Thomas' mentor Chillious begins UW tenure

When Washington cut down the nets last spring after winning its first outright conference championship since 1953, the Pac-10 champ should have saved a strand for Raphael Chillious.

The Huskies' dynamic Isaiah Thomas said he became Pac-10 freshman of the year last season - instead of being home in Tacoma, Wash., unqualified to enter Washington - largely because of Chillious.

"He made me a better player, and a better person," Thomas said.

And Matthew Bryan-Amaning stayed in the United States to pursue his current place as a frontcourt force for the Huskies instead of going back home to England because of the man they call "Coach Chills."

"He's the first guy I saw when I came into the States with my mom. He's such a good guy," Bryan-Amaning said.

The Huskies' new assistant coach hasn't even had a full week of preseason practice at Washington. Yet the former player at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, former prep school coach in Connecticut and - until Washington coach and friend Lorenzo Romar called him last spring - business manager for Nike in Beaverton, Ore., already feels at home.

Chillious has coached three current NBA players: New Jersey's Josh Boone, Miami's Dorell Wright and Andray Blatche of the Washington Wizards. He couldn't say no when Romar called last spring, after longtime Huskies assistant Cameron Dollar took the top job at Seattle University.

"There were a list of three guys I would have left Nike to go work for," Chillious said, talking about the comfortable job he had running elite camps all over the world. "I won't name names, but Lorenzo was first and foremost, from an integrity standpoint."

Plus, Chillious added, "a blind man could see the direction this program is heading."

Thomas, along with now-departed star Jon Brockman, led Washington back to national prominence last season after a two-year hiatus from the NCAA tournament. The 5-foot-8 guard from Curtis High School was the Washington state player of the year as a junior before he enrolled at tiny, idyllic South Kent School in far western Connecticut to get his grades higher for entrance to the UW.

One week of wearing a uniform, washing dishes and attending chapel each day three time zones away left the city kid homesick. Another week spent with Chillious yelling at him left Thomas phoning his parents back in Tacoma and telling them, "This coach is trippin.' I don't want to be out here."

"Yeah, he was tough on me, not just on the court but off," Thomas said. "He always told me, 'You're here for a reason. Get it done.'"

Luckily for Thomas, Chillious' wife was the coddler. Charlene had Thomas over to the house for meals or to just watch TV before Thomas got the colder side of mentoring at practice.

"There were times at South Kent I didn't even want to talk to him," Thomas said of Charlene's husband.

Asked if he would have left prep school - and thus remained ineligible to enter Washington - were it not for Chillious' tough love, Thomas said: "Yeah, probably. I'm glad he did (what he did)."

Thomas thought he could bull through his course work, leave after one year and join the Huskies for the 2007-08 season. Chillious knew better.

"The second year is when he really started to be the Isaiah who I see now," Chillious said. "He became a pleasant surprise to me. Always where he was supposed to be, doing what he was supposed to do. Going to class. Going to chapel ...

"That second year, I really got to see his personality," he said, adding Thomas also became a better passer, defender and team player that second year for a stacked South Kent team.

"When you see him get to college and apply those things you taught him, that's when you know you had his ear - even though you may have thought you didn't," Chillious said, chuckling.

Romar first met Chillious in 1997, when he was the coach at Pepperdine. Chillious was just out of college, working out on the campus while playing in a Los Angeles summer league en route to becoming an assistant at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Romar was impressed with how this young man with a psychology degree mentored a troublesome Pepperdine player that summer.

When Dollar left, Romar saw Chillious as a perfect fit to help lead Thomas, Bryan-Amaning and the rest of the young Huskies, whose only senior is Quincy Pondexter.

Chillious will be watching to see how Thomas, with Brockman gone, handles Washington asking him to be more of the prolific scorer he was in high school.

Thomas likes that this second go-round with Chillious is more on his terms than it was at South Kent.

"It's weird having your high school coach here with you in college," a smiling Thomas said.

"When he first got here, I told him, 'We now run this show.'"