Rating the Pac 10 Coaches

Our first article of the new season will be rating the other nine
Pac 10 Coaches. The other nine? Yep, you all know who is # 1. I have used an A, B, C grade to be polite, and to better make my point, without causing too much of an uproar.

The C's:

Tia Jackson is the newest Head Coach to the Pac 10 and the Washington job will be her first as a Head Coach. She does have Pac 10 experience, having been an Assistant at both Stanford and UCLA. She moved from UCLA to Duke as an Assistant before coming to Washington. The C grade has not been earned, but she simply hasn't been a Head Coach before. However her start in the recruiting area hasn't been great, as she has had to talk several commits into staying with their signed LOI and their verbal (Kingma). This year I believe she only has one Scholarship remaining, so we will see her recruiting impact with the 2009, next year, class.

Tia replaced June Daugherty in an effort to pump up fan interest in the program. With an outstanding incoming frosh class (recruited by June), Tia and the Huskies could get off to a good start toward building both excitement and a post season team. We'll see how she performs as a Head Coach.

Oregon's Bev Smith has been at Oregon for a while now and it's been pretty ho hum lately. This is a program with good fan interest, but the results the past two years have been disappointing. Oregon's recruiting over the past few years consists mostly of importing players from overseas. 8 of this year's 12 players are foreign. And Oregon has no players from the state of Oregon.

I appreciate that good players can come from abroad, but it hasn't produced results. So that's either suspect coaching or suspect recruiting methods. Neither lead me to believe Smith is above average as a Coach.

Kathy Olivier of UCLA is a Coach we fans often critize. She had a great players just 2 years ago and it fell way short of expections, and last year was even further away from what Bruin fans expect and hope for. But, and this is big, she can recruit. UCLA has an outstanding 6 player group coming in as frosh this season. The huge question is will they improve and will they play as a team and would playing as a team even be the plan. Kathy seems to use the star system, pleasing a few players. But it has not translated to post season wins.

LaVonda Wagner of Oregon State will be cause for debate here with her C grade. I base this on her lack of ability to retain 2 of her top 3 scorers from last season. After only one season at Oregon State, Smith and Lomax left. 7 of her 12 players will be new this year (one of the seven returns after a year off). Yes her players play hard and yes she seems to coach her team up. But she must recruit better and keep her recruits to move up a grade in my mind. The potential is there. But recruiting is a big part of Coaching, and she is not doing well there.

The B's:

June Dougherty was fired and I give her a B? Yep. It is de javu all over again. June has a great class coming in and gets fired, much like Caren at Cal 3 years ago. But the real ironic thing is that June is a good game coach. It will be very hard to do well at Washington State, so hard to recruit, and she's not off to a good start in that area. Too many players considering Gonzaga and not WSU.

June's Washington teams ranged from good to average. But they could always be counted on to play the tough teams tough. She should be a great addition to the Washington State program, and if anyone can recruit to Pullman, I suspect it's June. And hot off the press, she has 4 solid commits for the November Signing Period.

Joan Bonvicini seems to be only able to recruit the Top 100-200 players at Arizona, but she gets a number of those. He teams play hard, they stay in their game plan and they slightly over achieve. I'm being a bit inconsistant, but if Joan could land a Top 25 player they'd move to the top half of the Pac 10 immediately. Recruiting top players hasn't been her forte since Polk enrolled. Joan handles the in game coahing very well though, thus her B grade.

Joanne Boyle has done a fine job in her two years at Cal, but is really at a crossroads now. She recruited but couldn't keep Sanford, a Top 25 player, who has been by far her highest ranked recruit. With six weeks to go to Letter of Intent Period, Cal has only one committment. However Boyle proved her coaching and leadership ability last year when Cal lost Gray-Lawson in Dec and still advanced to the NCAA's with a very young team. Cal will have 10 openings this year and next, so the pressure will be on to sign several top players.

Mark Trakh has done a fantastic job recruiting, sadly injuries have struck heavily on USC. Last year he lost two and possibly a third player who would have been starters, and this year he has lost two starters already. However unlike last season when USC had to start a walk-on late in the season, this year he will have a solid group of 8-9 players. A 20 win season is very possible, and a trip to the Dance. In fact to keep his # 3 in the Conference rating, he had better reach the NCAA's.

What I like most about Trakh is that he keeps his cool and the fact that a walk on was able to play a number of minutes demonstrates his coaching ability. I'm big on calm game coaches. I like those who do their coaching in practices and don't pace the sideline yelling instructions.

The A Coaches:

Of course that leads into Arizona State's Charli Turner Thorne. She's a pacer, she's a yeller, she's a hockey coach with hockey substitution patterns. But she can coach. Her teams are extremely competitive, very well coached and by goodness are they aggressive. Arizona State has been a very strong Pac 10 contender and competitive on the national level. Players develop well, of course they also know that if in the 10 deep they will play.

ASU is a team that will contend for the Pac 10 title for the foreseeable future, and could well advance deep in to the NCAA tournament. Charli has formed an excellent foundation for the Sun Devils.