John Blanchette: Wayne Tinkle honed his game growing up in Spokane. Now, the Oregon State coach is back on the national stage
Wayne Tinkle always thought of himself as coachable. But sometimes the coach insists.
There was a new man to lead Ferris High School basketball in the fall of Tinkle’s sophomore year. In fact, the Saxons were enduring a stretch of five different head coaches in six years. Six-foot-six and still growing, Tinkle began the year on the varsity.
And then high school happened.
“He got a bunch of heat from parents of seniors who were saying, ‘Hey, my kid’s been through all this, why is a sophomore playing over him?’ Tinkle recalled. “So I got sent down to JV after four games. They practiced at 5:30 in the morning and I pouted my way through the first few.
“Ray Hare, the head football coach, was the JV basketball coach and he called me into the office and lit me up like a Christmas tree. When Ray got after you, his voice dropped to the depths of hell. He’s got the white stuff going at the corners of his mouth. He says, ‘We don’t have any pre-mo donnas around here.’ ”
But he also explained that playing starter’s minutes in every JV game would produce dividends that spot time on the varsity would not. And by season’s end, Tinkle was back on the A-team, earning his letter. Two years later, he could celebrate a Greater Spokane League championship.
“He and I still talk once a month in the offseason, and exchange texts or calls after games,” Tinkle said.
Oregon State’s basketball coach has had a lot of time this week to think about mentors. Also about family and unconditional support – the TV cutaways to his screaming offspring have become a staple. About destiny’s indifference to your personal timetable, turning-point meetings and the raw emotions of young men who blew up the odds.
Yeah, and about being picked to finish 12th in the Pac-12, too.
He had nothing but time. He was holed up in a hotel room for a mini-quarantine upon landing in Indianapolis, whisked straight to the NCAA’s bubble after his Beavers became the most improbable of bid thieves in storming to the Pac-12 tournament championship in a season that might well define a career.
Oh, he’s been to the tournament before – this is his fifth trip in 15 years as a head coach at OSU and Montana, where he fulfilled a goal he’d missed out on as a player. But the circumstances of basketball in 2021 and the Beavers’ own spike-and-swoon plotline have made this one unforgettable.
“It does validate a lot of things about our approach,” Tinkle said, “and about our guys’ commitment to staying with what we knew would lead to success.”
Even if the Beavers were told they would have none.
After that media vote before the season pegged them 12th, Tinkle was quick to guarantee “we won’t finish last.” That didn’t stop him from having his equipment manager stitch the number on the team’s warm-up shirts – inside near the label, more prod than public protest.
But sometimes the Beavers looked very much like a last-place team. Nonconference losses to Portland and Wyoming were embarrassments, giving ammunition to an ever-unsatisfied sliver of fans for whom Tinkle will never do enough. A “woodshed job” by Arizona at home prompted a come-to-Naismith meeting among the staff and turned the heat up in practice, to the point where one assistant wondered to his boss, “Are we going to lose these guys?”
Instead, the Beavers found themselves at the perfect time,
There was a bittersweet side to it. It came a year late for the coach to share with his son Tres in the lineup. The younger Tinkle missed out on playing in the NCAAs when he was injured late as a freshman, and saw COVID-19 wipe out his last shot at March Madness in 2020.
“It was a blessing to coach him – any time you’d break the huddle and see him go out there you knew you had a chance,” Tinkle said. “Not that it wasn’t tough, too. People used it against us in recruiting, saying that everything was ‘built around the sons’ ” – assistant coach Steven Thompson had two on the team, too – “and we probably missed on some kids. And some who were soft wanted to use it as an excuse, and did.”
Wayne Tinkle tried to leave his excuses behind in Spokane. In his high school and college summers, he’d throw himself into the rolling pickup game that crossed the city, with the resident pro, John Stockton, as de facto commissioner.
“This was pre-cellphone, so we had a phone tree of about 25 guys and every morning we’d wake up and find out what gym we had that day. Might be Fatima up on the South Hill, Gonzaga, G-Prep, Mead. If we couldn’t get a school, sometimes it was the East Central Community Center. If there was no gym, we’d meet up at a park on the north side or even under the freeway – remember those courts? At least five days a week we were getting runs in.
“And – this I learned from Stockton – if a handful of guys weren’t consistent about showing up, we crossed them off the list.”
That was Wayne Tinkle’s Beavers this year: the team that didn’t let itself get crossed off the list.