Men's NCAA Tournament
EWU taking the tough road

By Bob Condotta
Seattle Times staff reporter

	ORLIN WAGNER / AP Eastern coach Ray Giacoletti wondered if his scheduling backfired when team began 3-9.
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Since becoming the coach at Eastern Washington four years ago, Ray Giacoletti has taken his team to play at Iowa, Michigan State, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota, California and Washington, among others — not to mention annual meetings with Spokane-area rival Gonzaga.

It's a philosophy that hasn't always resulted in a quick start, but Giacoletti thinks it toughens Eastern up for the long haul.

"To a certain extent, it doesn't really matter what we do in the nonconference anyway because we aren't going to get an at-large bid," Giacoletti said. "It's what you do in the conference."

In Giacoletti's first three years, the Eagles finished second in conference every year, just missing an NCAA tourney berth each time.

So this year's team of veterans had just one goal — to win the Big Sky and finally land that elusive NCAA tournament berth.

But on Dec. 31, after a 70-49 loss to Gonzaga, the Eagles stood 3-9 — having also lost at Washington, Oklahoma, Iowa and San Diego State, among others — and Giacoletti wondered if his plan had backfired.

"I'm not second-guessing anything, but I felt that maybe I had probably scheduled ourselves to the point where it was going to hurt us mentally," said Giacoletti, an assistant at UW from 1993-97. "There's a fine line right there and you want to push your team to that line but you don't want to cross the line to where mentally you are hurting your team. I would say we came pretty close to that line."

But as we now know, they didn't go over it, rallying to win 14 of their last 17 games, including two in the Big Sky tournament, to land an NCAA berth for the first time in school history.

Giacoletti says now he may water down his team's schedule just a bit in future years, particularly in trying to get more home games — EWU played 10 of its first 13 on the road this season. But that's not easy to do when you're where Eastern is on the Division I food chain. None of those big-name teams will come to Cheney, and playing a steady diet of the kind of teams that will won't necessarily make a team better.

"I knew we could go 0-12 or 12-0 and it wouldn't matter in terms of getting into the NCAA tournament," said guard Alvin Snow.
 
Added senior guard Brendon Merritt: "All along we thought it was a good thing. To be able to run with the best teams you have to play the best teams. We pride ourselves on our nonconference schedule. ... Even though we were losing them, me personally, I didn't have any doubt that we would do great things this year and make it to the tournament."

Merritt concedes a few minutes later he did have a few moments of doubt. Particularly after Eastern lost its Big Sky opener at home to Montana, 79-68, to fall to 4-10.

"That kind of threw me for a loop," Merritt said. "I was a little shook after that game."

That sequence of games was the one time this season the Eagles felt a need to question each other.

"I'm not going to lie to you," Giacoletti said. "I had some concerns ... I think we all were a little bit frustrated when we were 3-9 because we felt like we were better than that. We had played good competition the last three years, but we had found a way to get through it. Everybody had some concerns."

Giacoletti, in particular, questioned his team's commitment to defense, which has always been EWU's strength.

At halftime of a game at Northern Arizona a week later, with the Eagles down by 11, Giacoletti walked into the locker room and gave his team about a 10-word speech, telling his players that until they started playing some defense, there wasn't much else to talk about. Then he walked out.

Eastern outscored NAU 40-23 in the second half to win going away and move into first place in the Big Sky for good, riding a wave of momentum all the way to the NCAA tournament.

In the end, the scheduling worked. The Eagles made it to the tournament, and Giacoletti says all those early-season games will make his team that much more prepared to play a powerhouse like Oklahoma State today.

But don't expect Eastern to try it again.

"Putting ourselves in that position every year is probably not real smart," Giacoletti said.

Bob Condotta: 206-515-5699 or bcondotta@seattletimes.com

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