Nevada recruiting wealth of talent from Puget Sound-area schools

So thick is the basketball connection between Seattle and the University of Nevada that it surfaced again after a volleyball match Dec. 17. That's when the triumphant Washington women's team stepped to the podium to accept a national-championship trophy.

Presenting it was Cindy Fox, associate athletic director at Nevada and a member of the NCAA women's volleyball committee. That used to be Cindy Holt, a marketing assistant in the UW athletic department, before she married Mark Fox, in his second year as head basketball coach at Nevada and an ex-Huskies aide.

The Fox paths took them to Kansas State a few years back, where the volleyball coach was Jim McLaughlin, now at Washington. Says Mark Fox, "We used to spend hours just talking about coaching, how to teach. Jim McLaughlin might be the best coach of any sport in America."

Fox, meanwhile, has a good thing going in Reno, a year after taking over for another Seattle product, Trent Johnson, now coach at Stanford. Despite a year-ending 89-80 loss at St. Mary's, the Wolf Pack is 10-2, having won at Kansas and beaten Georgia. Its first defeat was at UCLA, 67-56, on Dec. 10.

Fox's short tenure has produced a 35-9 record and a 14-game road winning streak, not an easy proposition in the far-flung WAC. Of course, it helps to have junior center Nick Fazekas, who averages 20.2 points and 8.4 rebounds and landed on some preseason All-American lists.

Fox's second-leading scorer is Marcelus Kemp, a 6-foot-4 guard from Garfield High, who, despite averaging a modest 23 minutes, scores at a 14.8 pace.

"He can really score," Fox says. "He's got a knack for that."

Another Wolf Pack contributor is guard Lyndale Burleson of Franklin High, son of ex-UW football player Al Burleson and brother of Nate, Minnesota Vikings wide receiver and Charlotte Bobcats guard Kevin.

Burleson averages 19 minutes, and Fox says of him and Kemp, "If we don't have those two, we're a .500 team."

Kemp played on some athletically gifted Garfield teams that included UW standout Brandon Roy and Huskies quarterback Isaiah Stanback. Johnson and Fox recruited him to Reno, but a broken foot in fall practice in 2003 negated that season, and after Kemp had recovered from that, he had a faulty landing in a pickup game the next summer and tore an ACL.

Kemp recalls getting recruited by Utah, Gonzaga and Oregon, but Fox says he wasn't heavily sought.

"We don't have any guys on our team we had to beat a high-major school for," Fox says. "We just have some guys that bought into what we do and try to get better when they get here."

Fox, who'll be 37 on Jan. 13, has his own Seattle connection. He spent some time as a "restricted earnings" coach late in the regime of Lynn Nance at the UW, then went to Kansas to get his master's degree, where then-coach Roy Williams "let me come to practice every day."

He moved on to an assistant's job at Kansas State, where the son of longtime college and NBA coach Tex Winter lives. Winter would visit a couple of times a year and, in some long brainstorming sessions, Fox was a good listener.

With the success of Kemp and Burleson, Fox will doubtless be back in Seattle, seeking somebody who might not be prominent on Pac-10 radar.

"I like to tell the guys, 'We're going to bring in the rain,' " says Fox, referring to one of Puget Sound's familiar commodities.

Oh yes. There's that question everybody wants to know of anyone who attends school in Nevada.

"I really don't gamble at all," Kemp said. "I try to stay away from the casinos."

No Ill in Illini

Hardly anybody has a winning habit quite like Illinois under Bruce Weber. The Illini dropped only two games a year ago — including the national-championship finale against North Carolina — and are off to a surprising 14-0 start entering an anticipated Big Ten opener tonight with Michigan State.

Weber always seems on the verge of a smile, which is easy these days with lightning guard Dee Brown and Illinois' career rebounding leader, James Augustine.

"No doubt," says Weber, asked this week if the start has taken him aback. "You always think you can be successful, but to be where we're at ... it's surprised me and my staff. The team keeps saying they're not surprised.

"Winning becomes a little bit of a habit. They just feel they should be successful if they work at a high level."

Certainly Weber is, since arriving from Southern Illinois three years ago. He's 77-9 with Illinois.

Sandbagging

Think a few Big East schools might have been saving something for an incredibly rugged conference schedule — ask Connecticut about playing at Marquette — bloated by adding powers from Conference USA?

Entering the New Year, these were the ongoing winning streaks by Big East schools: Connecticut 11, Pittsburgh 11, Villanova 9, Cincinnati 8, Syracuse 8, Notre Dame 7, West Virginia 6, Louisville and Georgetown 5 apiece.

Still, it was more than just holiday fluff. Connecticut won the Maui Invitational, Notre Dame won at Alabama, Georgetown at UTEP, Pitt at South Carolina and West Virginia ripped Oklahoma in Oklahoma City.

And what's more ...

• St. Joe's coach Phil Martelli voiced unhappiness over a last-minute delay-of-game technical Saturday at Gonzaga, a rare call that he claimed wasn't preceded by a warning. "If you're on top of your game," he asked, "wouldn't you come over and say, 'Delay-of-game warning'?"

• Since the 1999-2000 season, the SEC is the only league to have had all its teams ranked. By contrast, the Big 12 has had only seven and Washington State, Oregon State and Arizona State haven't been from the Pac-10. The guess here is that the Cougars beat OSU and ASU to the honor.

• Free-throw shooting is a plague in the SEC this year. Tennessee, at .711, was the only school to begin the week better than 70 percent.

• Montana State was the preseason pick to win the Big Sky, but the Bobcats are only 7-7 while rival Montana is 10-2.

• A lot of major conferences, including the Pac-10, have some 'splainin' to do. The Missouri Valley is No. 2 in the RPI report this week behind the Big Ten, with the Pac-10 seventh.

• This was supposed to be a solid year at Loyola Marymount under first-year coach Rodney Tention, who came from the Arizona staff. But the Lions are only 3-11 entering WCC play.

• Best nickname around might be LSU's Glen "Big Baby" Davis, who can also play a little. At 6-9 and 310 pounds, he leads the SEC in scoring and rebounding.

Three unsolicited takes on college-hoops happenings:

1. If Stanford isn't the nation's most disappointing team, it might be Alabama. The Tide, widely picked to be a Top-25 team in the preseason, is only 7-5 entering SEC play and ranks 11th in the league in scoring defense.

2. Speaking of fired Sonics coaches, Paul Westphal's fifth Pepperdine team is not only bad, but boring. The young Waves are 4-8 — giving Westphal a 51-51 record over his past four seasons — and have scored 56 points or less seven times.

3. Is it too much to ask TV announcers making their first trip to the wild West to get basic pronunciations right? ESPN's Hubert Davis, who apparently has never been west of North Carolina, repeatedly said "Gon-zog-a" in doing the St. Joe's game last Saturday, and even threw in a "Spo-Cain."

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com