John Blanchette: WCC Vegas venture is not a gamble

SAN DIEGO – So the church league is taking its basketball tournament to Las Vegas, and somebody’s rosary beads are bound to be in a bunch about it.

Hard to understand why. After all, bingo has been as much a part of the Catholic experience as fish on Fridays and guilt the rest of the week.

Besides, a bigger sin has been what the West Coast Conference has been putting its champions through the past 22 years, shooting craps with the league’s NCAA tournament bids by awarding home-court advantage to fifth-place teams.

Change comes slowly in the WCC, but come it did Sunday. Lots of change.

No, Gonzaga didn’t flop in the conference tournament – at least the men didn’t. They somehow managed to outlast their own ennui and Santa Clara’s inspiration to sneak through the semifinals into tonight’s title game, though they also frittered away that fine momentum they’d bottled a week ago. Yet even survival was accomplished upside down: it was center Josh Heytvelt who picked up the Zags, rather than the other way around. Beyond that happy development, the less said about the game, the better.

The intrigue and significance occurred before tipoff.

First, the WCC confirmed the move of this tournament to the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas for 2009 and likely beyond, though it’s a one-year contract at the moment.

Then 37-year-old Jamie Zaninovich was introduced as the league’s commissioner to succeed the retiring Michael Gilleran – retiring being a multi-use descriptive.

If the timing of this parlay was coincidental, it didn’t play that way to the new hired hand.

The move to Vegas doesn’t mean the WCC presidents have gone all “Swingers” on us, but Zaninovich did think it’s “a signal of what the conference wants to do.

“When I was considering the job, I took that as a sign from the presidents that, hey, we’re going to take that next step to do something different. That was something that attracted me.”

Different? For the WCC, it’s downright revolutionary.

The league’s membership has been so content to reside for so long in its own shadow – never mind the Pac-10’s – that Gonzaga’s basketball rise to dominance in the last decade has been greeted not only with envy, but with a snarky disdain that the Bulldogs had sold their Jesuit souls for a few Sweet 16s. The Zags had made the most racket about the tournament’s format and the need to take the event to a neutral site, but that’s because they’ve been the ones with the most to lose.

Coach Mark Few couldn’t let go without a parting shot.

“I applaud the league people for finally figuring out what us coaches have been wanting for about 10 or 12 years – or 18 or 19 years,” he said. “Eventually, if you hit them over the head hard enough and enough times, they’ll finally figure it out.”

Finances often trump fairness, of course, and that was the case here. The WCC couldn’t bring itself to take its showcase event to an off-campus joint – say, the San Diego Sports Arena – if there was a newer, more economical on-campus place. Other neutral courts in the league’s geographic area were either booked or undesirable.

Then a year ago Thanksgiving, Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth was watching Kansas and Florida playing on TV – from a 9,000-seat stand-alone facility that’s part of the Orleans Hotel and Casino complex in Vegas.

“The thing we’ve been looking for is not just a neutral site, but one that makes sense,” said Roth. “A building with 20,000 seats doesn’t make sense. And we were convinced it had to be a destination location, because a site where somebody doesn’t want to go the first week of March isn’t going to help us.”

He got a thumbs-up endorsement for the facility from Kansas associate AD Larry Keating – father of Santa Clara coach Kerry Keating – and then passed the information on to the league office, notably director of championships Ellen Moore, who did the necessary grunt work to make it happen.

Gilleran admitted not knowing about the Orleans before the process started and that’s OK – a lot of people in college hoops are similarly unaware. Still, it’s not surprising that the outside-the-house thinking came from the program where they’ve been thinking that way ever since cracking open the window of opportunity.

But this is truly a departure. Other leagues have found neutral sites, but none in a city so obviously outside their footprint, where local interest is bound to be minimal. But Vegas is also a destination that all WCC tourists can embrace – and especially Gonzaga fans “without whom the tournament as it is now would be a disaster,” as Few said.

And it makes for a nice adieu for Gilleran. His replacement was chosen, said Saint Mary’s president Br. Ron Gallagher, because “what we identified as an important issue was the visibility and promotion of the league.” And, yes, Gilleran’s 24-year tenure was understated, as he is, but not without achievement. If the growth wasn’t as visionary as it could have been, it is also easy to forget what a half-baked operation the WCC once was, staffed by a part-time commissioner and a manual typewriter with an “R” key always out of register.

That was the old church league. It seems to be changing.