Dave Boling: Despite being out of a job, Long Beach State coach Dan Monson will have one more shining moment
Decades ago, Don Monson tried to talk his son, Dan, out of following his career path and getting into coaching.
Far too many ups and downs, highs and lows, the elder counseled.
Neither Monson could have envisioned that a time would come when Dan would experience the extreme range of both those emotions – all in one week.
By text on a busy Sunday evening, Dan said that he had called his father when he was fired as basketball coach of Long Beach State last week – before he coached the Beach into the NCAA Tournament.
Don had no real advice, Monson said. “He just told me how proud he was of the way I handled it. He is 91, (and) just a proud dad at this point.”
He should be proud. Proud of the classy way Dan took his firing, and probably even more proud of the way Dan led his squad to three straight wins to capture the Big West Conference Tournament title and the automatic berth to the NCAAs that came with it.
I’m not supposed to play favorites, but, man, I’m pulling for Long Beach State to make it to the Final Four, and to see Monson get snapped up by a great program eager to shell out a worthy contract.
If there’s any karma left in college basketball, this would serve as a rebuke to the trigger-happy athletic directors who no longer seem to have the decency to let coaches finish the job. Or even catch their breath heading into their final press conferences.
That’s not confetti falling, it’s a shower of pink slips. March Meanness. One grimy moment.
Monson was fired even before the Beach (that’s the nickname if you haven’t followed) made their title dash. With Monson allowed to stay at the controls as a lame duck, the Beach got hot, surely a gesture of loyalty to their coach.
Monson was all class when addressing the media after the astonishing turn of events, when everybody else in the country knew that the most satisfying response would be for him to ask his bosses: “How you like me now, Beaches?”
We care about Monson’s fate in these precincts because he was at the root of the success that Gonzaga has enjoyed in the 21st century, as the head coach first piloting the Zags into the consciousness of the nation’s basketball fans.
And we care because he is a good guy, a terrific coach, and a man with such a pure and deeply held respect for the game and its players.
Actually, the firing was not the unreasonable part of this whole curious episode.
The Beach suffered a five-game losing streak to finish a tepid 10-10 in conference play. It was the end of Monson’s 17th season, only one of the prior seasons ended in the NCAA Tournament.
Still, he’d taken over a program on a three-year NCAA probation, and won four conference titles and got them in the NCAAs in 2012. Hard to ask for more, he had cleaned up a dirty program and won a conference title as recently as ’22.
And at the end of the season, if things were still trending downward, sure, consider it. But to pull the plug before the tournament? What’s the rush? As we all see now, the decision was somewhat premature.
Monson always proudly carried on the legacy of his father, who was national Coach of the Year in 1982 for leading the Idaho Vandals to the NCAA Sweet 16
Dan graduated from Idaho with a degree in mathematics (he learned numbers, he said, by watching scoreboards so much as a kid), and didn’t play basketball at all in college (his Vandal football career ended with a knee injury).
Despite his father’s warnings, Monson was adamant about coaching, and was hired as an assistant to Gonzaga coach Dan Fitzgerald in 1988. Monson, and the new graduate assistant, Mark Few, convinced Fitzgerald to start taking chances on higher-level recruits and to begin scheduling games against tougher opponents.
GU’s 1999 run to the Elite Eight, in Monson’s second season after taking over from Fitzgerald, set up the Zags and Few to turn the program into one of the most successful in recent college basketball history.
In a performance-based position, coaches get fired and sometimes they move on – goes both ways. It’s often the right move. And nobody wants to be left swinging in the wind.
But dang, people, a little respect isn’t too much to ask.
Ask Kayla Ard, late of Utah State. Yes, her club had won only 10 conference games in four seasons. But here’s how her firing was reported: Ard showed up at the press conference, after being eliminated in their tournament game with Boise State, and was asked by the media: “How do you plan to rebuild next season?”
Ard was then forced to answer “I’m not going to be rebuilding, I just coached my last game at Utah State.” Reporters were stunned silent. “I assume that will be the last question,” Ard said, sarcasm dripping from the knife wound.
Stanford’s administration was only slightly more respectful Thursday, after the Cardinal were defeated by Washington State. The media was told that coach Jerod Haase was fired before his post-game interview.
At least he didn’t have to fire himself.
Monson had the bittersweet opportunity of addressing his firing after a gloriously unexpected title run.
“I don’t think this is my last year,” he said during a television interview. “I love coaching … I need a new challenge. That’s life – it’s on to the next chapter.”
Maybe Monson is done with the Beach, but surely there’s a team out there that needs a coach like Dan Monson, who has proven how quickly he can turn a team around.