Cal Lutheran’s Dunlap Taking His Pioneer Spirit to Australia

Born in a log cabin, raised among arctic wolves. . . .

Mike Dunlap delights in being characterized as a pioneer, a risk taker, a man of sturdy stock eager to step into treacherous situations and emerge triumphant.

No mere dreamer, the Cal Lutheran basketball coach practices what he preaches when teaching the jump shot: He follows through.

He will lead the successful Kingsmen (24-2) into the second round of the NCAA Division III tournament tonight at UC San Diego. Days after Cal Lutheran either is eliminated or wins the tournament, he will fly 12,000 miles to take over as coach of the Adelaide 36ers, a team in Australia’s professional National Basketball League.

Dunlap’s many friends in the college coaching fraternity will shake their heads, same as they did five years ago when he quit as George Raveling’s golden boy assistant at USC to take over at Cal Lutheran, an obscure school that had chewed up seven basketball coaches and spit out each one a loser.

Dunlap’s wife, Mollie, a lawyer whose lawyer father wrote her a three-page brief against moving to Australia, will dutifully follow, sons Holt, 3, and Spencer, 1, in tow. (The verdict is in, Mollie told dad. Sentence: Three-to-five in the bush, with time added for good performance.)

As for Dunlap’s own judgment, the jury is out.

But the move is not surprising, given his background, which brings up the log cabin. Wolves? Well, sled dogs, anyway.

Lawrence Dunlap, Mike’s father, was a high-risk surgeon who set up practice in the 1950s in a log cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska, where Mike was born and raised.

Dunlap has thrown himself to the wolves in a figurative sense several times since.

“I have a pioneer mind-set,” he says. “It’s in the Dunlap blood to take a chance.”

That’s why he is bolting the moment he has transformed Cal Lutheran from a doormat to a national championship contender.

“Once you get too comfortable, it’s time to move on,” says Dunlap, the only winning basketball coach in Cal Lutheran’s 33-year history.

That’s why his destination is Australia, where he will confront the pressures of big-time basketball without enjoying many of its spoils.

“They are absolutely maniacal about the game there,” he says, a faraway gleam in his eyes.

And that’s why the Adelaide brass believes this 36-year-old Yank can hack it as the youngest coach in the NBL, a league that is beginning to rival Australian football in popularity.

“We have a lot of exciting young kids on the team and Mike has a track record of developing young talent,” says Barry Richardson, general manager of the 36ers. “Basketball is the sleeping giant of Australia. Walk down any street in Adelaide and a kid is dribbling a ball. Mike is making this move at the right time.”

How the general manager of an Australian team would know of Dunlap becomes clear by scanning recent Cal Lutheran rosters. At least one player in each of his five seasons is Australian.

In fact, the imports are a major reason the Kingsmen have raced to three consecutive Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championships.

Rupert Sapwell, a veteran of all three teams and a native of Melbourne, Australia, is the latest example of an arrangement that is mutually beneficial to a fledgling professional league on a faraway continent and a small Christian university in Thousand Oaks.

The junior forward has improved from 2.5 points and 2.1 rebounds per game in 1991-92 to 12.2 and 6.8 this season. He has gone from raw recruit to a polished gem ready for a lucrative NBL career.

“Coming here turned out to be everything I had hoped it would be,” Sapwell says.

Dunlap established the pipeline through Brian Goorjian, a longtime Australian player and coach whose father, Ed, was Dunlap’s coach at Loyola Marymount in 1980-81.

After Dunlap was able to suit up only seven players and stumbled to a 5-21 record his first season at Cal Lutheran, he recalled a bit of wisdom Raveling had imparted about recruiting: Go where they ain’t.

He spent a month with Goorjian in Melbourne and found it was “like fishing in a hatchery.” Australian universities do not field teams, leaving no place for 18-20-year-olds to play except for club teams.

Simon O’Donnell, a rugged post player, was the first Australian to make an impact, leading Cal Lutheran to records of 14-12 and 16-12 in 1990-91 and ‘91-92. Better still, O’Donnell became a star NBL player upon his return to Australia, enhancing Dunlap’s reputation there.

The transformation of Cal Lutheran was completed last season when the team posted its first 20-win season, finishing 20-7 and ranked No. 15 in the nation.

The Kingsmen had opened Dunlap’s tenure with 13 consecutive losses, including 11 on the road against Division II teams. Cal Lutheran was nothing but cannon fodder and Dunlap recalls the experience as “gnarly.”

In contrast, the team opened this season with 15 consecutive victories.

Apparently, the fact that Dunlap had accepted the Adelaide job in August did not distract the Kingsmen.

“He let us know what was going on, he is really upfront about everything,” says Damon Ridley, the team’s scoring leader.

Dunlap’s unwillingness to compromise his beliefs will make or break him in Adelaide, a somewhat provincial city of 1.2 million in the state of South Australia.

“I anticipate rough waters but if I hold steady to my convictions, I can turn it around,” he says.

He plans to transform a staid, plodding team that barely qualified for the playoffs last season into an up-tempo squad that will play in-your-face man-to-man defense and move the ball quickly up the floor.

This will please the crowd, and if it doesn’t please the old guard, well, Dunlap simply will bring in new guards. And forwards. And centers.

“Some old heads on the team might be stubborn,” says Sapwell, who will skip his senior season at Cal Lutheran and return to play for a team in Melbourne, “but they will have to conform or get out.

“Mike will get a winning group in there.”

He has already begun. At Dunlap’s urging, Adelaide signed last season’s NBL most valuable player, Robert Rose, who was a free agent.

Steve Spencer, the top assistant at Cal Lutheran for four years, has been in Adelaide for two months, conducting practices and laying the groundwork for Dunlap’s arrival.

Opening night is April 9. There will be no off-season for Dunlap this year.

“Anticipation is high,” Spencer says. “People are excited to have Mike come over here. But they are antsy.”

Once the season begins, there is plenty of time for adjustments. The slow pace of typical Australian play mirrors the season itself, which is closer to a marathon than a sprint.

Teams spread a 26-game schedule over nearly eight months, playing once a week and taking a month off in July-August to prepare the national team for the World Games or the Olympics.

The drawn-out schedule will give Dunlap time to strengthen ties in the community and head off any anti-Yank resentment before it gathers steam. He plans to hold weekly coaching clinics.

“I don’t think many coaches will show up at the beginning, but eventually it will be full,” he says.

Dunlap astutely bought himself time when he negotiated his contract with Adelaide. The pact is for five years, although Dunlap can renegotiate after three. His salary would put him among the top 15% of NCAA Division I coaches, which, by the way, is what he aspires to become.

Like a boomerang, eventually he will return home.

“This job will be a huge learning curve,” he says. “It will stretch my boundaries. It will make me a better coach.”

From his first full-time job as an assistant at Loyola Marymount at age 22, through his years under Raveling at Iowa and USC, to his first head coaching job at Cal Lutheran, Dunlap has benefited from each step up the ladder.

And for now, the ladder leads Down Under.