The Star's longtime columnist on what new AD ٱéReed-Francois sees at Arizona, Washington State assistant (and Tucson High/Pima CC alum) Jeremy Harden's McKale moment, Jada Williams big-time bank shots, Steve Kerr's new NBA deal and more.
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Why'd new AD Reed-Francois come to UA? More relevant sports is one theory
ٱéReed-Francois' career résumé reads like something from a Jedd Fisch job-hopping novel. In order, she has worked at Cal, San Jose State, Santa Clara, Fresno State, USF, Tennessee, Cincinnati, Virginia Tech, UNLV, Missouri and (whew) Arizona.
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That's 11 athletic departments from sea to shining sea in 27 years. Her longest stay was 4½ years at Tennessee, 2008-12, where she served during a chaotic period in which she worked for three athletic directors — Mike Hamilton, Juan Cronin and Dave Hart.
She's done it all: compliance, student services, academics, finance, strategic projects, fund raising, damage control, overseeing football programs and men's basketball programs. If anything, she's a survivor.
In 2004, Reed-Francois agreed to what was probably the most challenging job of the 11: She accepted an $80,000 salary to be the director of compliance at Fresno State, tasked to clean up a program under NCAA investigation for rules broken during basketball coach Jerry ղ첹Ծ’s years, a wild period in which the NCAA found the Bulldogs guilty of using ineligible players, improper financial aid and academic fraud.
At the time, Reed-Francois, 31, told the Fresno Bee newspaper that she considered her new job an "amazing opportunity.''
"It's not a dirty house, it's not a snake pit,'' she said. "I don't think this is a problem situation. I think it's an opportunity. The positives far outweigh the negatives.''
No wonder Reed-Franciois, a graduate of the UA College of Law, was agreeable to return to her alma mater. Compared to what Fresno State went through 20 years ago, Arizona's current financial challenges don't seem so daunting.
There's one irresistible connection to Tucson that has nothing to do with the UA Law School. In her 27-year sports journey, Reed-Francois was strongly influenced by Cedric Dempsey, the UA's athletic director, 1983-94, a glory-days period in which Dempsey was so successful that he was hired to be executive director of the NCAA.
During Reed-Francois' first year at Fresno State, she met Dempsey. Recently retired from the NCAA, Dempsey was working as a consultant to help Fresno State get through the Tarkanian mess.
"I never had an aspiration to be an athletic director,'' Reed-Francois said then. "I thought what women did was to be a senior women's administrator. Cedric said, 'Well, why wouldn't you want to be an athletic director?' You should look at that. You should think about it.' ''
The seed was planted.
She met Dempsey again in the winter of 2017. Dempsey was part of a two-person search committee with former Arizona senior women's athletic administrator Rocky LaRose to replace Greg Byrne. And although the UA chose to hire Central Michigan AD Dave Heeke, Reed-Francois was clearly on the radar.
Two months later, she was hired as the athletic director at UNLV. a financially-starved athletic department that had employed seven ADs since 1990. She was so effective reviving the Rebels that an SEC school, Missouri, hired her as its AD four years later.
No wonder she wasn't scared off by Arizona's financial crisis or the possibility that her boss, UA president Bobby Robbins, could be fired at any moment. Reed-Francois' career has been two decades of crisis management
It's my guess that she left Missouri not for (1) the sunshine, (2) to return to her alma mater and be closer to her Southern California roots, or (3) to get away from the newly-imposed Missouri oversight committee, which was created to look over the shoulder of the school's AD, and generally interfere with her decisions.
I think Reed-Francois left Mizzou after a short three-year term simply because Arizona has a more relevant athletic department.
Missouri is the Oregon State of the SEC. It has not won an SEC championship in 12 years. Its most successful program, wrestling, has won 12 straight league titles but the SEC doesn't have wrestling; Mizzou wrestlers compete in the Big 12..
What's more, through Friday, Missouri was 0-13 in SEC in men's basketball. After a blowout loss to Alabama last week, its coach, Dennis Gates, used an F-bomb in a live press conference to describe his team's status. Not a good sign.
In the final standings of the 2022-23 Director's Cup — a metric that measures each school's yearly on-field success in each sport — Missouri was 12th of 14 SEC schools, ahead of just Vanderbilt and Mississippi State. Bottom-feeder territory.
By comparison over those 12 years, Arizona won 12 Pac-12 championships, in men's basketball, men's golf, women's cross country, men's tennis, women's golf, baseball and softball. It reached the Final Four in women's basketball and won a women's golf national title.
Here's the killer statistic: A year ago, the UA led all Pac-12 schools in total attendance, roughly 785,000 in all sports, football included.
Reed-Francois is strongest in the one area Heeke did not excel: fundraising. She's an out-front, people-person, much like Byrne, much different than Heeke, who preferred to operate from the McKale Center command center. Not that Heeke wasn't effective. At the end of his seven UA seasons, I think he was among the Pac-12's three leading ADs, with WSU's Patrick Chun and Utah's Mark Harlan.
Reed-Francois' challenge is to be as effective as her esteemed predecessors — Dempsey, Jim Livengood, Byrne and Heeke — probably the Pac-12's best lineage of ADs the last 40 years.
Let's hope she understands that Missouri's state anthem — ''Show Me'' — will be her charge at Arizona.
WSU assistant (and Tucson High alum) Harden's career a kiss of success
Until Thursday night, the most well-known kiss at McKale Center was on Senior Night, 2015, when UA point guard T.J. McConnell took a knee and kissed the A at mid-court.
That may have been matched Thursday when Washington State assistant coach Jeremy Harden proposed to his long-time girlfriend, Dr. Megan Yanda, on the "A'' after the Cougars stunned No. 4 Arizona.
Yanda said yes. When word spread to the Cougars, they sprinted from the locker room, lifted him to their shoulders and carried him off the court.
Standing nearby was Cochise College men's basketball coach Jerry Carrillo, a nationally prominent coach who couldn't help but smile. "It's been a long time,'' said Carrillo, a UA grad from Salpointe Catholic, "but I cut Jeremy from my Cochise team in 2005.''
Since then, Harden's career arc has been one worthy of a Hollywood script.
The 2005 All-City guard at Tucson High School quit basketball after being cut at Cochise College. He worked in sales at Circuit City and became a blackjack dealer at Desert Diamond Casino. In 2008, after getting back in shape, he tried out for the Pima College basketball team. How'd it go? He led the Aztecs to the 2010 NJCAA finals, finishing seventh. He was a first-team All-ACCAC guard.
He then enrolled at Arizona and earned a degree, while beginning a coaching career as the head coach at Immaculate Heart High School, a Class 1A school near Pusch Ridge. From there, he got a job coaching at Eastern Oregon University and then moved to Boise State, 2013-16, working in player development. He then moved back to Tucson to become an assistant coach in Sells, of all places, at Tohono O'odham College.
A year later, he was hired as the head coach at Wenatchee Valley Community College, going 95-35 in five years. That led to an assistant coaching job for the Idaho Vandals and, finally, last summer, to a spot on Kyle Smith's Washington State staff.
When I congratulated Harden for his long and winding journey to the Pac-12, he said, simply, "It's a long way from Immaculate Heart.'' Perfect.
Short stuff: Jada Williams' banker's hour; Wolfgang Weber, Steve Kerr, Anthony Leon all targeting history
• How upsets happen: When Arizona stunned No. 3 Stanford on Friday at Maples Pavilion, UA freshman guard Jada Williams scored a career-high 23 points. She banked in two game-changing 3-pointers at crunch time. Yes, back-to-bank bankers.
What's more, Williams had only made two 3s in the last nine games, shooting 2 for 18. Just as important, Stanford All-American center Cameron Brink missed the game with a non-COVID illness. In her last five games against Arizona, Brink had scored a cumulative 106 points and grabbed 71 rebounds.
And thus, as the stars aligned, Arizona won at Maples for the first time since 2001. ...
• Wolfgang Weber coached Salpointe Catholic to its 11th state boys soccer championship on Friday night. It was a four-peat for the Lancers and Weber, who began coaching at Salpointe in 1984 and is widely considered the Father of Soccer in Tucson. He now has a state-record 761 soccer victories and, in a bit of intrigue, now has a chance to surpass iconic Sahuaro High boys basketball coach Dick McConnell, who won 774 games for the Cougars from 1969-2008. I thought that was a record that would never be broken. ...
• Steve Kerr, bless his UA soul, last week signed a two-year contract extension that will pay him $17.5 million per year, through 2026-27. It makes him the highest-paid coach in NBA history. And why not? The Golden State Warriors coach is the NBA's career leader in playoff winning percentage (70.7), winning four championships, going 99-41. Not even former Bulls and Knicks coach Phil Jackson (70.4) can beat that. ...
• Sunnyside High School wrestling coach Anthony Leon last week led the Blue Devils to a seventh consecutive state championship. That gives Sunnyside's dynasty 37 state wrestling championships. Incredibly, that is not the No. 1 total, all sports, in Arizona history. The Phoenix Brophy Prep boys swimming program has 42 state championships and the Phoenix Xavier Prep girls golf team has 38 state titles. Are those totals insurmountable? Brophy finished No. 3 in the two swimming championships and Xavier won the girls golf title this season.
My two cents: Washington basketball a cautionary tale
Washington coach Mike Hopkins became so frustrated with his shoot-first, defend-last team Saturday that he walked off the court and into the Huskies' locker room while the final play of the first half was still in progress.
Such is the fickle nature of college basketball.
When Hopkins was Tommy Dz’s age, 48, he was hot stuff, back-to-back Pac-12 coach of the year, 2018 and 2019, judged by many to be a rising star in the coaching business.
Now, at 54, Hopkins is still a best bet — a best bet to get fired next month. The Huskies haven't been relevant for five years. In Saturday's 91-75 loss at McKale Center, the normally tranquil Hopkins was assessed a technical foul, blowing his lid in the final five minutes of another clunker of a performance.
It's a cautionary tale, one that should help easy-to-panic UA fans to appreciate a 21-6 team that is still in play for a Pac-12 championship, one of five or 10 teams that seem capable of reaching next month's Final Four.
But Thursday's Arizona loss to underappreciated Washington State created a sense of deep-dish worry through the desert. What if this is as good as it gets?
After 40 years of covering Arizona basketball, I wouldn't rank this UA club among the top 10 Wildcat teams from 1984-2024. Not even close. Those 10 teams, in order?
• 1988: 35-3 record, lost in Final Four
• 2001: 28-8 record, lost in Final Four
• 1998: 30-5 record, lost in Elite Eight
• 2014: 33-5 record, lost in Elite Eight
• 1997: 25-9 record, won national title
• 1994: 29-6 record, lost in Final Four
• 1989: 29-4 record, lost in Sweet 16
• 2003: 28-4 record, lost in Elite Eight
• 2005: 30-7 record, lost in Elite Eight
• 1993: 24-4 record, lost in first round
Some of this is misleading. Those UA teams, especially Lute Olson’s teams, weren't greatly affected in what has become a one-and-done era of transfers and hardly-got-to-know-you players. College basketball's overall talent level is nowhere near what it was from 1985-2005.
But even those 10 superb Arizona teams mostly left a wake of broken hearts in Tucson. The hard lesson many of us learned was how fleeting happiness is in March and April.
So enjoy this UA club, however flawed, while you can. Or ask Washington's Hopkins about the madness to come. His Husky teams have one — just one — NCAA Tournament game in six years.
Contact sports columnist Greg Hansen at GHansenAZStar@gmail.com. On X(Twitter): @ghansen711