GREEN AGGERS

Give him the slightest chance and Steve Aggers will trumpet the tradition of Loyola Marymount men’s basketball, even though its glory period a decade ago was as brief as it was brilliant.

Inevitably, any conversation with Aggers leads to his wanting to “restore the roar” of the program. When he was hired last April, the four West Coast Conference championships and that miracle 1990 NCAA tournament run were a distant memory.

Imagine Aggers’ surprise when he found the four WCC trophies stashed away in a closet.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Aggers said. “The first thing I did was take them to get polished up.”

The program also badly needed polish. There had been an 18-victory season in 1995-96, but since then, Loyola Marymount had been on a firm path to oblivion. Last season was a 2-26 disaster that included no conference victories and no wins over Division I opposition. The Lions ranked 316th in the RPI out of 318 teams.

Worst of all, they were barely a team. Charles Bradley, the deposed coach, had stopped conducting practices before the season ended. Loyola had lost 12 games by 20 or more points.

“It was bad,” forward Elton Mashack said. “Worse than you can imagine.”

The 50-year-old Aggers was called in to dig Loyola out of the rubble. As the Lions head into tonight’s home game against rival Pepperdine, they are 5-10 overall and 1-1 in conference play.

In the won-lost columns, these are small strides. In terms of attitude and competitiveness, however, the Lions are taking giant steps, having played teams close in nearly every game.

Mostly the Lions, largely a collection of transfers, have taken to Aggers and his no-nonsense style. They play defense with effort that hasn’t been seen in recent seasons.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“Obviously, Steve has done a great job of turning this into a [situation] in which you can win ballgames here,” Santa Clara Coach Dick Davey said. “People who come in here are going to have to play to win.”

Above all, there is hope. Mashack, who was overweight and erratic in his first three seasons under Bradley, is slimmed down and playing the best basketball of his college career.

“I really think he’s going to turn this around,” Mashack said. “Just seeing how he came in impressed me. He started with the basics, just teaching us how to play basketball. He has a basis for everything he says.

“I wish I could be here when he does turn it around.”

Tonight’s game is fraught with overtones. Aggers was a Pepperdine assistant for four years during which the Waves went to the

NCAA tournament three times, the National Invitation Tournament once, and turned out several good players, among them NBA veteran Doug Christie of the Sacramento Kings.

Aggers has fond memories of those days but there is also a part of him that wonders why he isn’t still coaching at Pepperdine. After Tom Asbury, who had coached the Waves to that success, left for Kansas State, Aggers believed he was ready to fulfill his dream of being a Division I head coach.

The finalists were Aggers and Tony Fuller, a former star guard at Pepperdine and a one-time UCLA assistant who was San Diego State’s coach.

Wayne Wright, then-athletic director at Pepperdine, chose Fuller. A stunned Aggers left to join Asbury in Manhattan, Kan.

“I really couldn’t believe he didn’t get the job,” Asbury said. “He was a large part of what we accomplished at Pepperdine.”

Aggers took the rejection personally.

“He was disappointed,” said David Campbell, another Asbury assistant who joined Aggers’ staff this season. “We had some great years there. Steve was more than qualified for that job and for whatever reason, they didn’t choose him.

“He took it kind of hard at first. That was a major program.”

Aggers doesn’t deny there were hurt feelings he had to get over.

“In this business, you put your heart, blood, sweat and tears into your job and I thought that . . . I deserved the opportunity to be the head coach,” he said. “The athletic director wanted to go in a different direction and you have to live with that. I was obviously hurt and disappointed but that’s part of the business. You’re not going to hit a home run every time. You’re going to strike out some. I would have loved to stay there.”

In hindsight, Aggers could easily criticize the decision. Now an assistant at Stanford, Fuller mysteriously resigned hours before a game midway through his second season, citing personal reasons.

But Aggers won’t.

“I never look back,” he said. “I don’t dwell on what’s happened in the past. It wasn’t meant to be. I moved forward.”

After a season at Kansas State, Aggers surprised coaching friends by taking the top job at Eastern Washington. That meant a pay cut, but he was a head coach.

“He really wanted to prove himself,” said Asbury, who has known Aggers since both were assistants at Wyoming in 1978. “There weren’t many opportunities [at the time] and that was one he felt he had to take, even though he had to take a pay cut.”

Eastern Washington was one of the worst programs in Division I, having won only eight Big Sky Conference games in four years.

In Aggers’ first season, Eastern Washington went 3-23. But by Year 5, the Eagles had won their first regular-season Big Sky title and finished 15-11.

Why leave, particularly for another downtrodden program?

Those around the coach say he did as much as he could at the campus in remote Cheney, Wash. Asbury said coaching there “is the toughest job in the Big Sky.”

Still, conventional wisdom said wait it out until a better program came calling. Aggers, however, remembered Bo Kimble and Hank Gathers turning LMU into a college showcase.

“I had some coaching friends who questioned me, yet I thought it was a great opportunity,” Aggers said. “To coach in a great league like the West Coast Conference . . . this program proved in the late ‘80s that it can be successful.

“With [Paul] Westhead, [Jeff] Fryer, Kimble, Gathers, Corey Gaines and those guys, they proved that we can be successful and get to the NCAA tournament, so I look at all those things as huge positives.”

It was Aggers’ masterful job at Eastern Washington that caught the eye of Loyola Athletic Director Bill Husak.

“I felt like we needed somebody who could teach the game,” said Husak, who gave Aggers a five-year contract. “It seemed as if our team had lost its fundamentals. And Steve has been down this road. He’s a little older and he has some maturity that maybe some other coaches don’t have.

“We’re in this for the long run. We want to build a strong foundation. I don’t want this to be a house of cards.”

Right now, the Lions are trying to develop something to build on. They lack overall talent and the bench is so thin, two walk-ons play extensively, largely out of necessity.

Aggers knows he has to recruit in talent rich Southern California, but that means battling Pepperdine, Long Beach State, Cal State Northridge and other area schools for the players that UCLA and USC hasn’t already grabbed.

“Steve’s a pit bull,” said assistant coach Brian Priebe, who has been with Aggers the last five years. “It’s not his nature to sit back and let things take their course.”

The wins haven’t come as quickly as Aggers had hoped but his enthusiasm hasn’t dimmed. He arrives with his staff before 7 a.m. most days.

And despite the setbacks, he tells you how much he loves this. It is the fulfillment of a dream the native of Laramie, Wyo., has nurtured through stops at Mid-Plains Community College and Wayne State College in Nebraska and the College of Great Falls in Montana.

Now Aggers is ready to put down roots.

“I’d love for this to be my last job,” he said. “You never say never in this business, but I envision being here for a long time.”