Meanwhile on campus, student reactions mixed

Nick Christensen

Tuesday, March 16, 2004 | 9:48 a.m.

The hiring of Lon Kruger as the new men's basketball coach at UNLV was met Monday night with a collective shrug from the student body.

"I'm just too busy with school," said Bessie Stavros, an architecture major. "I was really into it with Tarkanian. I'm a bandwagon fan I guess."

Many students asked said they'd heard of the school's basketball reputation back in the early 1990s, but hadn't followed it since they came to UNLV.

Some of the students who'd heard of the Kruger hiring said they thought that interim coach Jay Spoonhour should have gotten a longer chance as head coach.

"I don't think it was fair to him, assuming he wanted the job permanently," said Ben Montoya, a graduate student studying history. "I think good basketball teams start with consistent coaches. Tark was a good coach and he was consistent."

Montoya guessed that UNLV had had three coaches since Jerry Tarkanian stepped down in 1992. With Kruger's hiring, the total stands at nine, including two interim coaches, and that was something that surprised Montoya.

UNLV student government vice president Nick Christiansen said he hoped that the hire would energize the lax student body into becoming "Thomas and Mack Maniacs," a tribute to Duke's Cameron Crazies.

"In basketball, I'd like to see us move to the side of the court the way it is at every other major university," Christiansen said. "So when we are recruiting, they say 'I want to play in front of the Mack Maniacs.' "

Christiansen said he supports Hamrick's decision to hire Kruger this soon.

"I like that we've established somebody. He's got a good resume, a clean track record, and for us, that gets us off the microscope," he said. "I think he's the right guy right now to put us over that little hump we're in right now. Seems like every year we get to the final and lose by three."

Myke Minnich, a hotel major, also thought UNLV got the right guy.

"He comes from a winning program. He wasn't so good from under the pros, but he comes from a winning program from the years he was at Illinois," Minnich said.

But Chris Woolf, a graduate student in literature, thought UNLV should have gone after former NBA head coach George Karl.

"If you're 18 years old, and you hear George Karl just became the coach at UNLV, he's a great coach, and he would have played fast-paced ball," Woolf said. "After three years, every program he's been at has been a car wreck. That Illinois class was an aberration of what he usually gets."

Still, most students simply didn't know or care about the coaching change.

"Of who?" said sociology major Kermit Bayless when asked what he thought of Kruger's hiring. "I'm not into UNLV basketball."