These are Jay’s days to get comfortable …

Steve Guiremand

Thursday, Feb. 19, 2004 | 9:56 a.m.

Just hours after picking up his first Division I coaching victory, interim UNLV head coach Jay Spoonhour was back hard at work at his Thomas & Mack Center office putting together a game plan for Saturday night's game with Colorado State along with assistants Deane Martin, David Rice and Vince Booker.

"I didn't do very well," Spoonhour said when asked how he slept following the Rebels' 68-65 comeback win against San Diego State on Tuesday night.

Imagine that.

Besides worrying about the health of his father, Charlie Spoonhour, who resigned as Rebels head coach Tuesday on orders by his doctor after complaining about tightness in his chest, Jay Spoonhour also found himself tending to his infant daughter, Grace, during the wee hours of the morning.

"The baby had a bad night," he said. "She was sick last night and she's still sick this morning."

But Jay Spoonhour wasn't looking for any sympathy. As the son of a longtime college basketball coach he knows that sleepless nights are part of the territory during the season.

"Last night wasn't any more difficult than any other night because there's a lot of hard nights," said Spoonhour, a 33-year-old native of Springfield, Mo. "That's one of the things nobody tells you about. (Coaching) is like having 12 or 13 children, and you worry. A lot of it isn't basketball stuff. A lot of it is outside the floor, school or whatever, and you worry about your 12 guys. I think it's the same thing for just about every coach. You look at everybody right now and they all have dark circles under their eyes."

Jay Spoonhour's circles could get a whole lot darker the next three or four weeks as the Rebels (13-9, 4-5) finish the season under his guidance.

This is only the second time in his career that he's been a head coach at any level. In 2000-01 he coached Wabash Valley College in Mount Carmel, Ill., and led the Warriors to a 36-1 record and the NJCAA national championship, picking up NABC national coach of the year honors in the process.

A few months later, he joined his father's staff at UNLV as an assistant coach. And Tuesday night he got to coach his first Division I college game against San Diego State and upped his overall head coaching record to 37-1.

No one was happier about the victory than the man he replaced earlier that day.

"He called me after the game," Jay Spoonhour said of his dad. "He watched it on TV. He was really, really happy for the guys and thought they had played well. You could just really tell how happy he was."

Jay Spoonhour wasn't sure his father would even watch the game beforehand.

"Sometimes it can be more stressful to not have any control and watch it on TV," he said. "So I told him that he probably shouldn't watch it because it might not be pretty. He had to do some treadmill stuff so he was doing that while watching the game. He was hollering and excited."

Did father give his son any advice before the game?

"No, he didn't," Jay Spoonhour said. "He'll give you any advice you want if you ask. But otherwise he's not going to offer. He knows Deane and David and Vince and I and the players are capable people. His big thing is he doesn't want to intrude on anything. That's not the way we feel, that's the way he is. But we'll ask him stuff.

"He felt bad enough about having to leave that he probably didn't want to give a whole bunch of advice (Tuesday) anyway."

So just what kind of imprint can Jay Spoonhour put on this team during the next few weeks?

"You've got to act like yourself," he said. "The whole thing is we have whatever many games left and we've got to try and win as many or all of them while doing what you think is right. ... There's nothing that needs a lot of changing other than we just have to play better.

"By no means is it just me," Spoonhour continued. "It's the entire staff. From here on out we'll go with what we think is right, what we think is best for the group. And we're going to try to win them all. We're not going to make it any more complicated than that or try and get into any tricky stuff."

Jay Spoonhour did make one change in the starting lineup for Tuesday's win when he started freshman John Winston at point guard over junior Jerel Blassingame. But that was disciplinary.

"He was late for something, and it wasn't that bad," Spoonhour said. "He called to tell us that he was stuck in traffic."

As it turned out, Blassingame, who sat out the first five minutes of action, bounced back for a double-double (10 points, 10 assists) and had fresher legs in crunch time when he nailed four consecutive free throws in the final 28.2 seconds for what were the winning points.

"It still comes down to the players," Spoonhour said. "The players are the ones who did it (Tuesday) night. Their attitude was really good. There really wasn't nothing that we did differently last night other than play with more energy."

If Jay Spoonhour could somehow bottle that formula, he would be able to sleep a whole lot easier the rest of the season.