Ferd Lewis: Rainbows need to be better than mediocre in a mediocre conference
Mar. 14—In the time that it seemingly takes to say the official mouthful that is the Air Force Reserve Big West Men's Basketball Championship presented by the Hawaiian Islands, the University of Hawaii men's team was swiftly sent packing, again.
Now, getting bounced out of the tournament on your first night two years in a row might be an unfortunate coincidence. But a four-year run of consecutive early exits ? That suggests more systemic issues, the kind that deserve a prompt and genuine deep dive into what UH is doing—or not doing.
Because the Big West is considered a middling league, regularly ranking 20-something among the 32 Division I conferences, it usually gets just one berth in the NCAA Tournament, which means the whole season comes down to a conference tournament championship or bust proposition.
That's why the Big West tournament is everything. Teams point to it from the first time they pick up a basketball for summer workouts and coaches focus all year on peaking at the tournament.
Maybe you could defend UH's conference record, 42-40, over the past five seasons if the Rainbow Warriors had at least made some noise in the conference tournament, but that hasn't been the case unless you count the series of season-ending thuds.
This year the Rainbow Warriors went 11-9 overall, thanks to victories over Hawaii Hilo and Hawaii Pacific, and 9-9 in conference for their fourth.500 league record in five years since winning the title. They were relegated to sixth place in the 10-team standings because they went a collective 3-8 against the five teams that finished ahead of them.
Any exhaustive review of the program has to start with recruiting and questions about why, of the 30 players selected as first-team all-conference by the coaches over the past five seasons, UH has managed just two, Noah Allen (2017 ) and Eddie Stansberry (2020 ). The same total UC Santa Barbara had this year alone.
Precisely the kind of players who can help UH close out games or just keep the'Bows from devastating droughts like the 1-for-9 shooting and three turnovers in the pivotal 5 :06 of Thursday's elimination by UC Riverside—an opponent, it should be noted, with an interim rookie head coach who took over in July, running a program that could be dropped to save money.
That dearth of top drawer talent, even by Big West standards, is hard to fathom given all that UH would seem to have going for it. The 'Bows play in, by far, the best arena in a conference, where several don't qualify as arenas, being more akin to glorified high school gyms. Even UH's two practice gyms, which underwent more than $10 million in renovations, are spiffy.
In non-COVID-19 impacted seasons, nobody draws more fans or plays in a better environment than UH. Throw in what UH pays for the cost of attendance stipends above tuition, room and board and it presents what should be a fairly attractive package for a mid-major program in the Pacific.
With at least two more seasons remaining on his contract, coach Eran Ganot doesn't figure to be going anywhere soon and won't have to if he can make substantive changes.
Stubbornly doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results is, as Albert Einstein put it, "the definition of insanity."
You don't have to be Einstein to see that UH needs to turn things around, pronto.------Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis @staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.------
