‘Still look at him like my dad’s point guard.’ Gonzaga’s Mark Few has a big fan – and old friend – in first-year WOU coach

Ryan Orton’s stories about Mark Few can be traced back to a time when Gonzaga’s coach was hardly recognized outside of his sparsely populated hometown in west central Oregon.

Long before Few was sending in play calls at a national championship game attended by more than 76,000 people, and viewed by 23 million more on television, he wore No. 15 for coach Doug Orton and the Creswell High Bulldogs.

Decades before he was sharing an Olympic gold -medal -game huddle with LeBron James, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant, Few was a steady-handed high school point guard who liked to dribble a basketball around the locker room, playing keep-away from Ryan, Creswell’s ball boy, while 1970s rock band “Boston” blared over loudspeakers.

“It’s interesting because all the success he’s had,” Orton said, “I still look at him like my dad’s point guard.”

Orton is now the first-year coach of the Western Oregon University team traveling to Gonzaga for Monday’s 6 p.m. exhibition at McCarthey Athletic Center. It’s not hard to imagine how this preseason contest came about between a Division I powerhouse from Spokane and a Division II program in Monmouth, Oregon.

Few graduated from Creswell High in 1981, so his connection to the Orton family dates all the way back to the early 1970s. Orton, who’s a handful of years younger than his Gonzaga counterpart, would occasionally pop over to the Few household for backyard basketball. The family had an 8-foot hoop on the patio and Orton liked to challenge Few in “dunk ball.”

MaxPreps wasn’t tracking high school basketball stats in the late ’70s, so there’s no official record of Few as a player, but Ryan remembers a balanced point guard who liked to get teammates involved, especially if it meant feeding post passes to Todd Buerk, a future Ivy League standout at Brown University who was the only D-I player Doug Orton coached at Creswell.

“They had a really good team and I remember Mark being a guy that led all those guys and took care of the ball and was smart enough to realize, if we get the ball to the 6-8 guy inside … then we probably have a pretty good chance of winning,” Ryan said.

Located outside of Eugene, Creswell’s basketball team would make the short trip to the University of Oregon’s MacArthur Court – since replaced by Phil Knight Arena as the Ducks’ home venue – for state tournament games.

On one bus ride, Doug Orton was going over flash cards that contained basketball plays, figuring the visual cues would be helpful for his point guard if crowd noise became too overwhelming.

Written on one of the cards was “2-D,” shorthand for Creswell’s “two defense.”

Also? One of the nicknames Few’s sister, Kathy, went by.

“So just being the laid-back guy Mark is and doesn’t get too rattled about things, he was like ‘2-D? That’s my sister’s name,’ ” Ryan recalled. “My dad’s fretting like, ‘Hey, be focused Mark.’ ”

Doug later helped Mark get his coaching start, offering him an unpaid assistant job at Creswell, where he’d also coach the school’s junior varsity team while pursuing an undergraduate degree at nearby Oregon.

Most are familiar with the rest of the story – how Few attended a Don Monson camp at Oregon, befriended Dan Monson and took up Dan Fitzgerald’s offer to join Gonzaga’s staff as a low-level grad assistant.

Similar to Few’s coaching arc, the Inland Northwest played a foundational role in the early phases of Orton’s career. In 1998, he latched on as a grad assistant at Eastern Washington with head coach Steve Aggers, then became a full-time assistant under Ray Giacoletti, who spent four years with the Eagles and three at Utah before returning to the area to work under Few at Gonzaga.

Orton, who lived both in Cheney and Spokane’s Browne’s Addition neighborhood during his time at EWU, was occasionally invited to hangouts with other members of Giacoletti’s and Few’s staffs.

A former high school golfer, Orton perked up when the coaches decided to play 18 holes one time during the offseason. Few, an avid fly fisherman who doesn’t have the same affinity for golf, warned Orton beforehand he likes to play with the “foot wedge rule.”

“So seeing him – if there was a bad lie, like something up against a tree – just kind of kicking out a little bit was kind of humorous to me,” Orton said.

Even as Gonzaga’s program made a rise to national prominence, Few never lost contact with his old friend from Creswell and encouraged Ryan to reach out for a reference if he was ever in the mix for a head-coaching job.

Not wanting to overstep, Orton declined multiple opportunities, but the former Alaska Anchorage assistant finally took Few up on the offer this summer when he was targeting the vacant job at Western Oregon.

“I haven’t asked him very much in my life to do that,” Orton said, “but he did on this particular occasion.”

Once Orton was hired in Monmouth, the next logical step was setting up an exhibition game.

“He actually was talking to my dad and was like, ‘hey, we’d love to schedule Ryan’s team over some other teams we schedule for this just because of our relationship,’ ” Orton said. “It’ll be super cool to be up there, surreal to be honest with you.”

Ryan Orton hasn’t been back to the area since he was at EWU. Doug has made occasional trips to the Kennel through the years, usually accompanying Few’s parents from Creswell. He was at the Final Four in 2017, doesn’t miss Gonzaga games on TV and often wears Zags apparel to the Oregon golf club where he’s a member .

Doug, a former Western Oregon player who plans to be in attendance for the exhibition, could find himself in a pickle with his son on one bench and former point guard on the other.

“I’m not sure what he’ll wear on Monday, to be honest with you,” Ryan said. “Just red, we’re both red so I wouldn’t take any offense to that.”

The Wolves are playing Gonzaga at the end of a brutal-but-memorable 72-hour stretch.

WOU bused to Corvallis on Saturday for an exhibition game at Oregon State and turned around the very next day to embark on a 400-mile trek to Spokane.

“I think they’ll be geeked up and hopefully we don’t throw too many of the balls over to the student section because we’re so excited,” he said. “Our players are learning and so I just want to see us go out and compete and not back down to players that are really, really high-level guys.”

Orton’s containment plan for Gonzaga bigs Graham Ike and Braden Huff?

“I mean, just hope they’re missing,” he said.

Outcome won’t factor too heavily into whether it’s a successful night for either program and Orton knows it’ll be a special opportunity for his players, not to mention a meaningful one for his father.

“To see the success (Few’s) had and all these years later, he’s so down to earth and the same guy I remember riding on those yellow school buses with despite the fact he’s got a gold medal and he’s coached some of the world’s best players and two national championship games and several NBA players he’s coached himself,” Orton said. “It’s really cool to see. I’m as much a fan as I would hope to be a friend at this point in time.”