"The Bucking Bronco"
After all, he had never been a head coach, never even played college basketball, and may have been the last man standing, after being hired as a graduate assistant by Dan Fitzgerald and staying on through the Dan Monson years.
Not exactly a recipe for success - but turns out he's making a meal out of the league.
Maybe Fitzgerald & Monson saw something in Mark that "few" others noticed - he doesn't settle for just good enough, he has his own vision and the drive to go after it.
He dismisses the concept of the good "mid major" program label that most of the WCC teams aspire to become. He blows it away. Even back in the early days, he chafed at the notion that "don't bother recruiting kids who were good enough to play in the then, Pac 10. His teams played with a huge "chip" on their shoulders.
Of course there were many other people as well as the University that assisted creating this juggernaut. But Few was certainly the driver. He found Adam Morrison and parlayed the success to the top of the WCC and frequent flyer trips to the NCAA.
We've had many great players, most recently some guy named Steve Nash and parlayed it into.....
While SCU is trying to get to contending for WCC titles as a mid- major program, Few's thinking about leaving for a new, national stage league with names like Georgetown, Villanova, Marquette - you get the picture.
A seven figure salary and a double digit string of consecutive NCAA appearances, and oh by the way, a local hero gets you into those conversations.
Gonzaga and Mark Few made the most out of their opportunities - sounds like a Silicon Valley story - but.....Spokane?
Don't miss the great read below.
Click on the link below to an interesting New York Times piece from earlier in 2013.
The Rise of Gonzaga
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During my time at SCU (class of '81) I always felt the recruiting philosophy was flawed. Instead of battling for scraps in California, we should have been pitching better players in the Great Lakes and Northeast regions. I can think of several players from my area, SE WI, who went to Catholic schools and excelled at places like Toledo and Creighton, in a couple of cases reaching the NBA during those years. I always thought those kind of guys were prime candidates for a school like ours. They still are.
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