I haven’t seen the job posting yet, but I can imagine the opening for the head softball coach at Oregon’s listing will look something like this.
? Must be able to finish in top half of the eight-team Pacific-10 Conference softball schedule yearly. (Forget that four Pac-10 teams have won 20 of the 27 total NCAA championships in the sport’s history.)
? Must be able to recruit to one of the worst stadiums in the Pac-10. (That would be Howe Field, where the dugouts block the seating area and lights were installed just in February.)
? Making the NCAA Tournament will be a yearly expectation. (Our old coach went to five tournaments in seven years, as many appearances as we had in the previous 28. Sorry, you’ll have to do better.)
? Academics are important. Keep the Academic Progress Rate in good standing. (Like the 986 score softball received this year, which was in the 80th percentile nationally.)
? OK, we admit, it’s not tangible, but try to help your student-athletes have the most enjoyable “student-athlete experience” possible. (That was one of the criteria athletic director Pat Kilkenny used in his review of former coach Kathy Arendsen.)
? And, er, uh, please meet these expectations despite your boss, Kilkenny, admitting your program hasn’t been given as much support as others at the school. (“There’s no doubt our softball program doesn’t have the same advantages of some of our other programs,” Kilkenny told The Register-Guard newspaper.)
In other words, you officially have the hardest job in the entire athletic department.
They’re not exactly fair demands of the newest softball coach, but then again, it doesn’t look as if Arendsen, whose contract will not be renewed when it expires in June, was given a fair chance in her last year as head softball coach after guiding the team to more victories than any coach before her.
But to look at Arendsen only is to put on blinders to the entire strangeness surrounding two of Oregon’s last three coaching changes. While Bev Smith’s departure was deserved from women’s basketball after going 123-121 in eight seasons, which included one NCAA Tournament appearance, the removal of Shannon Rouillard from the post of women’s golf coach and multi-event coach Kelly Blair LaBounty last July during the Olympic Trials have given the appearance Oregon is making decisions while it tries to understand what it wants.
The firings, such as Blair LaBounty’s during the Olympic Trials last July when nearly all the media were looking elsewhere, and the subsequent decision to keep Rouillard in a new position inside the athletic department – she was given the job of handing out media credentials at the men’s NCAA basketball tournament in March – brings about questions that Arendsen’s firing doesn’t answer, either.
The main being, why now?
Rouillard being fired in the middle of the fall season made little sense. All Blair LaBounty did in her three seasons was help develop Pac-10 Conference champions Brianne Theisen and Ashton Eaton and heptathlete Kalindra McFadden. The timing, of course, only made Oregon look like they were trying to hide it.
Arendsen being tossed after the worst season in 25 years, a 16-34 record, seems to be justified, until you take into account the details around her sport and its place inside the athletic department. It would seem to me her accomplishments, already stated before, justified another chance after an awful year. More than half her team were freshmen or sophomore players, like Ernie Kent’s basketball squad, and similarly they struggled. One will return next year with an excellent addition at assistant coach whose contract is worth more than $400,000 and the promise of a sparkling new facility in Matthew Knight Arena.
Arendsen won’t, after not being given the second chance she so deserved. Part of Kilkenny’s criteria, he said, was that he expects Oregon to finish in the top half of the Pac-10 Conference in every sport. He said his expectations for Arendsen this year, which included finishing in the top half, were “crystal clear” between the two, which means it was likely the last thing the pair talked about before her firing considering Arendsen told this newspaper the last time they talked was in February.
And don’t forget that vague “student-athlete experience.” If her players are graduating and making the NCAA Tournament more than not, what else can you expect Arendsen to provide for them?
Does it matter if Oregon finishes in the top half of the conference, however, if the team makes the NCAA Tournament and has a chance at a championship anyway? And isn’t that, honestly, a little much to ask of a team that doesn’t have the best facilities or tradition in an extremely talented conference, and where communication between coaches and administrators is strained, to say the least? Wouldn’t you consider Arendsen’s job performance pretty good, considering the circumstances?
Well, it’s not good enough, apparently, to keep evolving Oregon’s ambition as a first-class athletic department as a whole.
That standard, however, gets murkier with every passing season at Oregon.
Andrew Greif
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