Kurtenbach

can pinpoint when the problem started, all agree there’s a snowball effect happening. This isn’t the first time the Bay Area has been shut out of the tournament — it happened as recently as 2018 — and it probably won’t be the last time.

“How do you change apathy?” ESPN college basketball analyst and Bay Area native Sean Farnham said. “How do you build a commitment to wanting to be great?”

One small upside of a situation where there’s little good happening, there’s no bad place to start.

But there was one place that everyone I talked to wanted to begin: The fans.

Simply put, there aren’t enough.

“How important are [college sports] in the Bay Area? Nonexistent. It was bad when I was around, but it’s now worse,” former Stanford and Cal coach Mike Montgomery told me. “It’s just so hard to draw in the Bay Area. Over time, that erodes you.”

There isn’t enough commitment from athletic departments, either.

“There’s a lack of buyin,” former Santa Clara coach Kerry Keating said. “I don’t think there’s unilateral alignment from the top down to highlight programs outside of Saint Mary’s.”

“They used to talk about winning the Directors’ Cup,” Montgomery said, alluding to the trophy given annually to the nation’s winningest overall athletics program, an honor Stanford has won 25 years in a row. “If you go to other places in the country, they don’t even know what that is — they’ll ask you how you did in football and basketball.”

Bay Area talent doesn’t want to stick around, either, and the region’s coaches aren’t all-in on keeping that talent from leaving.

“The Bay Area will always have talent. You can roll out of bed and fall on a Division 1 basketball player in the Bay area,” Farnham said. “The biggest problem for the Bay Area college basketball programs is the fact that the kids that grow up in that area often maybe are not recruited as hard by Bay Area schools as they are from schools outside the region. They get enamored with leaving home and going somewhere else — seeing better opportunities to potentially grow.”

And, of course, all of these issues are tied together. The lack of fans is tied to the lack of buy-in from the athletic departments, which makes hiring big-time coaches and recruiting big-time players tough.

It’s a chicken-and-anegg scenario, but right now, that chicken is either fried or the egg is splattered. And until many of those factors change, simultaneously, the sport will continue to be an afterthought here.

It is important to note that Saint Mary’s doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the rest of this group.

“Saint Mary’s, they’re the outlier in this conversation,” Farnham said.

Now, some of the same systemic issues happening around the Bay are showing up in Moraga, but Randy Bennett is still one of the winningest coaches in the sport and the Gaels have been wildly successful under his leadership. This season, they lacked the talent and athleticism necessary to play with BYU in West Coast Conference play, much less undisputed national No. 1 Gonzaga, but the team was also riddled with injuries.

The Gaels made the tournament five times the last decade, despite being in an oftentimes one-bid league alongside a juggernaut program. It hasn’t been easy, but they’ve held up Bay Area basketball for years.

“Everybody has down years,” Keating said, pointing to Duke and Kentucky’s 2021 seasons. “Except Gonzaga.”

But what’s the excuse elsewhere? Why hasn’t San Jose State, which fired head coach Jean Prioleau this past week, made the tournament since 1986? It’s impossible to compete with Utah State, San Diego State, and Nevada?

WhyhaveSantaClara and USF failed to breakthrough in the West Coast Conference and make the tournament since 1996 and 1998, respectively?

And at the major-conference level, why has Stanford, which went to the tournament 13 of 14 years from 1995 to 2008, reached the tournament only once since? How has Jerod Haase — despite strong recruiting classes (Ziaire Williams is a possible top-10 pick in the NBA draft) — gone without a tournament bid in the five years as head coach?

And how has Cal turned into a program that, when mentioned, elicits sympathy instead of respect?

Attendance, athletic departments, and recruiting are problems, but the right coach can overcome them. When Montgomery was at Cal and it was made clear that the athletic department wasn’t going to increase its support of the team, he says he told school officials that the Bears would still win. Sure enough, they did. They haven’t done much of it since he retired in 2014.

The school’s pass on hiring former Warriors coach Eric Musselman in 2017 still looms large. After Montgomery’s successor, Cuonzo Martin, left for Missouri, in large part because of the school’s lack of support for basketball, Cal promoted Martin’s assistant Wyking Jones, in large part because he was an inexpensive option. Musselman, now at Arkansas, has built one of the best programs in college basketball. Meanwhile, at Cal, coach Mark Fox is still digging out of the hole Jones dug in his two dreadful seasons (16-47 overall) at the helm.

Haase seems to be on the hot seat in Palo Alto. On the flip side of that, Todd Golden, who has done a nice job at San Francisco, is one more good season from jumping to a bigger program, like his predecessor, Kyle Smith, who took the Washington State job in 2019.

If Stanford moves on from Haase, can they attract a better option? Can San Francisco go threefor-three on coaches?

The recruitment and retention of assistant coaches is an issue in the Bay as well. Everyone knows it’s expensive to live here. That makes it tough to bring in veteran coaches, who want a certain quality of life, and young coaches, whose growing families will eventually need more room than their salaries might be able to provide.

Still, there is some optimism. Bay Area programs have created excitement in the past. We’ve seen Maples, Haas, and McKeon packed and jumping, just not recently. There still is belief that, while it’ll be exceptionally hard, those programs can roll once again.

“You have to win,” college basketball analyst Bill Herenda said. “It’s all about securing the right talent. … Build it and they will come.”

“Getting top talent should help with changing the environment,” Farnham said. “But you need to build off of that. You can’t have an Ivan Rabb and then not have the next Ivan Rabb there. You know, you can’t go get Ziaire Williams and not have your Williams next year. You don’t have to have a top-five prospect. Saint Mary’s can’t go from Jordan Ford to not having a guy. You always had a guy for 12 years. Who’s your guy, where did they go?

“You gotta get a guy, and then you have to get a guy after that.”

Everyone I talked to commented on the need for better marketing and an attempt to get more buy-in with the local community, too. For the midmajor programs, in particular, there’s a newfound opportunity in the post-COVID world.

“Everyone has been waiting all year to get out of their house. Now you get a chance to restart, reset,” Keating said.

Free tickets for kids, camps for coaches, and being an Instagram and TikTok presence. If coaches and their programs can break through and capture some attention once the world resets, it could set them up for success.

We’ll see if any of these programs take advantage of what we hope — considering the circumstances — is a once-ina-lifetime opportunity. We’ll see if they can reignite college basketball in the Bay Area and have programs commensurate with the quality of prep and professional basketball in this region.

But if they don’t, if we get more of the same, this situation seems so dire — so multifaceted in all the wrong ways — then we’ll be having this conversation many more times in the years ahead.

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