Sophomore year of high school, we all had to do a job shadow. I kind of wanted to be a sportswriter, but that didn’t sound like a very fun day off school. So since my dad a) worked at the University of Washington and b) had a friend in the basketball office and c) is not shy about such things, he asked said friend if his fifteen-year-old son could follow Lorenzo Romar around for a day. For some strange reason, Romar said yes.
And so it came to be that I spent one late-winter afternoon in 2008—I wanna say it was four or five hours—hanging around Hec Edmundson Pavilion with no particular purpose.
We talked for a while about coaching, and I asked some questions to fill out the boxes on the stupid little worksheets we’d been given. I sat in the back of the room for Romar’s media availability (which was a thing, because this was during the conference season, which made it all the more perplexing that he was allowing some random kid to eat up a decent chunk of his time). Then there was a film session I wasn’t invited to, which, fair enough. So instead I spent a solid hour shooting hoops by myself on the Hec Ed floor, just about the coolest thing I could possibly imagine at the time. Then I watched a little bit of practice (to the confusion of the players, I can only guess) and then my mom came and picked me up and I went home. It was the best.
That’s my personal addition to the oeuvre of stories detailing the absolute delight that is Lorenzo Romar, human being. Plenty of others have their own.
Actually, here’s one more: Our paths crossed again a few years later, when I covered the Huskies for the student newspaper, and he continued to be an incredibly kind person—incredibly kind for any context, not just for a college basketball coach, a position that seems often to attract a particular type of asshole. One season, the print deadline for our Game Daily preview sections came before the UW’s weekly press conference; Romar arranged for one of his assistants to call me up and talk on the phone every Monday afternoon about that week’s opponents so we could get a few quotes into print. I don’t want to name names, but let’s just say that was a bit different than the reception we student reporters got from some other UW coaches.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying that Lorenzo Romar’s firing, after fifteen years, makes me sad. He’s by all accounts a great dude and the best possible representative of a university; his teams just didn’t win enough games. Lorenzo Romar, basketball coach, wasn’t quite delightful enough.
Here’s my best argument in Romar’s favor, which I’m not even sure I believe: What is the goal of a university? I think most people would agree it is to prepare its students for professional success. What has Romar done? Lose too many games, sure, but he has also undoubtedly prepared the students under his charge for professional success.
Only eight schools have produced more current NBA players than the UW. Romar has helped standout recruits like Spencer Hawes and Quincy Pondexter get to the league, sure, but he’s also helped greatly improve the draft prospects of lesser recruits like Marquese Chriss and Isaiah Thomas. Romar has made a lot of basketball players a lot of money they wouldn’t have otherwise made, which goes a long way (along with the aforementioned kindness) toward explaining the loyalty he tends to engender.
But I get it: Big-time college basketball is about money coming in to the university, not going to its players. Might it have been prudent to wait one more year and see if Michael Porter Jr. and the rest of the best recruiting class in school history could right the ship? I would argue yes. But that won’t happen now. Next year is going to be horrific, no matter who the new coach ends up being; it won’t too fun watching Porter average 24 a game at Missouri and Daejon Davis turn into the next Gary Bell over at Gonzaga. But at least we’ll have the Dan Kingma-Sam Timmins pick-and-roll to enjoy!
(As an aside: Another way to look at this decision by athletic director Jen Cohen & Co. is that they’re choosing to pay $3.2 million (the cost of Romar’s buyout) to have the best player in the country not play for you next season. This decision was about winning, right? What about winning in the immediate future? What was shaping up to be a tremendously interesting year will now surely be depression-inducing. As for the whole “And what about the year after that?” argument? Cross that bridge when we come to it.)
The idea, obviously, is that the UW bites the bullet and suffers through one or two ugly seasons now in order to achieve better results down the line. But that’s also obviously not guaranteed. Who will the school hire? What kind of recruits will he draw? Will they win? Romar is the winningest and most successful coach in school history: Are we sure the next guy is going to do any better?
It’s too bad it had to end this way. The $3.2 million buyout will probably help salve the wound, but I still can’t help feeling bad for Romar. And I don’t feel great for the UW. Consider me pessimistic Huskies fan will look back on this day with a smile in five years’ time.