Spoonhour to evaluate future at season’s end

Steve Guiremand

Tuesday, March 18, 2003 | 10:16 a.m.

UNLV coach Charlie Spoonhour said he will wait until after the season before making a decision on whether to return to coach the Rebels.

Spoonhour, 63, is 42-21 in two seasons at UNLV and has two years remaining on his contract. He said it is his normal practice to wait several days after each season before deciding whether to coach another year.

"When the season is over I have told people I'm going to sit down for three or four days and decide what I'm going to do," Spoonhour said before practice on Monday. "I've been doing that for about 10 years. If somebody wants to speculate (he will step down at the end of the season), he can speculate."

The topic of Spoonhour's future at UNLV was broached in a column by the Sun's Dean Juipe on Monday.

"I'm not going to comment on that guy's column, period," Spoonhour said.

There were rumblings, particularly during the middle of the season when UNLV stumbled to a 1-4 conference start, that Spoonhour mighty step down after the season. But those rumors subsided after UNLV rebounded to win seven of its final 10 games and advance to the championship game of the Mountain West Conference tournament for the second consecutive year.

Spoonhour also has been spending UNLV's few days off the past two months scouting junior college talent in the Midwest.

"I have had no indication of that," UNLV athletic director John Robinson said Monday of the possibility Spoonhour might step down.

The Warriors were scheduled to fly back to the mainland on Monday, fewer than 24 hours after their long flight back from Oklahoma.

"It's obviously a bad situation for us, but you take whatever they give you," Hawaii coach Riley Wallace told the Honolulu Advertiser.

Hawaii was led to believe it would host a first round NIT game against Eastern Washington, or it would have stayed on the mainland to wait for the pairings. Instead, Eastern Washington was sent to Wyoming and the Warriors were sent packing to Las Vegas.

"We actually took a vote to see if the team wanted to go through with this because you don't have to accept the (NIT) bid," Wallace said. "But they all said they wanted to go, so we're going."

Because of all their travel, Hawaii will have just one practice before Wednesday night's game.