Tulane transfer rises with Cougs
PULLMAN – Belief is something that’s getting easier and easier to come by these days around the Washington State basketball program.
But for one player on this record-setting team, that quality was needed – both internally and externally – long before the wins started piling up.
Taylor Rochestie arrived at WSU a little more than a year ago, a point guard with an air of confidence but a knee braced tightly. The former he had possessed for years, the latter was acquired in what was to be his sophomore year at Tulane. After shredding knee ligaments and suffering the consequences of Hurricane Katrina, Rochestie found himself transferring to Pullman.
Restricted to shooting 30-footers while sitting on the bench, his injured right leg propped up on a chair, the Cougars’ newest point guard was still one of the most talkative players on the team.
“It’s not a cockiness, but it’s a confidence level that’s funny and fun to be around,” junior Robbie Cowgill said. “Coach Dick Bennett kept saying, ‘There’s just something we’re missing. We need a point guard that’s going to take control.’ And Taylor would say, ‘Guys, that’s going to be me.’ It’s like, all right, take it easy here, buddy.”
Even if his teammates didn’t necessarily know what they had in their newest addition, Rochestie thought he had something to believe in around him.
Watching from the bench last year, Rochestie saw, like everybody else, a team that lost almost all of its Pac-10 games and plummeted into the basement. But all good point guards know how to see the whole floor, and the California native thought he spotted something in his new teammates that few others had.
“I don’t know how they were feeling, but being able to be a spectator and watch, I saw some good things,” he said. “I saw we’ve got some good big men. We’ve got some good guards. We’ve got guys that can create, guys that can shoot. We were losing a lot of games by one or three points. And you know, as you’re watching this, you’re not out there experiencing why we were losing. You’re asking yourself, ‘How is this happening?’ “
For all the talk, though, Rochestie was anything but the solution coming out of the gate for WSU this season. Buried on the depth chart and still struggling badly in his first action after missing a full year because of the knee injury, Rochestie looked to be out of place and out of the rotation.
But – here comes that word again – head coach Tony Bennett and his staff continued to believe in their transfer, and slowly but surely the redshirt sophomore worked his way into the rotation.
“It was a gamble,” Bennett said of taking the injured guard in the first place. “We did our homework to the best of our abilities to say, ‘OK, do guys recover from this?’ … There’s the physical element and then there’s the psychological element when you have a significant injury as he had to just sort of let it go and just play.”
Never was that more apparent than in the Cougars’ last game. Already the first man off the bench in a handful of previous games, Rochestie led WSU with 16 points in last week’s road win at Washington.
Rochestie showed the skills against Washington that made him an all-conference freshman at Tulane.
“You’re the third-string point guard on the 10th-picked team in the Pac-10,” Rochestie said, thinking back to the season’s start. “You’re hoping you can make it through a game. And now you’re at a point where you play 31 minutes in the last game, waiting for Monday to be ranked in the top 10.”
Who could’ve believed that?