Columnist Dean Juipe: Coach/AD endured heat on the way to top

Dean Juipe

Monday, June 2, 2003 | 9:27 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

As school lets out for the summer, many a student, teacher or administrator can look back on a year of varying peaks and valleys.

None, however, may be able to match the tumult and exhilaration that was experienced by Tim Chambers.

The full range of emotions? Yeah, they smacked him over the head a few times.

Chambers wears at least two hats at the Community College of Southern Nevada. One fits snug and is his by choice; the other was thrust upon him and quite often sits askew.

If it's true that all's well that ends well, then Chambers can look back on the 2002-03 school year as a crowning achievement in his career. But the road he took to reach that summit was laden with mines, a couple of which exploded at his feet and left him covered with debris.

Rarely has one man been accorded so much credit while receiving so much blame in a single school year.

He'll need the summer to get his pulse rate back to normal.

Chambers, of course, is the Coyotes' baseball coach and the man most responsible for their winning the Junior College World Series. CCSN took the title Saturday night in Colorado, prevailing over top-ranked and season-long power San Jacinto North of suburban Houston.

The Coyotes finished 55-10, capping a five-year run from wistful dream to stunning reality. A mere infant of a program when he inherited it from Rodger Fairless, Chambers has transformed CCSN into a baseball monolith.

He has proven what many have felt: That the Las Vegas valley may be short on water but it's long on baseball talent, and that the right man in the right place could tap into that spring and maintain a juggernaut of a program.

He cycles the local guys through at two-year intervals, perennially winning dozens of games and, in 2003, reaching the absolute pinnacle of performance. As such, he has earned the right to advance to a higher-profile position elsewhere in the country -- or at UNLV, if Jim Schlossnagle elects to move on anytime soon -- if he should so choose.

Chambers, as a baseball man, is par excellence.

But as CCSN's athletic director, he may always have his antagonists.

I still have the phone number of a young lady who was on CCSN's soccer team when the program was dissolved last fall, and she has promised a scathing anti-Chambers diatribe upon demand. Rest assured, there was some bitterness when soccer was dropped.

Likewise, when CCSN dropped both its men's and women's basketball programs earlier this year after a single season, those dependent on them lashed out toward Chambers with a vigilance usually reserved for an enemy or a war. Men's coach George Tarkanian was especially outspoken and perturbed.

In each of these instances, a Chambers supporter could claim he was merely carrying out the wishes of his supervisors and was a man unwittingly caught in a financial vise. However, the common denominator of the complaints directed toward Chambers the AD is that he funneled the school's athletic resources into a baseball program that he, not coincidentally, also oversees.

I'm sure he doesn't look back on it and thinks he has the last laugh now that his school sits atop the junior college baseball globe. And I'm sure he was hurt, personally and professionally, by seeing CCSN trim sports that had barely been given a chance to grow.

It's also probably no consolation to him or his detractors that he didn't want to be AD in the first place and that he only took the job because a predecessor had suddenly departed and consolidating positions seemed fiscally apropos.

To be sure, it was an eventful school year for Chambers, mixing, as it did, anger and heartache with joy and satisfaction, each played out in public for all to see.

So at this time of graduation, picture him in cap and gown on the stage receiving a figurative degree. A bit older and a bit wiser than many of those around him, he can flip his tassel to the other side, knowing that anything that follows might seem like a breeze.