All these years later, the Zags are the model of NCAA Tournament consistency, and the university this year greeted a freshman class of 1,202.Ī drive around campus feels like a tour of the house the Zags built. Seeing the value in the window dressing of good basketball, university administrators wisely invested in the team, and the team returned the favor by continuing to keep Gonzaga’s name prominent every March. The school recognized it was onto something. ![]() After the Bulldogs reached the Sweet 16 the following year, Few’s first as head coach, the freshman class jumped again, to more than 900 students. That theirs became a perennial run to the NCAA Tournament, the program rising from plucky underdog to powerful favorite, turns the whole thing into a fairy tale. Had it been a one-off, this might be a tragedy, a crash and burn to the inevitable sad conclusion for both basketball team and school. In the fall, the incoming freshman class jumped from 500 to 700 students. Disenfranchised alums suddenly found their old sweatshirts and their checkbooks, and students discovered the school as well. That spring, in March 1999, the 10th-seeded Zags knocked off Minnesota, Stanford and Florida to reach the Elite Eight and fell a couple of Khalid El-Amin free throws shy of a win over UConn and a Final Four berth. People in charge wondered if the tiny school could go on, alumni pride diminishing with the budget, taking their donations with them. The diminishing numbers led to a $1 million budget crisis and layoffs campus-wide. By the fall of 1998, the Bulldogs were about to embark on their best season in program history, and the university enrollment had shrunk, fewer than 3,000 students calling the school home. ![]() In this case, the rewind clock takes us back to a basketball program poised on its launchpad, and a university near the end of its rope. The hard part is learning how to cast.Īs always with these sorts of things, you have to start at the beginning. Indeed why, for Gonzaga has learned the lesson any good fly fisherman has mastered: The hard part isn’t figuring out where to cast. “The only thing that’s changed in the last 20 years is we can go anywhere in the world to accomplish what we want to accomplish,’’ Few says. 1 distinction, the Bulldogs staff remains steadfast in its selective approach. Yet having scaled the mountaintop to its apex, earning the program’s first preseason No. Plenty of players would take the bait on a program that has made 20 consecutive NCAA Tournaments and done no worse than the Sweet 16 in the five years before last season’s event was canceled. But now? Now the Bulldogs could pivot if they wanted to, jump feet first into as many pools as they’d like, into as deep waters as they’d like. This made sense 20 years ago, back when no one quite knew how to pronounce Gonzaga, let alone where the school was, when swimming with the big fish might get a program swallowed whole. Gonzaga, by contrast, prefers to tie a string to a stick and patiently and methodically fish in a very specific body of water. Cast a large net, that’s long been the motto in crafting a team, coaches backing up their player wish lists with wish lists in order to protect themselves both from rejection and the spasms of teenage whims. On this day, a day filled with conversations about Gonzaga’s flat-out refusal to follow the norm when it comes to roster building and recruiting, the picture serves as an especially helpful and illuminative piece of visual aid.
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