Fullerton hopes to avoid 30-year plan

OMAHA -- For five days, the Cal State Fullerton basketball team basked in the spotlight, the Titans attracting so much media attention in the buildup to their NCAA tournament appearance that even loquacious Coach Bob Burton sometimes ran out of words.

Now the trick will be to try to build on that success instead of letting it become a distant memory, which is what happened the last time the Titans made the NCAA tournament in 1978.

“Hopefully nobody has the mind-set that we’re the big thing in the Big West now and we can come back and relax,” junior guard Josh Akognon, the team’s scoring leader, said after Fullerton’s season-ending 71-56 loss to Wisconsin in a first-round game Thursday. “Hopefully, everybody comes back hungry and we can come back and get out of this first round.”

Getting out of the first round has been no easy task for Big West teams. Of the teams currently in the conference, only Pacific, which has first-round victories over Providence in 2004 and Pittsburgh in 2005, has won an NCAA tournament game in the last 18 seasons.

UC Santa Barbara in 1990 is the only other current Big West team that has won a first-round game since that 1978 Fullerton team that advanced to the Elite Eight.

“I hope we can change those kinds of things,” Burton said. “I hope it’s the case that at least we’ve put the program on the map now and now people are saying, ‘Geez, maybe some good things are going on over there.’ ”

A repeat for Fullerton will be difficult. The Titans will have Akognon back after he averaged 20.2 points and scored 31 Thursday, but they lose six seniors, including four starters.

Pacific will enter next season as the favorite, with every player returning from a team that finished a game out of first place.

Cal State Northridge and UC Santa Barbara should also be in the mix, though the Gauchos need to replace conference co-player of the year Alex Harris.

One thing the Big West has is some stability among its coaches. Four of the league’s nine coaches have been with their teams for at least 10 seasons and three others have been with their teams for at least five.

That’s not the case in the West Coast Conference, which has had five of its eight teams change coaches in the last year -- including Pepperdine and Loyola Marymount.

Pepperdine, which last made the NCAA tournament in 2002 and last won a game in 2000, has brought back Tom Asbury, the coach who led the Waves to NCAA tournament appearances in 1991, ’92 and ’94. He takes over a team that has gone 26-64 the last three seasons.

“Do we have challenges here in this program? Of course we do,” Asbury said at his introductory news conference last month. “We’re certainly going to do everything in our power to build this program back up to where it was.”

But the Waves are in flux. Former coach Vance Walberg abruptly resigned in the middle of the season and many of the players are still deciding whether they will come back to play for Asbury.

Loyola Marymount has its own problems. Coach Rodney Tention and the school parted ways March 12 after the Lions went 30-61 in his three seasons.

Nobody has officially even interviewed for that job yet, a school spokesman said, but a search team is formulating a list of candidates.

Among those who have been in contact with the school are former San Diego coach Brad Holland and Denver Nuggets assistant Mike Dunlap, the former coach at Division II Metro State who is a Loyola graduate and is a former USC assistant.

Other names of interest include Fullerton’s Burton, Northridge’s Bobby Braswell, USC assistant Gib Arnold and Washington assistant Cameron Dollar.

“One of my goals is to find someone who will bring the program not just back to respectability, but to prominence,” LMU Athletic Director Bill Husak said in a telephone interview Friday. “And with the quality of candidates that have shown interest, I’m fairly positive that we can do that.”

The Lions have not been to the NCAA tournament since their magical Bo Kimble-led and Hank Gathers-inspired run in 1990, and they have had only three winning records in the last 18 seasons, a span in which they’ve lost 20 or more games eight times.

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peter.yoon@latimes.com