April 15 – CHENEY – At first, Dan Monson misinterpreted the question.
In the middle of an introductory news conference on Reese Court on Monday afternoon, Eastern Washington’s 20th basketball coach was asked if he had thought about putting his former team on the Eagles’ schedule this season.
“I wouldn’t mind,” Monson said. “We’ll play with whoever.”
On second thought, Monson decided that yes, he would be fine playing for one of his old teams.
But that former team? Maybe not yet.
“I thought you were talking about Long Beach State,” Monson said. “I have a problem with playing Gonzaga. I want to beat Gonzaga and I don’t want to just play against them. I’m not sure we’re ready for that, so I’m not going to sit here and go out to the media: ‘Yeah, come on, let’s beat Gonzaga. .’ We’re not at that level yet, but we want to get there.”
Monson, who accepted the head coaching job at EWU last week after 17 years at Long Beach State, has been in frequent contact with the man who succeeded him at Gonzaga two and a half decades ago.
A non-conference game/series between Monson’s program at EWU and Mark Few’s at Gonzaga is possibly the only thing that hasn’t come up in recent conversations between longtime friends and fellow coaches who met in the late 1980s while working on the basketball courts at the University of Oregon. performed by late GU coach Dan Fitzgerald.
“There’s a lot of room for both programs and Mark and I were on the phone for two hours yesterday going over candidates, players and everything,” Monson said. “It’s in my blood and we are in each other’s marriages. His father married both of us. So this is family too, but this is my family now. We will use each other for resources, but playing friends is not funny.”
Monson’s two-year stint at Gonzaga (1997-99) represents a small stint in a head coaching career that spans 27 seasons, but the coach, now 62, spent 10 seasons earlier as an assistant coach in Spokane and returned to the Inland Northwest with numerous connections to the school that gave him his start as a coach.
When Monson received a formal job offer from EWU AD Tim Collins over the phone Friday afternoon, he was in nearby Silver Lake watching his daughter Mollie and Gonzaga’s varsity rowing team compete against Seattle U. .
“If you’ve ever been in a regatta (rowing race), you have about five seconds to watch before it passes,” Monson said. “He called when they were passing by.”
Last month, as he was sifting through text messages and voicemails congratulating Monson on winning the Big West Conference Tournament, about a week after he was fired by Long Beach State, the coach came across a video message from Few’s wife, Marcy.
“(She was) filming Mark and his boys watching the last 30 seconds of our tournament championship game,” Monson said. “And Mark yelled at the TV and the kids couldn’t watch. Seeing how much they invested in Long Beach State basketball because they knew how much my family invested.
Since his last coaching stint at Inland Northwest, many of Monson’s coaching philosophies and ideas have changed or evolved, and EWU’s new coach suggested he will have to continue to adapt to an ever-changing college basketball landscape.
But Monson also stayed true to many of the values he instilled when guiding Gonzaga’s 1998-99 team — a group that consisted of several redshirts and non-scholarship players — to an Elite Eight berth in the NCAA Tournament.
EWU, he believes, will have to employ a similar approach if it wants to build on the program’s recent success.
“This program will still have to attract kids from this region who are hungry, who have an advantage… and want to get better,” Monson said. “… I’m not going to put Gonzaga, Gonzaga, Gonzaga in these guys’ heads. We’re Eastern, Eastern, Eastern. But there are some core values that I can bring with me.
