Erickson Gets Hard Lesson in Business

When Nicole Erickson, a high school All-American guard from Brea Olinda High and arguably the best Orange County women’s basketball player in nearly two decades, decided to move 2,000 miles from home to play basketball at Purdue, Erickson said it was for two good reasons.

“I wanted to go to the Final Four and I wanted to play for Coach [Lin] Dunn,” Erickson said.

And now, here is Erickson, playing in the women’s NCAA Final Four. But Erickson is a fifth-year senior guard for Duke and playing for Coach Gail Goestenkors.

That leads us to a story about the reality of big-time athletics versus the sales pitch the NCAA offers. It leads us to a story of emotional devastation and loss of trust and then to a story of triumph.

It has led Erickson from her home in Fullerton to Purdue and then Duke and from childhood to adulthood. It has taught Erickson that basketball is a business, even in college, and yet it has left her loving the innocence of playing the game, of making the jump shot, of being a back-slapping jock in the huddle with her teammates.

It has given her the absolute worst moments of her life and now the best.

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Open practice day at the Final Four has arrived. Sitting in the stands and watching Duke is Lin Dunn, the hard-nosed, acerbic, white-haired coach who had brought Erickson to West Lafayette, Ind., and Purdue. “Coach Dunn was like a mother to me,” Erickson said. “She is the reason I came to Purdue, absolutely.”

The NCAA loves to tell its student-athletes to choose a college because of the academics, because of the tradition, because of anything but the coach. And to reinforce that message, the NCAA makes the student-athlete sit out a year of competition if the athlete transfers for any reason, even if the reason is that the coach leaves to take a new job. Or is fired. Or doesn’t have her contract renewed.

That is what happened to Erickson at Purdue. After Erickson’s sophomore season, when she established herself as a starter for the nationally ranked Boilermakers while shooting a school-record 44% from three-point range, Dunn’s contract was not renewed.

According to people familiar with the situation, Dunn went to see Athletic Director Morgan Burke after the 1995-96 season ended and expected to have her contract, which was up two months later, extended. Instead, Dunn’s contract was not renewed. In other words, she was out of a job.

“What happened was devastating to me,” Erickson said. “It was like having your parents taken away from you, having your world turned upside down. I started not knowing who to trust and then to not trusting anybody.”

Erickson and another Purdue sophomore, 6-foot-6 center Michele VanGorp, had become fast friends and roommates and both spent hours crying and trying to make sense of things.

VanGorp and Erickson were angry not only at the loss of Dunn but also at Purdue athletic officials’ refusal to give them a reason. “There was no reason to fire her at Purdue,” VanGorp said. “They didn’t tell us anything at first and then they gave us oddball answers.” Erickson said that even now, “to me, the whole situation was shady.”

The day she was fired, Dunn cleaned out her desk and left. The university said, and still says, that the parting was mutual. Dunn ended up as coach of the Portland franchise of the recently deceased ABL.

Thursday at the San Jose Arena, tears fell from Dunn’s eyes as she watched Erickson and VanGorp practice with Duke, which is coached by one of Dunn’s former assistants.

“This is very emotional for me,” Dunn said. “All the things I felt would happen for these girls is happening and it’s very rewarding for me to see them.”

Erickson still gets emotional when she speaks of Dunn. “She was like my mother,” Erickson said. “She was somebody I felt comfortable with, could talk to, could grow under and trust. Trust was the most important thing and trust is what I lost.”

Pepperdine Coach Mark Trakh, who was Erickson’s coach at Brea Olinda, said that “the whole business was very, very hard on Nicole. To get no explanation from the university, you have these 18-, 19-year-old girls halfway across the country from home and to not even give them an explanation. I’ll tell you this, that whole business with Purdue opened Nicole’s eyes to the whole deal of basketball as a business.”

When Dunn left, Erickson and VanGorp decided they would transfer and that they were a package deal. Tennessee wanted VanGorp but not Erickson, so Tennessee was off the list. Eventually, Erickson and VanGorp visited Florida and Duke and then chose Duke, Erickson said, “because Coach Dunn told us Coach Goestenkors was a person we could trust.”

Then came the NCAA-mandated sit-out year.

“That was the next hardest thing I’ve dealt with, after losing Coach Dunn,” Erickson said. “To be out there in practice every day, working hard, working hard, then seeing your teammates in games and not being able to help them. Wow. That was almost impossible.”

This is a wrong-headed NCAA rule. A school can dispose of a coach or a coach can leave for another job. The student-athlete is punished, in either situation, if he or she chooses to transfer. Even if the new coach were to bring in a new style of basketball. Even if the player has lost all trust in the school’s officials.

It is not as if Purdue’s program fell to pieces. Nell Fortner replaced Dunn, and Fortner did such a good job that she was hired as USA Basketball’s national coach and will be coaching the 2000 Olympic team. Carolyn Peck, the coach now, is leaving at the end of this season to be coach and general manager of the new WNBA franchise in Orlando.

And the Boilermakers are here as the No. 1-ranked team in the country. Obviously, though, this has become a happy ending for Erickson.

Erickson scored 17 points Monday in Duke’s upset of three-time defending champion Tennessee and then called Trakh to say that “this was the happiest moment of my life.”

She and VanGorp are the cornerstones of Duke’s first women’s Final Four appearance. Plus, there’s this Twilight Zone thing that Erickson has in her head.

“This is the truth,” Erickson said. “Since I’ve come to Duke I’ve had this feeling where I knew my dream would come true, that I would get to the Final Four and that we would win. But that’s not all. I’ve just had this feeling all along that we would beat Purdue to win it all. Honestly, I’ve told people this.”

So there it is. After Duke plays Georgia Saturday, Purdue will meet Louisiana Tech.

“People ask me if I care who we’d play if we get to the final,” Erickson said. “I say no, I don’t care. But then I say that I know it will be Purdue. I just know it.”

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com