Gonzaga set to meet North Carolina for title

Gonzaga, the tiny school with the name many have trouble pronouncing, will face off with traditional powerhouse North Carolina in the national championship game on April 3 in Arizona.

GLENDALE, ARIZ. » For those who follow college basketball, the idea that Gonzaga is playing North Carolina for the national title doesn’t seem all that strange.

For those who don’t — or only get involved when it’s time to fill out a bracket — it still might. Gonzaga? Really? That a Jesuit school with 7,800 students based in Spokane, Washington, is going up against a behemoth from Tobacco Road in the April 3 NCAA final is testament to a coach with a stubborn streak, an administration that bought in to basketball and the modern-day realities of a sport that allows for little guys to reach the biggest stage.

“I know you have to believe,” Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth said. “The

biggest drawback some other schools have is that someone in that hierarchy says, ‘We can’t do that,’ or ‘We can never be like ...’ Well, if that’s the case, then you probably can’t.”

In the mid-1990s, Gonzaga was a nothing program, an afterthought in the West Coast Conference with a dandy of mascot, the Bulldog, that wore a sailor’s cap .

Changing the mascot was part of the equation.

Dan Monson, a longtime assistant coach, got the top job and put some other pieces in place.

He nabbed a group that included the scrappy forward with the awesome name, Casey Calvary . Gonzaga made the tournament in 1999 and pulled off upsets over Minnesota, Stanford and Florida on the way to the Elite Eight. At that point, it was a Cinderella story, the likes of which we see almost every year when programs like Butler, Virginia Commonwealth (VCU) and George Mason come from out of nowhere and make anything look possible.

But in Gonzaga’s case, 1999 marked the first in a string of 19 straight trips to the NCAA Tournament, the last 18 of which have come since Monson left for Minnesota and the current coach, Mark Few, took the helm. Counting his time as an assistant, Few has been at Gonzaga since 1989.

“When we first started coaching, our boss, Dan Fitzgerald, would always say, ‘Don’t waste the school’s money on (recruiting) a Pac10 player. We’re not going to beat those schools,”’ Monson said. “To Mark, that was motivation. It would make him recruit the kid harder. That’s who he’s always been. He’s very smart and very stubborn, and for a coach, those are two really good qualities to have.”

The team the Bulldogs face comes from the sort of school that is, quoteunquote “supposed” to be here.

North Carolina is a blue blood with five national titles.

North Carolina is Dean Smith and Michael Jordan and James Worthy and Roy Williams.

MARK HUMPHREY — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Gonzaga’s Zach Collins celebrates during the first half of the Bulldogs’ victory over South Carolina on April 1.