John Blanchette: Score hire as a ‘W’, but Cougs will need more

Let’s start with the premise that the Huskies screwed up. Every Cougar wants to believe that, right?

Then let’s suggest that Washington State made out like crazy in landing June Daugherty to be its new women’s basketball coach after Washington rather blithely showed her the door last month.

And finally, let’s conclude that the women’s game is suddenly relevant again at Wazzu.

Now here’s the catch: Only one of those things is even remotely true.

Not that it mattered on campus where Cougs of all stripes were so giddy with themselves Friday for scooping up the culls from the school across the state that you’d have thought Billy Joe Hobert or Rick Neuheisel or some other Husky bandito of the past was in the news again just to make Wazzu look good by comparison.

Or maybe everybody was just wearing their best if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em grin. After all, Daugherty was a mere 22-0 against the Cougars during her Washington phase.

Give athletic director Jim Sterk this: Once again, he has hired a coach with some bona fides – really the first such hire in women’s basketball since the school had to start paying attention to the sport in the 1980s. Three hundred-some Division I victories and seven trips to the NCAA tournament are on Daugherty’s resume. If she’d done that at Wazzu, she’d have a building named after her.

So naturally there were many congratulatory winks Friday, as if Sterk had boated Dick Bennett again – while Daugherty herself dropped Tony Bennett’s name at her press conference more often than Andy Katz did during last month’s coaching-go-round.

Well, not so fast.

As it happens, while Daugherty had some obvious high points during her 11 years at Washington, she hardly rebuilt anything. She didn’t even repaint.

And this, in the end, is what got her let go at Montlake.

The Husky program wasn’t drowning, by any means, but it was mostly treading water. A once-great program had become a good one. Washington was still making it to the NCAAs, but in thanks-for-stopping-by cameos. Attendance had fallen 50 percent in the last five years. Daugherty won, but her percentage was more than 150 points lower than all three of her immediate predecessors.

And if her program was exemplary in every off-the-court way, there is nothing wrong with UW athletic director Todd Turner taking a swing at restoring superiority on the court, too. He was absolutely right: Sometimes change for change’s sake is the proper move.

So were the Cougars wrong? Absolutely not.

Given the state of women’s basketball at Wazzu, Daugherty was a better hire than Sterk could have reasonably hoped for – a proven coach with strong regional name recognition and a spotless reputation.

The Cougars can’t help but be better under Daugherty – and not just because they couldn’t be worse.

Daugherty’s first-day enthusiasm was certainly appreciated – especially her admission that she’ll be motivated “more than you’ll ever know” by a desire to avenge, for lack of a better word, her UW dismissal. But there did seem to be a glossing over of the enormity of the task ahead of her with rote references to “that four-letter word: work.” Hey, the last coach – Sherri Murrell – worked hard. This has to be about working better, and Daugherty did touch on that, too.

“I have the experience,” she said, “the know-with-all” – now there’s a word – “to get out there and identify the talent. I’m connected with the West Coast and nationally. And the success I’ve had as a coach is attractive to a lot of people out there.”

Hmm. One of the reasons cited by Turner in firing Daugherty was some recent leakage of the state’s high school talent to other programs. The fact that Arizona State reached the Elite Eight with a virtual all-Northwest starting lineup wasn’t lost on anybody at UW – or Wazzu, for that matter. But when programs like Gonzaga start to poach Pac-10 players, it’s an eyebrows-up.

If she was losing them in Seattle, can Daugherty expect to woo them to Pullman?

“There are plenty of players to go around,” she said. “You can’t keep them all. Some want to leave, some want to stay home.”

More to the point, what the Bennetts have shown is that a moribund program at WSU can be turned without a dependency on in-state recruiting – that it doesn’t matter if the players are from West Seattle or West Germany.

Besides, the best local players aren’t even going to think about staying until the Cougars get good.

Until they win.

And so we come to relevance. If it seems dubious to think about energizing Cougars basketball with a coach the Huskies cast off, it’s obvious that there won’t be any energizing of this program until it wins. Period.

This program not only hasn’t been to the NCAAs in 16 years – and only once in history – it hasn’t finished higher than sixth in the Pac-10 during that time. It is the very definition of irrelevant, an afterthought – and will remain so until people are given a reason to care.

Daugherty can talk all she wants about a 100 percent graduation rate, having the highest team GPA in the athletic department, producing role models and ambassadors and creating a “great experience” for her players – all admirable ambitions.

But the Cougars need to win. And that needs to be the first goal, not the fifth.

It’s why Daugherty was hired, why she has a seven-year contract – seven! – at a salary that’s impossible to justify given the public interest in the program.

Winning, in her case, would be the best revenge. The only one, really.