Milestone: Cougars ranked
PULLMAN – A Monday afternoon practice is usually a quiet affair for the Washington State men’s basketball team.
Not so this time around.
With a gaggle of reporters and television crews on hand – or at the very least, well more than what WSU is accustomed to seeing at a practice – the Cougars slowly embraced the fact that their program is different than the one that took the floor Saturday night against Arizona.
Ranked for the first time since 1983 (tied for 22nd in the Associated Press poll, 23rd in the coaches poll), the Cougars will enter at least this week of play as the hunted, not the hunter. That will be a first for every single coach and player while competing under the Cougars banner.
“It’ll definitely be a new experience for us,” junior Robbie Cowgill said. “We’re usually underestimated or maybe sometimes looked past just because of the history of this program.
“We’re looking forward to getting people’s best and we have to prove ourselves now.”
Head coach Tony Bennett and the Cougars insisted they were trying to go about their business no differently than they had in building the 14-2 record that got them into the polls Monday. As Bennett said, a single week in January proves far less than what his team has desired all year long – a postseason tournament appearance.
“What it indicates is that we’re off to a decent start with some quality wins,” Bennett said. “If we’re ranked at the end of the year in there, then we’re talking. That’s when it’s going to mean something. We still have 14 Pac-10 games left, and the league as good as it is, you never know.”
Even though Bennett is in his first season as a head coach, he emphasized this has not been a turnaround in the offing for just a few months. Rather, the hard work – and the losing – endured by this veteran team under retired coach Dick Bennett is the reason the current coach sees for this season’s successes.
And although the head coach probably doesn’t want to admit it right now, the timing is just about perfect for his program.
The 2007 recruiting class is already filled with just one scholarship available. But WSU still has three more commitments to find for the fall of 2008, and many of those players who are now juniors will be making decisions in the coming summer.
Reaching the Top 25 now is sure to help WSU in the effort to stock that recruiting class.
“It gives you an advantage because when you’re ranked in the Top 25 and recruiting kids, they call you back,” assistant coach Ron Sanchez said. “Not that they haven’t called us back before, but now the kids that were interested in you and maybe another school, now they’re like, ‘OK, now I can see myself playing there.’ “
Sanchez said the Cougars don’t plan to alter their recruiting strategies now that the team is enjoying success, but they clearly hope the wins now will translate into better commitments later.
“We’re not going to go after a different kid now. The same kids that we identified in the past are the kids that we’re going to continue to go after,” he said. “You just hope that it’ll make those kinds of kids say yes sooner.”
Of course, WSU may be just one loss away from falling back out of the polls, and just as this ranking is rare another one would be even rarer. The Cougars haven’t been in a poll for consecutive weeks since 1950, a task they’ll try to take care of this week on the road at California and Stanford.
Despite the giddiness about getting some national recognition, these Cougars are hoping they’ll continue to be the same scrappy group on the court that earned the nod in the first place.
“We’ve got guys that have basically been underdogs their whole life,” Cowgill said. “Out of high school, no one gave them a lot of credit. We’ve got guys that like to play with a chip on their shoulder and something to prove, and hopefully that will carry on.”