Yanai Works on Golf, Waits for Olympic Festival

Dave Yanai has been busy lately.

The Cal State Dominguez Hills basketball coach has been planning his annual youth basketball camp and practicing his golf swing in anticipation of a match against friends Pete Newell, the former basketball coach at California, and Bobby Knight, the coach at Indiana.

Yanai has not spent much time on his role as assistant coach of the West team for next month’s Olympic Festival. All he knows is that he’s been told to show up for practice July 2 in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

“There’s a committee that sorts the players out,” Yanai said. “They get evaluated and then we get them.”

Yanai spoke with West Coach Don Monson in April at the NCAA Final Four in Denver.

“We went over some guidelines as to what he wanted from me, what we would do,” Yanai said.

Monson, who is basketball coach at Oregon, and Yanai will put the team through two-a-day workouts for three days before round-robin play between teams from the North, South, East and West begins July 7. The finals are July 10.

“I’m looking forward to working with some of the best kids in the country, many of whom could be on the United States Olympic Team in 1992,” Yanai said.

Yanai said he and Monson have agreed to keep strategy simple.

“You know I like to play man-to-man defenses anyway,” he said, “So keeping the system simple doesn’t bother me a bit.”

Yanai realizes that he is an ambassador for several causes. He has coached for 13 years at the Division II level, where few if any coaches get a chance to coach Olympic-class athletes. He detests the zone defense because he believes that it slows down the game. He is not a high-profile coach at a school with financial resources, as Knight is, but has a 196-155 record. In addition, he is the only collegiate basketball coach of Japanese ancestry in the United States.

Can he represent all those interests at the festival?

“I’m just going to go out there and hope I don’t embarrass (anyone),” he said.