Saturday was my first time inside Gill Coliseum for a basketball game. After spending two years covering games at Mac Court, the noise and the excitement of a packed house seemed like a pretty normal Saturday to me.
For the Beaver squad and their fans, it was a whole new ball game.
“We were so happy when we heard it sold out we were jumping around in the locker room,” said Beaver sophomore forward Omari Johnson. “We never thought it would happen to us and it did.”
“This is our first Civil War win and it feels great to get the monkey off our back,” said sophomore guard Calvin Haynes. “When is the last time we beat Oregon? I can’t recall.”
And the Beavers needed to win, maybe even more than the now 0-9 Ducks, because it made tangible for their fans what was just a notion of resurgence before. The house was packed Saturday but had the Beavers lost, there are no guarantees it would be full again next weekend.
“To be able to come up with the result we had with all those people there makes it even better,” said Oregon State coach Craig Robinson. “Because we want them to come all the time and we want them to feel like they’re coming to see a different team.”
And that illustrates well the difference between Duck and Beaver basketball this season. No matter how many analysts say that these are two programs headed in different directions, they’re not. These are just two different programs.
Oregon State has been down for a while now. Oregon has a long-term foundation of success. That’s why a 4-5 round of conference play punctuated by a win over Oregon has Beaver fans in a frenzy. That’s also why you don’t see any panic in the Oregon coaching staff or players through their winless round of conference play.
“I’ve heard at times that this is similar to what Oregon State went through last year and that’s not true,” said Oregon coach Ernie Kent of his squad’s string of conference losses. “I think Craig has done an outstanding job with them. They were a team and a program that had struggled a little bit. Our team is coming off two NCAA Tournament berths.”
Kent is playing this season’s hand perfectly. He’s concentrating on big-picture goals, remaining confident that his product will be better in the long run. By keeping his young team concentrated on the process rather than the results at this point, he is helping save its confidence. Were his reaction to the string of losses more desperate, his players would undoubtedly be feeling the losses more personally as failures rather than a part of this growth process that Kent has sold them.
“We knew we were going to go through some rebuilding this year,” Kent says, and he has been cautious with his projections from the very first day of practice. “My job as a basketball coach as I sat in those living rooms and recruited these young men was more than just basketball. You see the makeup of my team. They’re young but … they’re still men. My job is to teach them how to grow and how to get through this adversity. We knew it was going to be a process.”
A painful process for Duck fans, surely, but a process that begins with a level of talent and a confident air that denote a program with a solid foundation.
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