By Todd Leland
On-line Forty-Niner

Why is it coaches do not have mixed emotions about leaving Long Beach State? Roy Williams and Bill Self made career-defining decisions to leave highly successful basketball programs at Illinois and Kansas to take jobs of higher caliber.
 
Granted both men have history at their new sites of employ. Self was an assistant at KU in the ’80s and Williams has had life-long ties to North Carolina and was an assistant coach under the great Dean Smith at North Carolina.
 
But here in lies the point, the universities they left hated to see them go and the universities they now work for are so excited they are ready to start the basketball season today.
 
At The Beach there is no such fervor. This school has let go enough dynamic and amazing athletic coaching talent to fill a large portion of the NCAA Athletic Hall of Fame.
 
Lute Olson, head coach of the continuously nationally heralded and 1997 national champion Arizona Wildcats. Gone. Dave Snow, the man who dubbed them “Dirtbags” and Lazarus of Long Beach State baseball. Allowed to walk away. Seth Greenberg, the man who brought NBA talent to this university’s basketball team. Took off to South Florida in search of fortune. Jerry Tarkanian, basketball guru and hated adversary in the late ’80s and early ’90s with the talent-laden UNLV Rebels. Yes, he too was once a coach at Long Beach State.
 
Oh, and what about LBSU alumni in the coaching world that should be here. Most notably Mike Montgomery, who has turned Stanford basketball into a perennial national championship contender, why is he not coaching the 49ers?
 
I’ll tell you why. Because we don’t care enough about our teams. We have become content to watch USC and UCLA. We have allowed these coaches to exit and be cast aside without a whisper, without a groan. Well, this is my groan. We should not have fired Coach Bolla.
 
The athletic administration can package the situation any way they want, as they announced Bolla was merely at the end of her contract and not re-signed. Nice way to say we fired her, huh.
 
Bolla kept the 49ers in the battle for the Big West conference title last season as her squad battled injuries from the start. For next season Bolla was supposedly bringing in her best recruiting class to date.
 
Was there an uproar, were fans upset? No, we were surprised and then a couple of hours later on to other things.
 
Most important in this ordeal, my apologies to Coach Bolla, but what happens to those recruits? After parting ways with Bolla we hurt our chances of landing those recruits that will hopefully help us finally beat UC Santa Barbara.
 
What the athletic director will tell you is that recruits will come here regardless of Bolla’s presence. That student-athletes come here because of what Long Beach State has to offer in other areas, not just sports.
 
And he is right. We are not Boise State; we are not Cal State Northridge. This is Cal State University Long Beach and we are bigger, we are better and the student body and our alumni deserve more.
 
Why can a small school like Gonzaga land in the Sweet 16 and we can barely scratch out five wins? Coaching. Why is UC Santa Barbara consistently ranked in the top 15 nationally and why can’t we beat them? Coaching. Why can a second-tier team from the mid-west, Marquette, advance to the Final Four and we can’t even make our own conference championship tournament? Coaching.
 
Don’t get me wrong Larry Reynolds will turn the men’s basketball program around and our women’s team will crack that 20-game losing streak to UCSB. Reynolds has already secured a division one power forward from Xavier, but let us just hope the university gives Reynolds and the to-be-announced women’s coach the time to make it happen.
 
Coaches come and go, especially at LBSU, and that is something teams and fans must come to grips with. But what we must also realize is we do have a say in the length of a coach’s tenure.
 
Coaches and the athletic administration recognize the loyalty fans and students have to their teams and more often than not match that intensity. When there are less than 1,000 fans at any given sporting event the powers that be think they can make changes at will and believe they must to generate wins and thereby generate more fan support.
 
Long Beach State has a loyalty problem and we will not see broad national success in all sports until students and fans show up and help fix the problem.

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