One glance at the Long Beach State men’s basketball schedule and the immediate reaction is that somebody has it in for coach Dan Monson.
Here’s a guy with just one returning starter from last season but with a nonconference schedule that included North Carolina, Arizona, Syracuse, Ohio State and UCLA. Presumably the Miami Heat were busy, which was how BYU-Hawaii slipped in.
Yet, if we are to believe Monson, not only is he on the best of terms with the school administration, the schedule was self-inflicted.
Just another season at “The Beach,” as Hawaii’s Thursday night opponent at the Stan Sheriff Center likes to be known.
Monson’s madness apparently does have a method behind it because The Beach arrives in first place in the Big West Conference at 9-1.
Long Beach is 13-8 overall, a record similar to the 13-9 Rainbow Warriors (who are 7-4 in conference), but the philosophical approaches to getting there couldn’t be more different.
The ’Bows, with several new faces, sought to build confidence early with Maryland-Eastern Shore, Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Houston Baptist, North Dakota, Pepperdine and Chaminade wrapped around Illinois, UNLV, Miami and Ole Miss.
The Beach went for hard knocks and calluses. Their strength of schedule is ranked 139th. UH’s is 268, according to RealtimeRPI.com.
“Every coach kind of gravitates to what he has had success with, whether it is offense, defense or scheduling or whatever,” Monson said. At Gonzaga, where he was head coach for two seasons, including the 1999 run to the Elite Eight, that meant booking the big boys. “We scheduled as hard as we could and it paid dividends to get that program going,” Monson said.
So when Monson landed at The Beach after four seasons of trying to rebuild scandal-tossed Minnesota, he brought his Rolodex with him. In the past five years, the nonconference schedules have included Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, Wisconsin, North Carolina (twice), Syracuse (twice), Texas, Pittsburgh, Xavier, West Virginia and Clemson. Three years running they claimed the toughest strength of schedule on Jan. 1.
And while The Beach has taken its lumps out of conference, it has prospered in the Big West, where it is 38-4 over the past three seasons and 56-18 over five.
“People say you’ll hurt their confidence,” Monson said. “But, I just think you have kids who are 18-21 years old and the way the culture, the society is these days, these kids want reality more than they need confidence. I just think playing these teams gives them a reality that, hey, we have work to do.”
Plus, he maintains, they want to play the best and be on TV.
“I can tell them all I want that we need to work on our defense, but after they go up against a Syracuse or Ohio State, the next day in practice, I have their attention,” Monson said.
He also has the attention, though not necessarily the agreement, of his fellow mid-major coaches.
“I’ve had a lot of other coaches say, ‘What are you doing? You’re going to get yourself fired,’ ” Monson said. “Everybody has their own way and obviously some of them disagree with me because I’m the only one (in the Big West) doing it this way,” Monson said.
Come the conference tournament next month, we’ll see where the payoff comes.
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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
