PORTLAND, Ore — Brothers.
That’s how Dan Monson, who led the Zags on their original 1999 run and now is the head coach at Long Beach State, described the coaching tree that has sprouted out of Gonzaga.
“We follow each other really close. Gonzaga is to be expected, but the rest of us, mere mortals along the way, grinded it out this year, and it was really a fun year for all of us,” Monson said, reflecting on how LBSU, Gonzaga, Arizona, and Boise State all won their regular-season conference titles.
It’s been a fantastic year for the crew with former assistants Tommy Lloyd and Leon Rice both making the NCAA tournament.
It actually goes beyond that, as Monson was one point away from going to the tournament himself with LBSU.
They all met at Dan’s dad’s basketball camp at the University of Oregon as counselors in their twenties.
“It’s guys that you can count on, and to have those kinds of guys in your life for not five, not ten, not twenty years, but thirty-four, thirty-five years, that’s pretty special. We know how lucky we are to have each other in this business,” Rice said.
“I’m the little brother in the group,” Lloyd said. “I was with those guys for a long time. They’re all kind of similar in age, and I was 15 years younger. They’ve been great mentors to me and more than that, I mean, our families are all really close. You’re talking vacations and birthdays and weddings. We do all that stuff together."
The little brother of the group was the one who sent out the text last Tuesday night in Las Vegas to see if the four of them could meet up.
In the midst of the chaos of March, the quartet found a way.
“It was a good hour where we could just put our teams away,” Monson said. “The first thing Tommy said to me when he hugged me, he said, ‘Who’re you guys playing?’ I said, ‘We’re not starting there. I don’t care who you play or who I play. Let’s enjoy what we’ve done, and then a half hour from now we can talk about who we’ve got this week.’”
“It was just great to connect and just talk about what we’ve all been through to this point,” Rice said. “Just have some laughs and get to see each other. It was a really special night.”
Mark Few did arrive a bit late due to a complimentary bath his team gave him after winning the WCC Championship.
And, as brothers do, they couldn’t help but get a joke off at his expense.
“We had to give Mark a little grief when he came because he was the only one who didn’t coach of the year out of the four of us in our conferences. We said, ‘Should we let you even sit here?’” Monson said.
“Now that’s a Dan Monson right there, no doubt,” Rice said with a hearty laugh. “I did a spit take when he said that.”