Moose
Well-known member
Apologies but I forgot the poster who mentioned this the other day. Attaching it here and pasting the whole article even though I hate when people do that to pay sites because I think all our fans really need to read this. Bolded one section in particular. (And please don't quote when responding 
)
https://theathletic.com/2214508/202...p/?article_source=search&search_query=gonzaga
Fit, culture, family: How Mark Few and No. 1 Gonzaga scaled the mountaintop
By Dana O'Neil
SPOKANE, Wash. — In an office overstuffed with the trophies and trinkets of college basketball success, Mark Few walks to a shelf behind his desk and proudly shares just one photograph. It’s of him, holding a salmon. For those who know or have read about Few, this is no big surprise. The Gonzaga coach is an avid outdoorsman, happiest when he’s towing his kids down the road at Lake Coeur d’Alene, tossing backflips in Hawaii and most especially, when he’s fly fishing, having long ago discovered the solace in that particular silence.
On this day, a day filled with conversations about Gonzaga’s flat-out refusal to follow the norm when it comes to roster building and recruiting, the picture serves as an especially helpful and illuminative piece of visual aid. Cast a large net, that’s long been the motto in crafting a team, coaches backing up their player wish lists with wish lists in order to protect themselves both from rejection and the spasms of teenage whims. Gonzaga, by contrast, prefers to tie a string to a stick and patiently and methodically fish in a very specific body of water.
This made sense 20 years ago, back when no one quite knew how to pronounce Gonzaga, let alone where the school was, when swimming with the big fish might get a program swallowed whole. But now? Now the Bulldogs could pivot if they wanted to, jump feet first into as many pools as they’d like, into as deep waters as they’d like. Plenty of players would take the bait on a program that has made 20 consecutive NCAA Tournaments and done no worse than the Sweet 16 in the five years before last season’s event was canceled.
Yet having scaled the mountaintop to its apex, earning the program’s first preseason No. 1 distinction, the Bulldogs staff remains steadfast in its selective approach. “The only thing that’s changed in the last 20 years is we can go anywhere in the world to accomplish what we want to accomplish,’’ Few says. “But we actually haven’t changed at all. Why would we?’’
Indeed why, for Gonzaga has learned the lesson any good fly fisherman has mastered: The hard part isn’t figuring out where to cast. The hard part is learning how to cast.
As always with these sorts of things, you have to start at the beginning. In this case, the rewind clock takes us back to a basketball program poised on its launchpad, and a university near the end of its rope. By the fall of 1998, the Bulldogs were about to embark on their best season in program history, and the university enrollment had shrunk, fewer than 3,000 students calling the school home. The diminishing numbers led to a $1 million budget crisis and layoffs campus-wide. People in charge wondered if the tiny school could go on, alumni pride diminishing with the budget, taking their donations with them. That spring, in March 1999, the 10th-seeded Zags knocked off Minnesota, Stanford and Florida to reach the Elite Eight and fell a couple of Khalid El-Amin free throws shy of a win over UConn and a Final Four berth. Disenfranchised alums suddenly found their old sweatshirts and their checkbooks, and students discovered the school as well. In the fall, the incoming freshman class jumped from 500 to 700 students.
Had it been a one-off, this might be a tragedy, a crash and burn to the inevitable sad conclusion for both basketball team and school. That theirs became a perennial run to the NCAA Tournament, the program rising from plucky underdog to powerful favorite, turns the whole thing into a fairy tale. After the Bulldogs reached the Sweet 16 the following year, Few’s first as head coach, the freshman class jumped again, to more than 900 students. The school recognized it was onto something. Seeing the value in the window dressing of good basketball, university administrators wisely invested in the team, and the team returned the favor by continuing to keep Gonzaga’s name prominent every March. All these years later, the Zags are the model of NCAA Tournament consistency, and the university this year greeted a freshman class of 1,202.
A drive around campus feels like a tour of the house the Zags built. Along with the obvious — the McCarthey Athletic Center and the Volkar Center for Athletic Achievement — there are the Hemmingson Student Center and the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, both direct outgrowths of the financial stability established in large part due to the basketball program’s success.
But there is a backstory to the backstory, which is even more relevant to the present-day tale — namely how the Zags built the team that saved the school. After Dan Monson left for Minnesota on the heels of that Elite Eight run, Few set one concise yet complicated goal: “to stay nationally relevant, avoid the big swings of highs and lows,’’ he says. That’s no small task for schools with blue blood coursing through their veins; it is a near dream for an upstart lacking cash.
Few understood that in order to achieve his goal of consistency, he’d need a heavy dose of realism. The Bulldogs could ill afford to waste their time investing in players who would never choose to come. They needed sure things. They narrowed their focus, concentrating on the two places they thought could score: players close to their own zip code, who at least knew what Gonzaga was: Blake Stepp (Eugene, Ore.) and Corey Violette (Boise, Idaho); and those well beyond their geographic reach, with players who couldn’t find Spokane on a map, but were less inclined to care, such as Ronny Turiaf from France.
That started what is best imagined as a basketball layer cake. To the base, Gonzaga sprinkled in transfers, discovering in players in need of a reboot a similar sort of indifference to the bells and whistles traditional recruits needed. Dan Dickau served as Exhibit A, the mop-headed transfer from Washington looking for a smaller campus, leaving the Huskies for rival Gonzaga after two years. Dickau began his Zags’ career after Richie Frahm and Matt Santangelo left, when the team was the most vulnerable to slip back to the mean. Instead, Dickau went from a low-scoring role player in the Pac-12 to an All-American who led Gonzaga to the Sweet 16 in 2001.
The Bulldogs kept winning and suddenly Gonzaga became attractive to others transfers, the staff earning a reputation for player development and changing career trajectories. Nigel Williams-Goss (from Washington), Kyle Wiltjer (Kentucky) and Brandon Clarke (San Jose State) soared at Gonzaga. And when the NCAA approved immediate eligibility for grad transfers, Few added them to the recipe: Byron Wesley from USC, Jordan Matthews from Cal and Admon Gilder (Texas A&M) and Ryan Woolridge (North Texas) last year.
All the while, the Bulldogs kept winning, which slowly led to a receptive audience with the group generally the hardest to impress: high schoolers. “What’s stronger than night and day?” Few says, when asked to describe the difference in walking into the homes of teenagers early in his career versus now. Rather than needing both diction and geography lessons these days, some of the recruits who greet the Gonzaga staff even have Zags jerseys hanging on their bedroom wall. In 2016, Gonzaga landed its first McDonald’s All-American in Zach Collins, who then became the program’s first one-and-done player. This year, Jalen Suggs, the No. 7 recruit in the county per the RSCI, became the highest-rated player to choose the Zags, while his class, the self-proclaimed Tricky Trio of Suggs, Julian Strawther and Dominick Harris, enters as the best-ranked collection to choose Spokane as their college destination.
All of which leads us to the Zags’ gym in late October, where a roster that is an amalgamation of 20 years of work gathers for practice. Here is Corey Kispert, born and raised in Edmonds, Wash., his newly grown flow held in place by a Samurai-like headband, speaking of his gratitude toward Joel Ayayi, his chatterbox Frenchman teammate. Ayayi, who learned to speak three versions of English — “like the one you use in school, the one you use in basketball, and the one you use when you talk to your friends’’ — taught Kispert how to make a crepe. “Like a real French crepe, not just one with like peanut butter and jelly.’’ And here is Andrew Nembhard, an Ontario native and a transfer by way of the University of Florida, tag-teaming with Aaron Cook, a St. Louis-born grad transfer from Southern Illinois, to pick up Suggs after the hotshot freshman had made an errant pass while Few barks from the sideline. “He screws up that bad, there’s slapping hands or high fives,” the coach says. “Let him know about it.’’ It’s a rough day at practice for Russian Pavel Zakharov, but a great day for Oumar Bello, the big man from Mali, although Few points out that’s in part because redheaded Texan and star-on-the-rise sophomore Drew Timme isn’t here.
It is basketball’s Ellis Island: Give me your foreign, your locals, your over-recruited and underappreciated, your transfer masses yearning to breathe free.
Frankly, it shouldn’t work, at least not this year, not when a global pandemic has turned the basketball season into a patchwork quilt of practices. So many seemingly disjointed pieces should look like a mess on the court. Instead, the Zags move fluidly and easily, draining 3s and smoothly transitioning from one drill to the next. Few has little reason to yell at his players because they rarely make glaring mistakes. Nembhard cuts on his teammates like he has been around them forever, instead of just four months, and Suggs, Strather and Harris look comfortable, not dazed and confused. “It’s what makes this place so special,’’ Kispert says. “It’s like a melting pot. That’s why I love it so much. I grew up playing with a lot of people who looked like me, from the same background as me. Here, it’s different cultures, backgrounds, but no matter where you’re from, it always works.’’
The question is why? Which leads us back to that fly-fishing lesson, the notion that it’s not where you cast but how.
On the whiteboard alongside Tommy Lloyd’s desk is the timeline of Nembhard’s travel from Gainesville to Spokane. Along with the dates of the guard’s public decisions — testing the NBA Draft waters, removing his name, entering the transfer portal — is the private minutiae specific only to the Bulldogs. When, for example, calls were made to various coaches to flesh out both Nembhard’s interest and his fit.
This is the crux of it. Gonzaga is big now, as big as any program in the country. It still thinks small, with a narrow-minded focus that feels more like retro 1999. “Nobody recruits from a smaller pool. Nobody,’’ says assistant coach Brian Michaelson, who, like most of the staff is almost a lifer. “How much different are we from the average? It’s gotta be 10 to one. I’m not a big social media guy, but when I read the number of guys schools are in with, my head spins. How do you know if a guy is the right guy for you if there are like seven at each position, and you basically are taking whichever one says yes first?”
Fit, culture, family — if a person were to do a shot every time someone in college basketball mentioned one of those words, he or she might be schnockered in minutes. They are the buzziest of buzzwords, so overused to sound meaningless. They also happen to ring slightly less true when, to Michaelson’s point, teams go around collecting recruits like mad squirrels hoarding acorns.
Check out 247Sports.com, for example, and click on a random school’s dropdown menu and its interest in Class of 2022 prospects. Most run on for pages, with well more than 20 names, like some sort of Tinder for basketball coaches. Swipe right if you’re really recruiting him; swipe left if you just like to make it look good. Gonzaga’s list includes six names. Five make the cut for the Class of 2021, of which two — Ben Gregg and Kaden Perry — already are committed. “In this digital age, where everything is sped up and everyone has access to the news people are putting out, there’s a lot of FOMO going on,’’ Lloyd says. “If you look at coach Few’s personality type, my personality type, all of us, there’s not a lot of FOMO going on around here.’’
The Zags do, in a lot of ways recruit in the same way Few lives — heavy on the chill factor. They do not send out daily letters or put on a dog-and-pony show filled with empty promises. It just won’t work, not here. The facilities are high grade, and the fan base dedicated to the only game in town, but Gonzaga remains a small Jesuit school tucked in a far-flung city in a non-power league that frequently tips off at times only suited for the East Coast insomniac. “We don’t work for everybody,’’ Few says. “And that’s OK. Both sides, we tend to weed each other out.’’
Gonzaga has found harmony in its unique roster blend, combining local prospects, international targets, transfers and now highly-ranked high school players.
If anything, as the level of talent interested in Gonzaga has increased exponentially, the Zags have become even more careful about the weeding. They still want guys who truly want to come, but now they only take the guys they really want to take. To talk to Few feels a lot like talking to Jay Wright. Which makes sense. Villanova, owner of two national titles and a huge profile remains a small Augustinian school tucked in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Wright learned the hard way to recruit only the players who fit him and the unique place that is Villanova, crashing to a dreadful 13-19 finish two years after the first Final Four run. The two coaches are good friends, and Few nods when the comparison is shared, acknowledging they have much in common. Both want players who exemplify certain values, as well as the necessary basketball skill set. Few has and will continue to walk away from players, no matter how highly they’re ranked, if he doesn’t get the right vibe. “The guys just talking about ‘me, me, me, how many shots am I going to get,’ no, get me outta here with that,’’ he says. “Or the people around him ask those questions. No, that’s not for us.’’ Few did not take Suggs because he was excited to get a top-10 player and to make headlines. He almost grimaces at the thought of having to do such a thing, grateful he has both an administration and a fan base who put value in things that matter (NCAA Tournament streaks, for example), over those that do not (recruiting rankings).
Suggs, in fact, had to persuade the Gonzaga staff of his legitimate interest in the program every bit as much as the staff had to sell the Bulldogs to him. In the end, the two more or less chose each other, Suggs sold on how he could develop at Gonzaga, the Zags impressed with the player’s clear commitment to team and willingness to exist in the here and now, rather than worry about what might come next for him.
The staff is even more particular with transfers, understanding that a player brought in on his last run arrives with the expectation that there will, in fact, be a race to run. “There’s gotta be a spot, and there’s gotta be a specific need to fill,’’ Michaelson says. “For us, at least, it doesn’t work to just bring in a guy, throw it together and say, ‘We’ll figure it out later.’ They have to fit what we need.’’ Nembhard had tons of options. Gonzaga felt right because he was recruited here out of high school, but also because, having removed all the shiny distractions, he wanted a place where he believed he could get better. Nembhard arrived fully expecting to sit out, and would have been perfectly content had the NCAA not granted his waiver. “Once I hit the portal, every day a new team was hitting me up,’’ he says. “You really have to focus on what you’re looking for, and what I’m looking for is to get better. You’re younger, you pick the big school that has all of the facilities. You get older, you know you have to find a place to get better.’’
Few moseys into 24 Taps Burgers and Brews, jacket collar pulled up, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, more to protect him from the chill than to shield his anonymity. He is a big deal here, of course, but he’s not really a big deal anywhere, not like he could be. He gets through dinner, more or less the length of one college football game on this Saturday night, before a fan walks up and asks him if he is, in fact, him. Few at first tries to shrug it off. “Nah, I get that a lot,’’ he says, before coming clean.
After pleasantries are exchanged and pictures are snapped, Few slides back into the booth, almost embarrassed by the whole thing. For the longest time, as Gonzaga scaled the fence of college basketball’s hierarchy, his name was atop the shortlist for every vacant power job. It doesn’t come up so much anymore. Folks have learned. He’s not going anywhere. The rhythm of Spokane, the scope of Gonzaga, suits him. They love their Zags here, and thereby love him, but they are not going to press their noses to the glass and watch him eat. He can exist, peacefully and happily.
Five days after the coronavirus ended the basketball season and cut off Gonzaga’s very real shot at a national title, Few was asked how he was handling the abrupt end to the season. In a text, he replied he was headed out to fish the next morning.
This a man who long ago discovered where he would cast his career, and has since mastered how.
) https://theathletic.com/2214508/202...p/?article_source=search&search_query=gonzaga
Fit, culture, family: How Mark Few and No. 1 Gonzaga scaled the mountaintop
By Dana O'Neil
SPOKANE, Wash. — In an office overstuffed with the trophies and trinkets of college basketball success, Mark Few walks to a shelf behind his desk and proudly shares just one photograph. It’s of him, holding a salmon. For those who know or have read about Few, this is no big surprise. The Gonzaga coach is an avid outdoorsman, happiest when he’s towing his kids down the road at Lake Coeur d’Alene, tossing backflips in Hawaii and most especially, when he’s fly fishing, having long ago discovered the solace in that particular silence.
On this day, a day filled with conversations about Gonzaga’s flat-out refusal to follow the norm when it comes to roster building and recruiting, the picture serves as an especially helpful and illuminative piece of visual aid. Cast a large net, that’s long been the motto in crafting a team, coaches backing up their player wish lists with wish lists in order to protect themselves both from rejection and the spasms of teenage whims. Gonzaga, by contrast, prefers to tie a string to a stick and patiently and methodically fish in a very specific body of water.
This made sense 20 years ago, back when no one quite knew how to pronounce Gonzaga, let alone where the school was, when swimming with the big fish might get a program swallowed whole. But now? Now the Bulldogs could pivot if they wanted to, jump feet first into as many pools as they’d like, into as deep waters as they’d like. Plenty of players would take the bait on a program that has made 20 consecutive NCAA Tournaments and done no worse than the Sweet 16 in the five years before last season’s event was canceled.
Yet having scaled the mountaintop to its apex, earning the program’s first preseason No. 1 distinction, the Bulldogs staff remains steadfast in its selective approach. “The only thing that’s changed in the last 20 years is we can go anywhere in the world to accomplish what we want to accomplish,’’ Few says. “But we actually haven’t changed at all. Why would we?’’
Indeed why, for Gonzaga has learned the lesson any good fly fisherman has mastered: The hard part isn’t figuring out where to cast. The hard part is learning how to cast.
As always with these sorts of things, you have to start at the beginning. In this case, the rewind clock takes us back to a basketball program poised on its launchpad, and a university near the end of its rope. By the fall of 1998, the Bulldogs were about to embark on their best season in program history, and the university enrollment had shrunk, fewer than 3,000 students calling the school home. The diminishing numbers led to a $1 million budget crisis and layoffs campus-wide. People in charge wondered if the tiny school could go on, alumni pride diminishing with the budget, taking their donations with them. That spring, in March 1999, the 10th-seeded Zags knocked off Minnesota, Stanford and Florida to reach the Elite Eight and fell a couple of Khalid El-Amin free throws shy of a win over UConn and a Final Four berth. Disenfranchised alums suddenly found their old sweatshirts and their checkbooks, and students discovered the school as well. In the fall, the incoming freshman class jumped from 500 to 700 students.
Had it been a one-off, this might be a tragedy, a crash and burn to the inevitable sad conclusion for both basketball team and school. That theirs became a perennial run to the NCAA Tournament, the program rising from plucky underdog to powerful favorite, turns the whole thing into a fairy tale. After the Bulldogs reached the Sweet 16 the following year, Few’s first as head coach, the freshman class jumped again, to more than 900 students. The school recognized it was onto something. Seeing the value in the window dressing of good basketball, university administrators wisely invested in the team, and the team returned the favor by continuing to keep Gonzaga’s name prominent every March. All these years later, the Zags are the model of NCAA Tournament consistency, and the university this year greeted a freshman class of 1,202.
A drive around campus feels like a tour of the house the Zags built. Along with the obvious — the McCarthey Athletic Center and the Volkar Center for Athletic Achievement — there are the Hemmingson Student Center and the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, both direct outgrowths of the financial stability established in large part due to the basketball program’s success.
But there is a backstory to the backstory, which is even more relevant to the present-day tale — namely how the Zags built the team that saved the school. After Dan Monson left for Minnesota on the heels of that Elite Eight run, Few set one concise yet complicated goal: “to stay nationally relevant, avoid the big swings of highs and lows,’’ he says. That’s no small task for schools with blue blood coursing through their veins; it is a near dream for an upstart lacking cash.
Few understood that in order to achieve his goal of consistency, he’d need a heavy dose of realism. The Bulldogs could ill afford to waste their time investing in players who would never choose to come. They needed sure things. They narrowed their focus, concentrating on the two places they thought could score: players close to their own zip code, who at least knew what Gonzaga was: Blake Stepp (Eugene, Ore.) and Corey Violette (Boise, Idaho); and those well beyond their geographic reach, with players who couldn’t find Spokane on a map, but were less inclined to care, such as Ronny Turiaf from France.
That started what is best imagined as a basketball layer cake. To the base, Gonzaga sprinkled in transfers, discovering in players in need of a reboot a similar sort of indifference to the bells and whistles traditional recruits needed. Dan Dickau served as Exhibit A, the mop-headed transfer from Washington looking for a smaller campus, leaving the Huskies for rival Gonzaga after two years. Dickau began his Zags’ career after Richie Frahm and Matt Santangelo left, when the team was the most vulnerable to slip back to the mean. Instead, Dickau went from a low-scoring role player in the Pac-12 to an All-American who led Gonzaga to the Sweet 16 in 2001.
The Bulldogs kept winning and suddenly Gonzaga became attractive to others transfers, the staff earning a reputation for player development and changing career trajectories. Nigel Williams-Goss (from Washington), Kyle Wiltjer (Kentucky) and Brandon Clarke (San Jose State) soared at Gonzaga. And when the NCAA approved immediate eligibility for grad transfers, Few added them to the recipe: Byron Wesley from USC, Jordan Matthews from Cal and Admon Gilder (Texas A&M) and Ryan Woolridge (North Texas) last year.
All the while, the Bulldogs kept winning, which slowly led to a receptive audience with the group generally the hardest to impress: high schoolers. “What’s stronger than night and day?” Few says, when asked to describe the difference in walking into the homes of teenagers early in his career versus now. Rather than needing both diction and geography lessons these days, some of the recruits who greet the Gonzaga staff even have Zags jerseys hanging on their bedroom wall. In 2016, Gonzaga landed its first McDonald’s All-American in Zach Collins, who then became the program’s first one-and-done player. This year, Jalen Suggs, the No. 7 recruit in the county per the RSCI, became the highest-rated player to choose the Zags, while his class, the self-proclaimed Tricky Trio of Suggs, Julian Strawther and Dominick Harris, enters as the best-ranked collection to choose Spokane as their college destination.
All of which leads us to the Zags’ gym in late October, where a roster that is an amalgamation of 20 years of work gathers for practice. Here is Corey Kispert, born and raised in Edmonds, Wash., his newly grown flow held in place by a Samurai-like headband, speaking of his gratitude toward Joel Ayayi, his chatterbox Frenchman teammate. Ayayi, who learned to speak three versions of English — “like the one you use in school, the one you use in basketball, and the one you use when you talk to your friends’’ — taught Kispert how to make a crepe. “Like a real French crepe, not just one with like peanut butter and jelly.’’ And here is Andrew Nembhard, an Ontario native and a transfer by way of the University of Florida, tag-teaming with Aaron Cook, a St. Louis-born grad transfer from Southern Illinois, to pick up Suggs after the hotshot freshman had made an errant pass while Few barks from the sideline. “He screws up that bad, there’s slapping hands or high fives,” the coach says. “Let him know about it.’’ It’s a rough day at practice for Russian Pavel Zakharov, but a great day for Oumar Bello, the big man from Mali, although Few points out that’s in part because redheaded Texan and star-on-the-rise sophomore Drew Timme isn’t here.
It is basketball’s Ellis Island: Give me your foreign, your locals, your over-recruited and underappreciated, your transfer masses yearning to breathe free.
Frankly, it shouldn’t work, at least not this year, not when a global pandemic has turned the basketball season into a patchwork quilt of practices. So many seemingly disjointed pieces should look like a mess on the court. Instead, the Zags move fluidly and easily, draining 3s and smoothly transitioning from one drill to the next. Few has little reason to yell at his players because they rarely make glaring mistakes. Nembhard cuts on his teammates like he has been around them forever, instead of just four months, and Suggs, Strather and Harris look comfortable, not dazed and confused. “It’s what makes this place so special,’’ Kispert says. “It’s like a melting pot. That’s why I love it so much. I grew up playing with a lot of people who looked like me, from the same background as me. Here, it’s different cultures, backgrounds, but no matter where you’re from, it always works.’’
The question is why? Which leads us back to that fly-fishing lesson, the notion that it’s not where you cast but how.
On the whiteboard alongside Tommy Lloyd’s desk is the timeline of Nembhard’s travel from Gainesville to Spokane. Along with the dates of the guard’s public decisions — testing the NBA Draft waters, removing his name, entering the transfer portal — is the private minutiae specific only to the Bulldogs. When, for example, calls were made to various coaches to flesh out both Nembhard’s interest and his fit.
This is the crux of it. Gonzaga is big now, as big as any program in the country. It still thinks small, with a narrow-minded focus that feels more like retro 1999. “Nobody recruits from a smaller pool. Nobody,’’ says assistant coach Brian Michaelson, who, like most of the staff is almost a lifer. “How much different are we from the average? It’s gotta be 10 to one. I’m not a big social media guy, but when I read the number of guys schools are in with, my head spins. How do you know if a guy is the right guy for you if there are like seven at each position, and you basically are taking whichever one says yes first?”
Fit, culture, family — if a person were to do a shot every time someone in college basketball mentioned one of those words, he or she might be schnockered in minutes. They are the buzziest of buzzwords, so overused to sound meaningless. They also happen to ring slightly less true when, to Michaelson’s point, teams go around collecting recruits like mad squirrels hoarding acorns.
Check out 247Sports.com, for example, and click on a random school’s dropdown menu and its interest in Class of 2022 prospects. Most run on for pages, with well more than 20 names, like some sort of Tinder for basketball coaches. Swipe right if you’re really recruiting him; swipe left if you just like to make it look good. Gonzaga’s list includes six names. Five make the cut for the Class of 2021, of which two — Ben Gregg and Kaden Perry — already are committed. “In this digital age, where everything is sped up and everyone has access to the news people are putting out, there’s a lot of FOMO going on,’’ Lloyd says. “If you look at coach Few’s personality type, my personality type, all of us, there’s not a lot of FOMO going on around here.’’
The Zags do, in a lot of ways recruit in the same way Few lives — heavy on the chill factor. They do not send out daily letters or put on a dog-and-pony show filled with empty promises. It just won’t work, not here. The facilities are high grade, and the fan base dedicated to the only game in town, but Gonzaga remains a small Jesuit school tucked in a far-flung city in a non-power league that frequently tips off at times only suited for the East Coast insomniac. “We don’t work for everybody,’’ Few says. “And that’s OK. Both sides, we tend to weed each other out.’’
Gonzaga has found harmony in its unique roster blend, combining local prospects, international targets, transfers and now highly-ranked high school players.
If anything, as the level of talent interested in Gonzaga has increased exponentially, the Zags have become even more careful about the weeding. They still want guys who truly want to come, but now they only take the guys they really want to take. To talk to Few feels a lot like talking to Jay Wright. Which makes sense. Villanova, owner of two national titles and a huge profile remains a small Augustinian school tucked in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Wright learned the hard way to recruit only the players who fit him and the unique place that is Villanova, crashing to a dreadful 13-19 finish two years after the first Final Four run. The two coaches are good friends, and Few nods when the comparison is shared, acknowledging they have much in common. Both want players who exemplify certain values, as well as the necessary basketball skill set. Few has and will continue to walk away from players, no matter how highly they’re ranked, if he doesn’t get the right vibe. “The guys just talking about ‘me, me, me, how many shots am I going to get,’ no, get me outta here with that,’’ he says. “Or the people around him ask those questions. No, that’s not for us.’’ Few did not take Suggs because he was excited to get a top-10 player and to make headlines. He almost grimaces at the thought of having to do such a thing, grateful he has both an administration and a fan base who put value in things that matter (NCAA Tournament streaks, for example), over those that do not (recruiting rankings).
Suggs, in fact, had to persuade the Gonzaga staff of his legitimate interest in the program every bit as much as the staff had to sell the Bulldogs to him. In the end, the two more or less chose each other, Suggs sold on how he could develop at Gonzaga, the Zags impressed with the player’s clear commitment to team and willingness to exist in the here and now, rather than worry about what might come next for him.
The staff is even more particular with transfers, understanding that a player brought in on his last run arrives with the expectation that there will, in fact, be a race to run. “There’s gotta be a spot, and there’s gotta be a specific need to fill,’’ Michaelson says. “For us, at least, it doesn’t work to just bring in a guy, throw it together and say, ‘We’ll figure it out later.’ They have to fit what we need.’’ Nembhard had tons of options. Gonzaga felt right because he was recruited here out of high school, but also because, having removed all the shiny distractions, he wanted a place where he believed he could get better. Nembhard arrived fully expecting to sit out, and would have been perfectly content had the NCAA not granted his waiver. “Once I hit the portal, every day a new team was hitting me up,’’ he says. “You really have to focus on what you’re looking for, and what I’m looking for is to get better. You’re younger, you pick the big school that has all of the facilities. You get older, you know you have to find a place to get better.’’
Few moseys into 24 Taps Burgers and Brews, jacket collar pulled up, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, more to protect him from the chill than to shield his anonymity. He is a big deal here, of course, but he’s not really a big deal anywhere, not like he could be. He gets through dinner, more or less the length of one college football game on this Saturday night, before a fan walks up and asks him if he is, in fact, him. Few at first tries to shrug it off. “Nah, I get that a lot,’’ he says, before coming clean.
After pleasantries are exchanged and pictures are snapped, Few slides back into the booth, almost embarrassed by the whole thing. For the longest time, as Gonzaga scaled the fence of college basketball’s hierarchy, his name was atop the shortlist for every vacant power job. It doesn’t come up so much anymore. Folks have learned. He’s not going anywhere. The rhythm of Spokane, the scope of Gonzaga, suits him. They love their Zags here, and thereby love him, but they are not going to press their noses to the glass and watch him eat. He can exist, peacefully and happily.
Five days after the coronavirus ended the basketball season and cut off Gonzaga’s very real shot at a national title, Few was asked how he was handling the abrupt end to the season. In a text, he replied he was headed out to fish the next morning.
This a man who long ago discovered where he would cast his career, and has since mastered how.
Last edited:
