Long Beach State University Athletics
Monson Has Solid Start
4/7/2007 12:00:00 AM | General
|
Monson Off to Solid Start Long Beach State has had a great coach (Jerry Tarkanian), a great coach who was here long enough for a snack before leaving (Lute Olson), and good coaches who left for bigger (Joe Harrington, Colorado) or seemingly better jobs (Seth Greenberg, South Florida). The university has had well-meaning coaches (Dwight Jones) and coaches who knew as much about basketball as James Naismith (Tex Winter). The school has had a coach who came from a high school (Ron Palmer) and struggled, a coach who came from Division II (Larry Reynolds) and struggled, and a coach who came from Syracuse with a chip on his shoulder the size of Albany (Wayne Morgan) and struggled. What Long Beach State the school has never really had is a coach who knew the definition of continuity and what it means to a Division I basketball program, and looked at Long Beach with the phrase "long term" in his mind. So on those counts, Dan Monson has already made an impact on 49er basketball, and he's been on the job for all of a day. The former Gonzaga and Minnesota coach met the boosters, fans and media Saturday morning in The Pointe inside the Walter Pyramid and said he believes in many of the things the program has been searching for in vain since, well, Tarkanian beat NCAA probation out of town and went to UNLV. Monson believes in building a program, "not a team, not a season." He knows what continuity is, because the only change on the Gonzaga staff in his 11 years there was his becoming head coach when Dan Fitzgerald retired. He understands family. Monson, current Gonzaga coach Mark Few and former Zags assistant Bill Grier lived together for nine years, and Few's dad conducted the marriage service for all three of them. When Few got married, he and his wife lived with Monson and Grier for about six months. He believes in roots, too, because he says he wouldn't have taken this job if he didn't feel this was the right place to raise a family with his wife Darcy and their four kids, ages 6 (MicGuire), 5 (Mollie), 3 (Maddox) and 1 (McKenna). "My last job (Minnesota), I took for the money and the challenge," Monson said. "This job, I'm taking because it's the right fit for me and my family. Their comfort is a big part of it." If there's any one single thing he said that should hearten the hopes of 49er fans, it's his plan to build a foundation here the correct way - recruit and sign freshmen, redshirt them, and raise them to contribute once they're ready. Larry Reynolds recruited freshmen initially, too, but his choices didn't pan out and by his third year, with 11 wins in the first two, panicked and began the JC shuffle. That produced last season's Big West title and NCAA appearance, but it also leaves the program devoid of returning talent for 2007-08. "There's no six-month or one-year floor plan to a foundation," Monson said. "You recruit good kids, redshirt them, and be patient so they don't lose confidence. You schedule right so you're not asking them to do too much. "Things don't happen overnight. Gonzaga was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. The stars and the moon aligned for Gonzaga. But I do know what we did and we can try to duplicate that (at Long Beach)." Monson said Gonzaga redshirted five players in his first season as an assistant (1988-89) at the Spokane school. The team went 8-20 the next season, but two seasons later they won their first-ever game in the West Coast Conference tournament. In 1995, they qualified for the NCAAs for the first time in school history. In 1998, Monson's first as head coach, the team won 24 games. The following season, they went 28-7, won the WCC title and advanced to the Elite Eight with wins over Minnesota (coached by Clem Haskins), Stanford (Mike Montgomery) and Florida (Billy Donovan) before losing to eventual national champ Connecticut. "I believe I built that," he said of the Gonzaga years. "It was in my contract that Mark would replace me, and it was in Mark's contract that Grier replaces him (Grier has since taken the University of San Diego job). "The way Mark has sustained that has been incredible. We've seen programs have good runs before - Loyola with Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, Pepperdine, Santa Clara when they had Steve Nash - but they weren't able to sustain it." He arrives at Long Beach with three players signed by Reynolds and five other available scholarships. He said he'd have no problem using all five on freshmen, and if he couldn't find five freshmen he wanted, he'd save one or two for the following year. "Absolutely," he said. "You get in trouble when you try to build something quick and have kids only for a year or two. If in the next month we don't feel confident (of the players they're recruiting), we might save one or two of them for next year. "Next year, we might be in survival mode. But I don't want to lose next year. We'll work toward that while building a foundation here that will last. There's enough talent here within a tank of gas for Long Beach to compete at a high level." It was interesting to hear how Athletic Director Vic Cegles introduced Monson. He said Monson was strong in all of the areas that Reynolds was not - recruiting, teaching, people skills, toughness, competitiveness and discipline. "He's been a head coach for (nine-plus) years and went to the postseason seven of them," he said. "He has experience at a mid-major and a major team. He's built a foundation at two schools and did that at Minnesota despite being on Super Double Probation (the Gophers were hit with five years of penalties)." Monson may have to deal with that here because of the Reggie Howard indiscretion, "but I've dealt with more," Monson said. "I don't want to be Gonzaga. I want to be Long Beach State." And, he says, for a long time. |
