Friday, May 04, 2001
Coaches leave players in the cold
It's all well and good about Xavier and Thad Matta. The Musketeers got the man they wanted to replace Skip Prosser, and Matta's probably the right guy. He's young (33), energetic, successful and polished. They introduced him at a press conference Thursday afternoon, attended by lots of university high-ups. Everyone was well pleased. Back at Butler University, Mike Monserez wondered what was up.
You might remember him. Moeller Class of '99. Great player on a team that won the state title his senior season. He committed to Notre Dame as a junior, then signed the following fall. Things couldn't have been better. Until they weren't.
It's funny about college
basketball. Coaches are free to move like tumbleweeds, and they do. Contracts mean nothing; loyalty is preached but not generally practiced. A coach can skip from school a day after he promises a hot-shot recruit he's not going anywhere.
The kid signs, the coach bolts. The kid is left wondering what went wrong.
2nd school, 4th coach
Monserez signed with Notre Dame because of John McLeod, who was fired before Monserez got there. After a year playing for McLeod's replacement, Matt Doherty (who — surprise! — left after one season in South Bend), Monserez transfered to Butler to play for Matta, who “assured me he would be here as long as I would.”
Monserez sat out this past season, as NCAA rules require. Then two days ago, his world was yanked from underneath him again. The man who would be there for him would not be.
It's a bad system that punishes a kid for an adult's decision. Taking nothing away from Matta — who, from all accounts, has been well-liked by his players every place he has been — but this is just wrong.
“I'm very upset,” Monserez said Thursday. “Ninety percent of the reason I came to Butler was for Coach Matta. We left on good terms. He's a wonderful coach. But for selfish reasons, I'm frustrated this is able to go on.”
Selfish? There is selfishness occurring here. But it ain't coming from Mike Monserez.
Lesson in loyalty
Matta said of Monserez, “Whatever he does on the basketball court will be nothing compared to what he achieves when he stops playing.” That's nice. Only now, Monserez does it without the coach who said he'd be there to help him along.
Monserez says he has learned from what happened at Notre Dame and Butler. “Everything is a business,” he said. “It made me see loyalty as even a bigger virtue. My word is a bigger thing than any amount of money.”
He doesn't want sympathy. Monserez likes Butler and his teammates. He just learned about the cynical side of life, from a guy who should've been teaching him other things.
What the NCAA should do is allow players to come and go the way coaches do. Eliminate the year off for transferring. That's fair. Also: Would Notre Dame have fired McLeod if it knew its best player, Troy Murphy, was free to follow his coach out the door?
Meantime, at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Monserez and his teammates were meeting to ask the Butler administration to hire one of Matta's former assistants. That's how Matta got the job last year.
At exactly the same time Thursday, Matta was being introduced as XU's new coach. Ironic, isn't it?
E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.
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DAUGHERTY: Coaches leave players in cold
