GARRETT WAIT
Sports Editor
The shocking announcement of men’s basketball Head Coach Paul Westphal’s firing ends five tumultuous years of Pepperdine basketball. The program, coming off it’s worst season in nearly a decade, was infused with young talent, but underachieved during the bulk of Westphal’s tenure.
It’s true that Westphal was a good man. He embodied the spirit of the Pepperdine community as well as any other coach in the athletics office. However, Pepperdine has a tradition of winning unparalleled among schools without a football program and Westphal just couldn’t live up to the expectations.
He came in to Pepperdine as a big name coach. He was, and still is, a guy with an NBA pedigree. He coached the Phoenix Suns to the NBA finals and he’s the second-fastest coach ever to rack up 150 wins in the NBA.
But his track record in the NBA never translated to Division I college basketball for some reason. Maybe it was Westphal’s motivational techniques, maybe it was recruiting or maybe, for one reason or another, fate conspired to force Westphal out after half a decade.
It was a tenure that was marred by devastating injuries and departures. Glen McGowan, Devin Montogomery, Will Kimble, Terrance Johnson, Shaun Davis. The names come fast and easy. These were guys who would have made significant impacts had they been able to play all four seasons.
This season, injuries were a factor yet again, but a 7-20 record can never be fully explained by injuries. This team was young and inexperienced, something that can also be attributed to early departures like Davis and Oliver Prince. Still, something deeper was plaguing this year’s team, but nobody knows exactly what it is.
Unfortunately for Westphal, Pepperdine students and alumni are not a patient lot when it comes to their men’s basketball team. Many students and alumni voiced their displeasure with the direction of the program and some had begun to make noise about forcing Westphal out. There was even talk of an e-mail campaign designed to let Dr. John Watson, the athletic director, know exactly what the alumni thought should be done with Westphal.
In the end, they got what they wanted. Westphal’s gone and he’s not coming back. And so ends a disappointing era in Pepperdine basketball history.
It was disappointing for a lot of reasons, not just because the team wasn’t winning as much as they were previously. In fact, the biggest disappointment may be that Westphal was such a good fit for Pepperdine, as a good, honest man who ran a clean program and believed in the mission of the university, but he couldn’t come through with the wins needed.
Now the question becomes where Pepperdine goes from here.
Watson and President Benton will discuss the next step soon, as soon as the end of the NCAA Tournament. This decision has more weight than many in the academic community at Pepperdine would like to admit. If Gonzaga and Duke are any indication, the success of a basketball program often has a lot to do with the success of a university as a whole so this isn’t something to be taken lightly.
There are rumblings about other coaches who have vacated high profile positions, including ex-Missouri Head Coach Quin Snyder The thing is, we’ve already had a high-profile coach and that didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped.
We need fresh blood, a young coach who is going to work hard to restore this program to the heights it once reached. The new coach should also have experience with this program so younger players will feel comfortable staying here despite the loss of the coach who recruited them.
However, in today’s college basketball scene, a coach like that is often lured away by a bigger school with more money rather than sticking around a small school like Pepperdine.
Loyalty is often the most important asset a coach can have. Unfortunately, coaches like Mark Few at Gonzaga are the exception, not the rule.
The irony of the matter is that the women’s team, who has a newer coach in Julie Rousseau, was supposed to go down in status, but has made a dramatic run to the NCAA Tournament. The two basketball programs are going in opposite directions, just not the directions most had expected.
No matter what happens, it’s a sad day at Pepperdine. Westphal was the most recognizable face on campus and he surely helped the future of the program, both on and off the court.
It’s a real shame that the departing big man on campus won’t be around to see the fruits of his labor.
03-16-2006