Columnist Dean Juipe: Failure was predictable, coach says

Dean Juipe

Monday, March 10, 2003 | 9:57 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.

After 90 minutes of frank discussion, George Tarkanian and I reached a common conclusion pertaining to the demise of his basketball program at the Community College of Southern Nevada.

The school should have waited at least another year to get the program up and running.

And that failure to be patient led to CCSN president Ron Remington announcing, as he did a week ago today, that men's and women's basketball would be discontinued at the school after a single season.

Tarkanian said he saw the handwriting on the wall well in advance of the official announcement.

"A year ago things started changing, and then last summer I started getting real worried," Tarkanian said as we sat, along with one of his former assistant coaches, Nerses Kopalyan, in the sports book Friday at Palace Station. "When I was hired (in October of 2001) there were a lot of people with big ideas, but as the year progressed it was all just talk."

Those "big ideas" included CCSN playing in a downtown Las Vegas arena that was never built, and establishing a pipeline with UNLV that would be beneficial to both the Rebels and Coyotes.

"I was also told there would be a booster club, a foundation club and fund-raising activities and none of those happened," Tarkanian said. "In the long run, the school didn't really put any effort into this."

And why was that? The best answers: the firing of athletic director (and fund-raising specialist) Mike Meyer 19 months ago; the reneging of a $500,000 pledge to pay off the remaining debt on the school's new baseball stadium, as the donor was put off by Meyer being let go and the money then had to be taken from the school's "soft" account; and the hiring of Robert A. Anderson as vice president of student services, which overseas the athletic department.

Without Meyer, there was no one raising money for the school's sports; the faculty rebelled when the soft-money fund was exploited to pay off the baseball stadium; and Anderson, according to the coaches, doesn't have much interest in athletics.

"The people in athletics literally held a party the day he left there," Kopalyan said of the situation at Colorado Northwestern Junior College, where Anderson was employed prior to coming to CCSN.

Additional factors -- including imposing a higher academic standard on CCSN athletes than is required by the National Junior College Athletic Association, and the school's lack of effort in promoting basketball, which I emphasized in a column last week that took CCSN AD Tim Chambers, as well as Tarkanian to a lesser extent, to task -- resulted in a sport that should have been successful being, instead, discontinued.

"There's money at the school (including $1 million of it annually in the 'soft' account) but the question is how to use it," Tarkanian said. "All the soft money was pulled from athletics after the baseball park thing, and the political forces that were at work on and off campus just saw athletics as taking resources from something else.

"They don't care about athletics at CCSN. There's money there, but it's there to help beautify buildings and reorganize departments."

The pity of such decisions is at least twofold: numerous athletes will be deprived of an opportunity to improve their lives and skills; and CCSN, because of the plethora of excellent male players developed in local high schools, could have been a basketball powerhouse.

"If the attitude that was in place when I was hired had been maintained, I can guarantee we would have won a national championship within five years," Tarkanian said.

His one and only CCSN team went 16-14, playing its home games at an intramural gym at UNLV and going 3-10 in road games that were something of a death march.

"You wonder why we didn't win a conference road game?" Tarkanian said, before answering the question himself. "Well, the school made us travel six, seven hours the day of a game and then play.

"The school wasn't serious about running a successful junior college program. It was doomed from the start."

Kopalyan, who wasn't paid for several months, agreed.

"It's mind-boggling how they just didn't care," he said of CCSN authorities. "They were completely insensitive to the needs of the program and the kids."

One of those "kids," small forward Nick Porter, averaged 22.7 points and could find his way to UNLV, but most of the others -- as well as their would-be successors -- are back to square one.

"I had eight local guys committed to us for next season, and now where do they go?" Tarkanian said. "If they're not quite good enough to get a major-college scholarship, their only other real option is to play juco ball in California where the tuition and housing expenses are extreme.

"I'm telling you, the people in charge at CCSN just didn't give this enough thought."

Tarkanian said he never would have left his previous position as head coach at the College of the Sequoias if he knew what was in store back home in Nevada.

"I left a damn good job," he said. "Despite my name, my only concern at CCSN was fund-raising, but I was told I only needed to raise $50,000 a year and that raising $100,000 would be easy.

"Then Meyer was fired, and, I don't know, it just isn't easy for me to ask someone for $10,000 or something like that. Then a guy named Bill Townsend was going to replace him and help me raise money, but he was let go.

"All of a sudden it was a circus. It was 'What's going on here?' But the school was already letting the program fail, as they knew it would without fund-raising or publicity."

Remington said the men's team accrued a $146,729 deficit for its one season, excluding the $7,500 in expenses that Tarkanian voluntarily put on his own credit card. (The CCSN women's team was $153,846 in arrears.)

Tarkanian thought of resigning prior to the school year but was talked out of it by his father, Jerry. He also called for a meeting with Remington, Anderson and Chambers last September, although little of value came out of it.

"I like Tim and I felt he tried the best he could, but his ability to be the athletic director is limited by his also being the baseball coach," Tarkanian said, when asked for an assessment of his supervisors. (Kopalyan is more direct in his criticism of Chambers, saying "He took the athletic director's job just to protect his baseball program.")

Tarkanian had little of a positive nature to say of Anderson and was relatively indifferent toward Remington.

"Anderson did nothing to help us," he said. "Remington I don't blame a lot, but obviously he has to take some responsibility because he ultimately decides where the school's money should go.

"When they all realized it wasn't going to work, they just pulled away from basketball. With the economy the way it is and with an anti-athletics sentiment within the faculty and budget cuts on top of that, it wasn't the right time for starting a basketball program."

Tarkanian, who teaches study skills at the school's Cheyenne campus, is so exhausted he's not sure he wants to continue coaching and moving his wife and child.

"I thought this would be my last move," he said. "Now, I'm going to be very selective and I might get out of coaching completely. It doesn't seem as important to me anymore.

"I'm not bitter and I think I'm handling it well, because I knew there was a risk involved when I got here. But all these people at CCSN had all these great dreams and then they just didn't follow through."

archive