Harrick Is Happy to Be Starting On New Road

On the phone, the basketball coach from Rhode Island sounds upbeat about tonight’s season opener. It will be the first game he has coached since March 14, 1996.

“It’s time to find out what Eastern basketball is like,” Jim Harrick says.

A year of exile is over. After eight seasons at UCLA and nine at Pepperdine, the new guy running Rhode Island’s program is 59 years old and starting fresh.

He is not much younger than Dean Smith, who recently retired. But as the North Carolina coach leaves the game he loves, Harrick returns to it.

Tonight’s opponent is North Carolina.

No, check that . . . North Carolina Wilmington.

It is unimportant. To Harrick, it might as well be Kentucky, or Indiana, or Arizona. He is back in coaching and that is what counts.

A college basketball season carried on without Harrick for the first time since 1973, when he was in Inglewood coaching high school ball at Morningside.

“We just look at this as a very great new experience,” says Harrick, who with his wife has bought a Rhode Island house.

“At our midnight-madness practice, we had to turn 500 fans away.”

Meanwhile, far, far away, UCLA’s first opponent of 1997 will indeed be North Carolina, in an Alaska tournament on Thanksgiving.

This is no longer Harrick’s concern. UCLA is 3,000 miles away, Alaska farther. The glory of Pauley Pavilion is behind him. So are the ghosts.

What mixed feelings he must have.

With a chuckle, the coach of college basketball’s 1995 championship team says, “I’d better just not say anything. Sometimes I talk too much.”

Has he been keeping in touch with UCLA’s players? No.

Does he care? Of course. A coach wouldn’t be human without caring about certain people from his past.

“Anything new with Jelani?” Harrick inquires. He is the one who recruited center Jelani McCoy, now suspended.

The troubles in UCLA’s basketball program didn’t end a year ago, when Harrick was relieved as coach. Some will blame him, anyway. Others will wait and judge for themselves.

Meantime, a page in the Bruin 1997-98 basketball guide lists the following under “UCLA Basketball--Steve Lavin, the Last Six Years:”

“1995 NCAA championship, six consecutive NCAA berths, four Pacific-10 titles, overall winning percentage of 78.9%, six straight 20-win seasons, 11 NBA players.”

This isn’t the new coach’s doing. Lavin isn’t taking credit where credit is due.

In fact, listing his personal highlights, Lavin cites the April 3, 1995 NCAA championship game, and notes: “It was exciting as an assistant coach to watch Coach Harrick at the pinnacle of his career be able to enjoy that special moment.”

To some, UCLA to Rhode Island must seem a huge drop-off. It is not.

Harrick’s new team is nationally ranked in some preseason polls. The Rams made the 1997 NCAA tournament. They lost in the first round to Purdue, just as UCLA fell, a year earlier, in the first round to Princeton.

After 17 years as an NCAA coach and 358 victories, Harrick had to be an outsider.

Rhode Island brought him back.

He inherits a team that was 20-10 last season, and 20-14 in 1995-96 Former coach Al Skinner had to deal with questions about playing too soft a non-conference schedule, which some blamed for his team being snubbed by the 1996 NCAA tournament and sent to the NIT. Skinner’s reply: Rhode Island wouldn’t play anybody who won’t “return the game,” home and away.

Harrick’s team will travel. On Dec. 29-30, for example, he will be in Santa Clara for the Cable Car Classic, where the first team the Rams will face is Stanford.

“I’ve been trying to get away from [Coach] Mike Montgomery, and now I’m going clear across the country to play him,” Harrick jokes, of an old and familiar foe.

Rhode Island also has home-and-home dates with another Pac-10 opponent, California.

You can take the coach out of the conference, but you can’t take the conference out of the coach. In describing Rhode Island’s 5-foot-10 senior Tyson Wheeler, one of college basketball’s most exciting point guards, Harrick calls him “a cross between an Edney and a Stoudamire,” referring to Tyus and Damon, late of UCLA and Arizona.

Harrick will start a three-guard lineup led by Wheeler. He also has a shot-blocking 6-6 forward, Antonio Reynolds-Dean, who has added a hyphen and his mother’s surname since being the Atlantic 10’s rookie of the year two seasons ago.

He has enough talent for a shot at the 1998 NCAA tournament.

So does UCLA.

That sure would be interesting, when the brackets came out.

“Yes, it surely would,” says Rhode Island’s coach.