Columnist Dean Juipe: Still some bitterness toward CCSN

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2004 | 9:48 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.

The dream was still alive a year ago, although it was winding down. The Community College of Southern Nevada was just about out of the basketball business.

CCSN fielded men's and women's teams for a single season -- the 2002-03 season -- before the reality of the financial hardship it was causing resulted in the school deciding to cease and desist. In that single season the men's team went 16-14, the women 4-22.

Both programs had promise yet each played its only season in measured seclusion, the school doing next to nothing to promote home games that were played in a gym at UNLV.

When CCSN pulled the plug on the programs, there was more than a little bitterness.

Given that only two players from the men's team, Nick Porter and Jeremy Haggerty, are still playing at the collegiate level, it's more than likely that everyone else feels they were misled if not victimized by the school's shortsightedness.

"It's not the same, obviously," said former CCSN men's coach George Tarkanian, comparing the coaching he's doing today to what it was like handling a competitive juco team. These days Tarkanian runs a defensive skills clinic three nights a week and coaches eight kids' teams as part of the basketball academy he operates in Las Vegas with his brother Danny.

He also continues to teach political science at the school's Cheyenne campus.

"The thing I miss the most is the relationships with the players and coaches," Tarkanian said. "It's very tough not to have that anymore. My life isn't as pressurized as it was a year ago when I had to worry about games and players and academics, but I miss coaching.

"I enjoyed coaching."

He said he may get back into it -- there are a couple of attractive jobs open in California that have caught his eye -- but that there's a plus side to being out of the coaching racket for a while.

"You've got to do a lot of growing up yourself," he said of the sabbatical he has found himself in at the age of 40 and after having been a head coach the previous nine years. "But I'm enjoying a lot of things that I couldn't do before."

That includes tending to his wife and young son on a more consistent basis.

"But I've got strong ties to coaching, so I've got to weigh all these things," before making a permanent decision about his future, he said.

The future of his former CCSN players is just as uncertain.

Porter, who led the Coyotes with a 17.6 scoring average a year ago, is a shooting guard from Las Vegas who wanted to attend UNLV and maybe even walk-on with the Rebels, but is, instead, at Compton (Calif.) Junior College. "Nick is a big-time player and the (UNLV) coaches had some interest but they didn't pull the trigger," Tarkanian said of what seems to be a mistake by Charlie Spoonhour and his staff.

Haggerty (5.3 ppg at CCSN) is at Eastern Arizona Community College.

The picture is not as bright for any of the other ex-Coyotes, as three of them -- Zach Queen, Chris Hall and Mackenzie Clark -- are going to school at either UNLV or CCSN but not playing ball, and two others of note -- Brian Lang (17.5 ppg) and Daniel Artest (25.0 ppg in 12 games) -- have dropped out of school after transferring from CCSN and trying their luck elsewhere.

The three imports who dotted CCSN's first and only roster -- Leseguo Molebatsi of South Africa, and Vinko Fain and Hrvoje Gasparac of Croatia -- have returned to their native countries. We can only wonder if they are richer for the experience of a school year in Las Vegas and a season on a team that was neglected by its own administration.

While Porter may yet make it at the D-I level, Lang and Artest probably won't and that's a shame because they appeared to have major-college ability. What they needed is what they didn't get from CCSN: another year in a competitive program with a first-rate coach.

As you can tell, even I have some lingering bitterness about CCSN's failure to sustain its basketball programs after initially leading the public to believe they were here to stay.

The school not only misrepresented itself, it interrupted, perhaps even temporarily ruined, a few lives along the way. It offered something of importance and then abruptly took the offer off the table, leaving the affected to scatter as they pleased.

While it was fun to have a CCSN team for a season and those who were on the team likely got something positive out of it, in retrospect it was a move that maybe shouldn't have been made.

It gave hope to a situation that was, in truth, hopeless without the full support of the school, its policy makers and its athletic director.