Bringing Seattle U. back to glory days

The gym will feel a little bit different at Friday's first practice. There will be more electricity in the building. The stakes will be higher, and the challenges will be enormous.

This is the week Seattle University basketball grows up.

This week, after 22 years of personal preparation, coach Joe Callero begins the slow march to the big time.

"The adrenaline rush is there every day," Callero said Tuesday, sitting in his ground-level office at the Connolly Center.

At 46, Callero is about to become a Division I coach and his charge, ultimately, is to return Seattle U. to something resembling the glory days of Elgin Baylor, Clint Richardson and the O'Brien twins.

On a normal day, Callero revs at high RPMs. Now, on the brink of his school's new beginning, he is all nervous energy and oozing optimism.

This could be the start of something big, and for basketball-hungry fans who are just beginning to feel the pain of losing the Sonics, the return of Division I basketball to Seattle U. is news worth celebrating.

How about the real possibility of a five-year contract for an annual game with Washington? How about the potential of a new tournament called the Caretaker Classic that would feature Washington and Seattle playing in separate ends of a doubleheader?

How about future schedules that include Oklahoma State, Marquette, Fresno State and Utah?

Of course, the process will be painstaking. For the next four years, as part of the NCAA application process, Seattle will be in transition. It will be a team without a conference, a team without hope of playing in the NCAA tournament.

Callero calls it purgatory, but somewhere past that, he sees paradise.

"I remember back 35 years ago, watching the Seattle U.-University of Washington rivalry," he said, "and to be able to recreate that now, I mean, other than saying I want to be Lenny Wilkens and coach the Sonics to an NBA championship, is there anything better than that?"

Callero has coached the Redhawks' Division II program for the past seven years, but as he recruited this month, he has found there is magic in the mere mention of Division I. Already he has gotten an oral commitment from Bainbridge's 6-foot-10 Ben Eisenhardt. And he is finding doors that were once closed, now have been cracked open.

"The beauty of basketball is that we don't have to recruit 70 kids," he said. "Basketball is the sport where you can grow quickly. If we can find one or two kids who want to stay home. Find one or two kids who grow three or four inches after they get here, you know, the David Robinsons of the world.

"Or if we can find that international player who is overlooked. In basketball, three players can change your fortune and make you highly competitive. We've got to find that little niche, that player or two in the next two years that not many other people are recruiting."

But what does he tell a player from, say, St. Louis, who loves the school, loves Seattle, but wants to play for a conference title and wants to play late into March?

"We're looking for a kid who has a little different ticker," he said. "We're looking for a guy who's like the people who first moved out West and wanted to be the great adventurers.

"We tell kids, 'You can put your footprint on this program. When people look back, five or 10 years from now, you can be the one who charted the territory, who played the first full season of Division I at Seattle U since 1980.' "

From Sumner High School to Highline C.C., from an assistantship at USC, from to UPS to the Redhawks, Callero has spent a coaching lifetime preparing for the challenge of this season and beyond.

"From an X's-and-O's standpoint, from a game preparation, from communicating with your players, I think I've proved that I have those parts of coaching understood," he said. "But what I do wake up in a cold sweat over is that I feel like I have to step up my recruiting efforts.

"That's really where my anxiety regarding this position rears its head up. We're going into the hydroplane races now, and I want to make sure I'm competing with more than a row boat."

Welcome to Joe Callero's brave, new world. Welcome to the beginning of the big time.

Steve Kelley: 206-464-2176 or skelley@seattletimes.com