnaround Year.”
Yet “turnaround” seems too mild of a description for what the man known around Pullman as “Coach Dreamy” did with the Cougars in 2007.
“Transformation” – from oblivion into a national power – is more like it. Bennett’s debut, one of the most successful in college basketball history, was the top story on the state’s sports scene.
Washington’s oldest professional team, the Seattle SuperSonics, applied to the NBA for relocation to Oklahoma City – after new owner and Oklahoman Clay Bennett’s fruitless push for a new $500 million arena. The NFL’s Seattle Seahawks won their fourth consecutive division title.
But nothing was more mammoth than what Bennett did to become The Associated Press’ national coach of the year in his first season replacing his father, Dick, as WSU’s head man.
Washington State has replaced Gonzaga and Washington as the state’s premier college basketball team. The Bulldogs were consumed this year by the arrest of star forward Josh Heytvelt for possession of psychedelic mushrooms and the Huskies missed the NCAA tournament for the first time in four seasons.
Meanwhile, the Cougars roared.
The 2006-07 season ended with a 26-8 record (13-5 Pac-10, good for second in the conference). WSU was ranked 10 times in the AP poll – more than in the entire history of the school. The 26 wins matched the school record of the 1940-41 team that reached the NCAA title game and was coached by Jack Friel, for whom the Cougars’ home court is named.
Friel Court had curtains covering the entire upper bowl for most of a decade before Bennett took over, to hide the thousands of empty seats in the 11,671-seat arena. In 2001-02, an average of just 2,292 fans per game paid to watch a 6-21 team that went 1-17 in the Pac-10.
The curtains are gone now. After four crowds of more than 11,000 last season, Friel Court is routinely packed to watch these chic Cougars, who are ending 2007 undefeated and ranked an unfathomable fourth in the nation. It’s WSU’s highest ranking ever. Until January, they hadn’t been ranked in 24 years.
Young women showed up at games in ‘07 with signs reading “We love you Coach Dreamy,” a reference to Doctor McDreamy from TV’s Seattle-based “Grey’s Anatomy.” The Palouse is in awe of the 38-year-old former shooting guard in suits and his signature, open-collared dress shirts.
“Just part of the fun,” said his wife, Laurel, who gets a kick out of the fawning over her husband. “I told him to remember that I was the one who loved him when he was losing.”
The state’s professional hoops teams were anything but dreamy. Bennett kept pushing for a Sonics arena in the suburbs of the city where they’ve played for 40 years, but failed to persuade lawmakers to come up with millions in taxpayer dollars. The city sued to force the Sonics to play in KeyArena until the team’s lease ends in 2010. While the court case is pending, a league committee is reviewing Bennett’s application to move to his hometown.
On the court, the team flopped to a 31-51 record last spring, That got coach Bob Hill and general manager Rick Sund fired. New GM Sam Presti then remade the franchise. He traded All-Star scorer Ray Allen to Boston, let second-leading scorer Rashard Lewis leave as a free agent to Orlando, and in June drafted teenager Kevin Durant, the national player of the year last spring at the University of Texas.
One of the youngest teams in the league is off to a predictably poor start to end 2007. It lost 21 of its first 30 games.
The Storm of the WNBA lost in the first round of the playoffs for the third consecutive summer. Then Anne Donovan, coach, general manager and architect of the 2004 league champions, abruptly resigned Nov. 30. The team is still seeking a coach, a GM and a home beyond the one more season Bennett has assured the Storm will be in Seattle.
Donovan wasn’t the only sports leader to quit out of nowhere. Baseball’s Mariners surprised the sport by leading the wild-card standings into late August despite manager Mike Hargrove abruptly resigning in July because he said he couldn’t commit enough of himself.
Alas, the Mariners stayed out of the playoffs for the sixth consecutive season. Their weak starting rotation finally exposed an overused bullpen during one of the worst September collapses for a contending team in the last half century.
The state’s major college football teams stayed at the bottom of the Pac-10. Behind record-setting passer Alex Brink, Washington State beat Washington 42-35 in the 100th Apple Cup, a wild night that was one of the best games in the series. But that wasn’t enough to keep WSU, which finished 5-7 and out of a bowl for the fourth consecutive season, from replacing coach Bill Doba with former player Paul Wulff.
Wulff led Eastern Washington to the national quarterfinals in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA). He is the first alum to lead the Cougars since Phil Sarboe, who coached from 1945-49.
Despite wondrous redshirt freshman quarterback Jake Locker of Ferndale, UW finished 4-9 against a brutal schedule in coach Tyrone Willingham’s third year and out of a bowl for the fifth consecutive season. School president Dr. Mark Emmert spared Willingham’s job for one more season. But six days after he announced that, Emmert forced athletic director Todd Turner, Willingham’s biggest supporter at the school, to resign effective Jan. 31.