Columnist Dean Juipe: Chambers, CCSN coaches are at fault

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, March 5, 2003 | 9:47 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.

Whatever chance the men's and women's basketball programs at the Community College of Southern Nevada had of prospering were cut short, if not eliminated, by administrative oversights.

It was as if kids, not competent adults, were making the decisions. And the lack of an authoritative, experienced and astute athletic director definitely came into play.

Nothing personal against Tim Chambers, who seemingly had the AD's role thrust upon him. He's a baseball coach, and he came to CCSN to coach baseball and not necessarily to be involved in developing basketball programs.

But good intentions aside, Chambers -- and the men coaching the basketball teams for that matter -- neither utilized their assets nor compensated for their deficiencies. Each of them -- Chambers, George Tarkanian and Robert Smith -- can be criticized for doing the minimum and leaving their team's fates to chance.

It's fairly well established that you simply can't throw open the gates in Las Vegas and expect fans to beat a path to your team's games. You've got to work at it.

The CCSN guys didn't seem to work at it at all, or at least enough to keep the programs from being scuttled as they were earlier this week after a single year.

There were mistakes aplenty, perhaps starting with the very notion that CCSN needed men's and women's basketball teams. (It definitely doesn't need a softball team either, yet it appears it still plans to start one.)

But let's say basketball could have been successful, particularly on the men's side, as this city regularly produces a number of quality male players. With that as the premise, look at what was done as opposed to what could have been done.

The Coyotes had no true home court, did no advertising and had no legitimate publicist.

They played their home games in what is now an intramural gym at UNLV, yet they couldn't fill those few seats because hardly anyone in the community even knew they existed. And the reason they didn't know the CCSN teams existed is not only due to the lack of an advertising budget, but because Chambers hired an inept buffoon as a publicist and neither Tarkanian nor Smith had the good sense to pick up the phone and solicit interest from the city's media representatives.

Minimal information that every school or team needs to supply the media simply wasn't forthcoming from CCSN. We couldn't get results or box scores phoned in or e-mailed to us, which led to lengthy gaps in coverage that any team reliant on public support simply can't overcome.

The Coyotes isolated themselves from the very people who had the greatest potential to help them. By not reaching out, they threw cement on their seclusion.

Chambers has to take the blame for this. At a time when CCSN needed someone who was vibrant and attuned to the benefits of promotion, it, instead, had a man who was blind or indifferent.

Best we can tell, he did nothing for the CCSN basketball teams. And Tarkanian and Smith did nothing beyond show up and coach.

Those failings led to this week's drastic action. Basketball failed at CCSN not because it was inevitable, but because the school had the wrong people in charge.