Friday, April 29, 2005 | 10:29 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
The success of a Division I athletic program will always be judged by its won-loss record and/or bottom line in football and men's basketball, and using that criteria, UNLV has had sort of a middling year.
But when it comes to the minor, nonrevenue or the politically correct Olympic sports, take your choice, the Rebels have definitely turned the corner toward respectability. Actually, they're doing even better than that. They're winning.
Seemingly every time you scan the local sports briefs or the small print on the Scoreboard page there's a UNLV team winning a Mountain West title or at least contending for one. Just the way it was during Brad Rothermel's reign as athletic director. And just the way it wasn't when Charlie Cavagnaro was taking up space in the high-back leather chair.
While second-year athletic director Mike Hamrick doesn't deserve all the credit for the additions to the trophy case -- Dwaine Knight's golf team, after all, was making birdies long before Hamrick set foot on campus -- his coaching hires seem to know what they are doing.
Take volleyball, for instance. In the eight years prior to Hamrick, UNLV posted an 89-136 record under Deitre Collins. Then he brought in Allison Keeley, who this year guided the Rebels to their first winning record (15-12, 8-6 MWC) in eight seasons.
Or men's tennis, where Owen Hambrick has directed the Rebels to 16 wins -- their most since 1997 -- against just seven losses.
In other cases, Hamrick simply has stepped aside and let the coaches who were already here do what they've done.
Starting with men's golf. The Rebels are ranked No. 1 in the nation and this weekend in Oregon are shooting for their third MWC title in six years. They've made 14 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances, winning it all in 1998. With a talent such as Ryan Moore (13th as an amateur at that little tournament in Georgia known as the Masters) pounding the links, they could do it again this year.
Before long, the UNLV men may be joined atop the leader board by its women, given the success the 3-year-old program has enjoyed under coach Missy Ringler. UNLV last week won its second consecutive MWC women's golf championship.
While the golf teams have set the bar to success at Sergei Bubka height, their Olympic sports brethren are trying hard to keep up. Men's and women's swimming (Jim Reitz) posted UNLV's first MWC championship sweep in that sport, women's tennis (Kevin Cory) is a solid 12-7 and women's soccer finished 12-5-2 to qualify for the NCAA tournament and launch coach Dan Abdalla into TCU's greener pasture.
Other programs that had fallen on hard times seem to have righted themselves.
Once a national power that has produced stalwarts such as three-time Olympic gold medalist Lori Harrigan, about all the Rebels softball team was producing were losing seasons -- seven consecutive -- until Lonni Alameda replaced Shan McDonald as coach. Heading into a weekend series at San Diego State, the Rebels are 35-16 and 11-3 in conference play.
The baseball team (Buddy Gouldsmith) has struggled against a killer nonconference schedule but is 14-4 and tied with BYU for first place in the MWC. The women's basketball team (Regina Miller) had a similar season, slipping to a 16-15 when its star, Sherry McCracklin, blew out her ankle during an off-season scrimmage. But the Lady Rebels still played well enough to merit a women's NIT bid.
And if the women's track team (Barbara Ferrell-Edmonson) and whoever planned UNLV's graduation would have just exchanged e-mail addresses, the Rebels also might have left their mark on the conference meet in that sport. With several of its best athletes expected to bypass the MWC championships to walk in the ceremony, UNLV will have to wait until the NCAA meet to run like the wind.
Since the Mountain West's inception six years ago, UNLV has never won more than four conference titles in a school year. It already has equaled that number this year. And with championships in men's golf, men's and women's tennis, softball and baseball yet to be decided, the Rebels probably aren't finished.
The only sports in which UNLV wasn't very competitive were women's cross country (8th among a field of eight in the MWC meet) and men's soccer, which used to be a kick in the pants but has had only two winning seasons since 1992.
Hamrick said winning championships in the niche sports doesn't have to be rocket science. In UNLV's case, it's good coaches plus modern facilities plus adequate funding that equals first-place trophies.
"It's very clear that with the facilities and the resources we have, our goal is to win Mountain West Conference championships," Hamrick said. "And with those championships come bids to NCAA tournaments.
"The athletic director has to have an expectation and they (the coaches) know what my expectations are. But then it's a matter of how I and Dr. (Carol) Harter and the administration can help them win championships, and that's where the funding comes in. We've changed some of the budget procedures to get them what they need financially, because we think we've got some outstanding young coaches."
Reitz said this was the first time in 11 years that swimming received a budget bump. Hamrick also has earmarked an additional $300,000 for women's sports.
Another goal is to show that Stanford isn't the only program that can win games while graduating players. A UNLV athletic graduation rate that has hovered around Vern Troyer's kneecaps is expected to rise to an all-time high of 52 percent when the NCAA releases those figures in the fall.
As Bill Rutherford told Joel Goodson in "Risky Business," that's not exactly Ivy League. But at least it's better than Animal House.
"We're turning the corner although we're not quite where we want to be," Hamrick said.
But at least now when you talk about UNLV being good sports, you can mean it literally.
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