Oregon State women's basketball: The past, the present, what future?

osu96.jpgView full sizeThe Oregon State women's basketball program, which now faces a daunting rebuilding project, has a proud past. The 1996 team, pictured here, went to the NCAA Tournament.

CORVALLIS -- When Felicia Ragland stepped foot on Oregon State's campus in the fall of 1997 for her recruiting visit, the guard from Tulare, Calif., quickly fell in love with the Beavers program.

Corvallis boasted a familylike atmosphere, where OSU athletes were known by name around a community that was crazy about women's basketball. One season earlier, the Beavers had played in the NCAA Tournament, and they regularly packed more than 5,000 fans into Gill Coliseum for games.

Ragland was sold.

She signed on, scored 1,803 points in four years in Corvallis and became one of the most beloved players in OSU women's basketball history. Today, Ragland's No. 34 is one of two jerseys retired in the rafters at Gill, a bleak reminder of a program that was once thriving.

Eight years after Ragland graduated, it is a dramatically different situation.

Never before in major Division I women's college basketball has a program attempted to lift itself from such depths as the Beavers face in the wake of the LaVonda Wagner era.

The Beavers are in shambles after the head coach -- who was fired June 1 -- drove away more than 16 players in five years. After a rash of player transfers this spring, athletic director Bob De Carolis launched an investigation into the program. Media reports then revealed that Wagner had built a controlling, abusive environment. Her dismissal soon followed.

What's left makes for an abysmal sales pitch for the next coach: Other programs have rebuilt from losing eras and turmoil, but none at the BCS-level appears to have lacked enough players to field a team. At Oregon State, that's likely.

If play started tomorrow, the Beavers would be at risk of not being allowed on the court. They have two returning players, two incoming freshmen and one player from last season who has been granted her paperwork to leave the program but remains undecided.

NCAA rules require a minimum of five players.

Complicating matters, Oregon State is hamstrung in what it can pay the next coach and his or her staff because De Carolis fired Wagner without cause, meaning she will be paid the remaining $1.2 million of her contract.

"It's unbelievable," said Ragland, who now lives and coaches in New Orleans, "that it's this bad."

De Carolis, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said he plans to hire a new coach by July 1, but there is a chance OSU will announce a hire as soon as Monday. Finalists are visiting campus this weekend.

Regardless of when someone accepts, the new coach faces a daunting task: How do you rebuild a program from scratch?

Sooners recovered

Realistically, because it is so late in the recruiting cycle, OSU will have to hold open tryouts in the fall to field a team.

wagner.jpgView full sizeOregon State women's basketball coach LaVonda Wagner gestures to the scoreboard while talking to Anita Rivera during a game in 2006. Wagner was fired in June and the program is left in disarray in her wake.

"They're going to be giving scholarships away pretty much," Ragland said, laughing.

Joking aside, Ragland is right. OSU's roster next season will likely be composed mostly of walk-ons, unheard of at a BCS-level school. Oregon State, assuming the four players with or expected to join the program stay the course, has 11 scholarships it could hand out.

The only program that draws comparison is the University of Oklahoma. When Sherri Coale took over as head coach in 1996, it was, in the words of then-associate athletic director Marita Hynes, "a huge disaster."

Six years earlier, Oklahoma dropped its women's basketball team. Amid protest from coaches at that year's Final Four, OU brought it back eight days later, but the Sooners didn't win and drew barely 300 people to a game. Enter Coale, then a head coach across town at Norman High School, who walked into the interview and instantly convinced Hynes she was the one for the job, though she had no previous college coaching experience.

"Sherri walked in and said, 'This is what I can do for OU women's basketball,' and she laid out a program and presented us with a written plan," Hynes, now retired, recalled. "She didn't present us with any timelines but gave us a plan of what she could do for us ... my biggest thing was she wanted to be our coach. She wanted to be with us, and I believed in her."

Hynes says that Coale was so convincing, the committee later joked they were ready to lace up their shoes and play for Coale.

That wouldn't have been necessary. Coale -- unlike whoever takes the job at Oregon State -- had enough players on the roster she inherited to field a team.

When Oregon State posted its women's basketball job June 3, the description excluded high school coaches. But even if OSU doesn't want to go Coale's route, what she has done at Oklahoma in 14 years proves that you can come back from the dead: After a miserable 5-22 first season, Coale has gone to three Finals Fours, turning the Sooners into a perennial powerhouse.

Local players are key

When Niya Butts took over at Arizona in spring 2008, she knew the first part of resurrecting a Pac-10 program that had gone 11-43 in the previous three years was to make sure she and the administration were on the same page.

ragland.jpgView full sizeFelicia Ragland is one of two Oregon State women's basketball players to have her jersey retired. The program has two people from last season's roster who appear to be sure to return. A third is considering whether to leave the program. With two high school signees committed, the program - if play started tomorrow - might not have enough player to take the court.

"For me the key component was having administrative support," Butts said. "I wanted to make sure they understood the amount of time it was going to take and the resources I would need to rebuild. I think that (understanding) sets everything in motion."

Whoever takes over at OSU will obviously be looking for the same sort of support from De Carolis. But one of the bigger challenges, perhaps, could be repairing relationships within the Oregon basketball community.

"I think there's been a huge disconnect," said Michael Abraham, who was an assistant at Oregon State for five years in the mid-90s, when the Beavers were a postseason regular, and now runs Team Concept, a club program in Portland that features some of the top young players in the Northwest. "OSU is irrelevant right now, in the community and in the state."

Abraham and other high school and club coaches emphasize that whoever comes in next must "mend fences" immediately and get the next group of top talent excited about OSU. Oregon has long been known as a hotbed for girls basketball, and in the past five years, a number of high-profile players -- J.J. Hones (Southridge/Stanford) Alex Earl (Southridge/Arizona State) Shoni Schimmel (Franklin/Louisville) -- have left the state to play at other Division I schools, barely giving OSU a second glance.

"The first priority of every college in the state should be to tap into Oregon kids," Abraham said, confident that OSU can become relevant again. "There's always this image that you've gotta go to L.A., Texas and international to get kids and you do, to a certain degree, but you have to make sure your kids who are local stay local.

"The coaches who are going to have the next great crop of players have to feel that there's a future at OSU."

Brittany Kennedy, one of the two players from last season's roster who has decided to stay in the OSU program, is convinced there's a future for women's basketball in Corvallis, and says OSU is a more attractive job than outsiders may think.

"You get to be a role model for young ladies in this world, at a Pac-10 school," she said. "You get to bring people into this community and let them know why everyone wants to be a Beaver, get to meet a lot of people who can become a part of your extended family.

Kennedy, who has heard many stories about the glory days, thinks the history is a major selling point, too.

"You get to build that back up," she said.

Women's team a necessity

But at the heart of the rebuilding process, a hard question must be asked: Why save this program?

Around the country, women's basketball is not a revenue-producing sport. Only a handful of top-tier programs make money, and the possibility of Oregon State turning into a Connecticut- or Tennessee-caliber team is almost impossible.

But Abraham, Ragland and Kennedy all say that doesn't matter. OSU has to be fixed, they insist, because the Oregon basketball community cares about it.

"There's never been a state that does more with their high school teams than Oregon does..." Abraham said. "There's a core group of people who have always been supportive, come hell or high water, winning or losing seasons. If you can produce a program that fans can connect to, they're waiting with open arms to embrace a team that shows even moderate success."

Kennedy said it doesn't matter if people don't view women's basketball as "important:" Title IX makes women's basketball a necessity, not a choice.

"Some people might not like women's basketball," she said, "but that doesn't matter, because we are at a BCS school."

Though she has not been back to Corvallis in years, Ragland has warm memories of her time at OSU. She said players had a "magnificent" relationship with fans at Oregon State, and knows that now, more than ever, it's crucial that the program not slip into darkness.

"We're finally at the point where, in general, more people are starting to watch women's basketball," she said. "It's more fundamental than the men's game, and girls are starting to play at a younger age.

"It's very important to save it, because women's basketball is on the rise."

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