Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Former Arizona Wildcat Matt Brase one step away from D League title
- Updated
Star sports columnist Greg Hansen offers his opinion on recent sports news.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
To get a job in the NBA, Matt Brase didn’t rely on his Arizona basketball lineage or a phone call from his grandfather, Lute Olson.
Brase sent a letter with a resume to every NBA owner, general manager and head coach.
Nothing.
Because this took place during the five-month NBA lockout of 2011, no one was hiring. After working as a graduate assistant at Grand Canyon, earning a master’s degree while helping former Arizona interim coach Russ Pennell, Brase appeared to be stalled.
Ultimately, working a network he developed at McKale Center, the “brother of a friend’s friend” told Brase about an internship with the Houston Rockets.
“I immediately called and emailed my resume,” Brase told me last week.
He talked to the assistant GM and the GM. Six weeks went by. Finally, the Rockets hired Brase as an intern in the scouting department.
It was the opportunity of a lifetime.
“I packed up everything and was on the road to Houston by Friday for my first day on Monday,” Brase remembers. “It was a job that I had never met anyone face to face within the organization.”
Six years later, Brase is coaching the Rio Grande Valley Vipers in the championship series of the NBA D League. You can’t miss him. During ESPNU telecasts, Brase folds his arms across his 6-foot 5-inch frame and stoically stalks the sideline, an uncanny resemblance to “Papa Lute.”
The Vipers will play the Raptors 905 in the best-of-three finals. Brase will be matched against Sabino High School grad Dan Tolzman, who has a dual role of GM of the Raptors 905 and director of player personnel for the Toronto Raptors. Tolzman, who graduated from Minnesota-Morris, has a story similar to Brase’s: He began as an intern in the Denver Nuggets media relations office in 2008. He worked his way through the NBA chain and has traveled the world scouting prospects for the Raptors and Nuggets.
Small world, huh?
Brase, who is only 34, graduated from Catalina Foothills High School and began his basketball odyssey at Central Arizona College.
“So basically, my break was getting my foot in the door as a minimum-wage intern and moving up within the organization by being lucky that certain positions became available when they did,” he said.
Brase began his climb up the Houston Rockets ladder when ex-Salpointe Catholic basketball player Jesse Mermuys, a former basketball operations assistant at Arizona, left Houston to become an assistant coach in Toronto.
Brase got Mermuys’ spot in Houston. Mermuys is now Luke Walton's assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers. One more Tucson connection: Brase’s assistant coach is ex-Wildcat Final Four center Joseph Blair.
The D League championship series will be played Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. All games will be broadcast on ESPNU.
Someone from Tucson will be cutting down the nets.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona’s basketball department made some financial news in the spring of 2007 when it paid Kevin O’Neill $375,000 to be Lute Olson’s assistant coach. At the time, O’Neill was believed to be the highest-paid assistant coach in college basketball history.
Now Arizona is paying ex-Washington coach Lorenzo Romar $400,000 to be Sean Miller‘s assistant, and the salary market for assistant coaches has gone past the O’Neill-Romar level.
Kentucky pays assistant coach Kenny Payne $775,000. Louisville’s Kenny Johnson has a $550,000 per-year contract.
Irony: After UCLA won the 1995 Final Four, the Bruins gave Romar a contract worth $110,000 per year, which made him the league’s highest-paid assistant at a time Arizona assistants were being paid $70,000.
There are almost no similarities between the fractious O’Neill of 2007 and affable Romar of 2017. O’Neill was hired to extend Olson’s career; Romar was hired to enhance Miller’s career.
Over the last 25 years, only three long-tenured Division I head coaches re-entered the game as an assistant: Purdue’s Gene Keady served on Steve Lavin‘s staff at St. John’s; New Mexico’s Gary Colson helped Lou Campanelli at Cal; and Utah’s Lynn Archilbald joined Bill Frieder‘s operation at Arizona State.
All three of those men — Campanelli, Frieder and Lavin — were soon fired. Don’t expect that to happen with the Romar/Miller enterprise.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona has won eight Pac-12 golf championships but getting No. 9 Monday through Wednesday at Sewailo Golf Club, the UA’s home course, might be too much to ask. Even though Laura Ianello’s club is ranked No. 13 nationally, five Pac-12 teams are ranked between Nos. 2-10. Arizona sophomore Haley Moore, who finished No. 2 in the NCAA finals last year, is viewed as one of the favorites to win the individual championship, but Stanford’s Andrea Lee and UCLA’s Lilla Vu are also strong contenders for NCAA Golfer of the Year.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Tucson’s Craig Curley, a former Pima College distance running All-American, had a strong finish in the Boston Marathon last week, 59th overall. Fellow Pima alumnus Abdi Abdirahman of Tucson was sixth overall, the highest placing ever at Boston for someone 40 or over. Abdirahman and his girlfriend, Diane Nukuri, who finished fifth in the women’s race in Boston, train together in Flagstaff. They met at the 2000 Olympics in Australia, but only recently have become a couple. She is the sister of ex-Arizona NCAA 800 meters champion Patrick Nduwimana.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona softball coach Mike Candrea has accepted recruiting commitments from girls as young as the eighth grade, and also from Tucson High ninth-grader Carlie Scupin. That’s now the nature of the game. Gridley Middle School sixth-grader Aissa Silva, a pitcher, has been chosen to USA Softball’s Future Elite team for 2017, repeating her selection last year. Silva already has strong ties to Candrea’s program: She takes pitching lessons from UA standout Danielle O’Toole.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
It has been “old home week” for Arizona’s baseball program at Hi Corbett Field. At Thursday’s UA-Utah game, ex-Wildcats Clark Crist of the Angels, Ben Diggins of the Angels and Scott Stanley of the Marlins, were scouting the Utes and Wildcats. UA draft-eligible juniors J.J. Matijevic and Jared Oliva both are projected among the top 120 picks in June’s draft. Jerry Kindall and his much-valued Arizona coaches, Jim Wing and Jerry Stitt, also were at Hi Corbett Field after spending time with Utah coaches Bill Kinneberg and Mike Crawford, both former Wildcat pitchers. Not only that, ex-UA first baseman J.T. Snow has been the analyst for Pac-12 Networks’ broadcasts of the series.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona baseball coach Jay Johnson got a significant recruiting commitment last week from Las Vegas Bishop Gorman catcher Austin Wells, who is the son of former Arizona pitcher Greg Wells. Austin initially committed to Stanford; he is hitting .475 for Bishop Gorman, the No.1-ranked team in Nevada. Greg is now the CFO for an investment firm in Las Vegas.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
New York Mets hitting coach Kevin Long, another ex-Wildcat baseball player, hosted the entire George Washington University softball team on the field at the Mets’ Citi Field on Friday. Long was teammates at Arizona with John Tejcek, whose daughter, Riley, is an infielder at George Washington. John is now a financial advisor in Indianapolis.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Sabino High and UA grad Mike Meyer, a pitcher in the St. Louis Cardinals chain after his Pac-10 days, is now the head coach of the Sioux Falls Canaries of the American Association. Last week he signed ex-Catalina High state championship pitcher Nicco Blank, who previously pitched in the Mets organization. Meyer has been coaching in the minor leagues since retiring from baseball eight years ago.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Two weeks ago I wrote that Catalina Foothills grad Harrison Jacobs was part of a historic Caltech baseball victory that broke a 29-year, 533-game losing streak in the Division III SCIAC. Last week, Harrison had three hits as Caltech won again, 13-12, over Whittier, its first season with two conference victories since 1988.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Pima College football coach Jim Monaco signed Desert View High School running back Alex Courtmanche, who gained 1,981 yards as the Jaguars had a breakout 8-3 season in 2016. Among the 26 players in Monaco’s recruiting class are seven prospects from Hawaii and two of Catalina Foothills’ leading players from an 11-3 state championship game team. Linebacker Brandon Smith, who made a team-high 107 tackles, and defensive back Blake Rashad, who made 61 tackles, both will play for the Aztecs. Foothills coach Jeff Scurran, who turns 70 this year, told me last week he will not retire, as had been speculated. After giving football clinics in Europe for five weeks this summer, Scurran will return for his fifth season at Foothills.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
The Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl begins a three-year window in which it is locked into the Mountain West and Sun Belt conferences. The game’s founder, Ali Farhang, who recently completed a deal to broadcast this year’s game on the CBS Sports Network, has some difficult choices to make. It’s possible that Air Force would agree to be an anchor “home team” for Tucson’s bowl game the next three seasons. The Falcons and their military connection are virtually a can’t-pass-up option. One good thing Farhang did with CBS was to negotiate an option to avoid conflict with Arizona basketball. The third Arizona Bowl will be played early in the afternoon on a Friday or Saturday on either Dec. 29 or Dec. 30, whatever date doesn’t correspond to Arizona’s likely debut for the Pac-12 season.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
About three weeks after its last spring practice, Arizona completed a somewhat irregular spring football season Saturday by staging Fan Appreciation Day at Arizona Stadium.
I walked into the stadium about 12:30, midway through the event, and there couldn’t have been more than 200 fans. Remember, this is a Power 5 Conference school in a metro area of more than 1 million people. Even notoriously fan-needy ASU drew 4,600 for its “Fan Fest” a week earlier.
A ticket bench set up by the entrance at Arizona Stadium, manned by three people Saturday, did virtually no business. Part of it is that Arizona’s home schedule doesn’t have a get-your-tickets-now appeal: NAU, Houston, Utah, Wazzu, Oregon State and UCLA.
Additionally, the UA football program has no real personality. There are no stars around which to build a marketing campaign, as UA basketball did last week when it sent an email blast about the return of Allonzo Trier.
Across the five months since beating ASU in the Territorial Cup, the “biggest” news created by the Arizona football program was that it scheduled a home game against FCS powerhouse North Dakota State in 2022.
Pretty. Darn. Sad.
To get a job in the NBA, Matt Brase didn’t rely on his Arizona basketball lineage or a phone call from his grandfather, Lute Olson.
Brase sent a letter with a resume to every NBA owner, general manager and head coach.
Nothing.
Because this took place during the five-month NBA lockout of 2011, no one was hiring. After working as a graduate assistant at Grand Canyon, earning a master’s degree while helping former Arizona interim coach Russ Pennell, Brase appeared to be stalled.
Ultimately, working a network he developed at McKale Center, the “brother of a friend’s friend” told Brase about an internship with the Houston Rockets.
“I immediately called and emailed my resume,” Brase told me last week.
He talked to the assistant GM and the GM. Six weeks went by. Finally, the Rockets hired Brase as an intern in the scouting department.
It was the opportunity of a lifetime.
“I packed up everything and was on the road to Houston by Friday for my first day on Monday,” Brase remembers. “It was a job that I had never met anyone face to face within the organization.”
Six years later, Brase is coaching the Rio Grande Valley Vipers in the championship series of the NBA D League. You can’t miss him. During ESPNU telecasts, Brase folds his arms across his 6-foot 5-inch frame and stoically stalks the sideline, an uncanny resemblance to “Papa Lute.”
The Vipers will play the Raptors 905 in the best-of-three finals. Brase will be matched against Sabino High School grad Dan Tolzman, who has a dual role of GM of the Raptors 905 and director of player personnel for the Toronto Raptors. Tolzman, who graduated from Minnesota-Morris, has a story similar to Brase’s: He began as an intern in the Denver Nuggets media relations office in 2008. He worked his way through the NBA chain and has traveled the world scouting prospects for the Raptors and Nuggets.
Small world, huh?
Brase, who is only 34, graduated from Catalina Foothills High School and began his basketball odyssey at Central Arizona College.
“So basically, my break was getting my foot in the door as a minimum-wage intern and moving up within the organization by being lucky that certain positions became available when they did,” he said.
Brase began his climb up the Houston Rockets ladder when ex-Salpointe Catholic basketball player Jesse Mermuys, a former basketball operations assistant at Arizona, left Houston to become an assistant coach in Toronto.
Brase got Mermuys’ spot in Houston. Mermuys is now Luke Walton's assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers. One more Tucson connection: Brase’s assistant coach is ex-Wildcat Final Four center Joseph Blair.
The D League championship series will be played Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. All games will be broadcast on ESPNU.
Someone from Tucson will be cutting down the nets.
Arizona’s basketball department made some financial news in the spring of 2007 when it paid Kevin O’Neill $375,000 to be Lute Olson’s assistant coach. At the time, O’Neill was believed to be the highest-paid assistant coach in college basketball history.
Now Arizona is paying ex-Washington coach Lorenzo Romar $400,000 to be Sean Miller‘s assistant, and the salary market for assistant coaches has gone past the O’Neill-Romar level.
Kentucky pays assistant coach Kenny Payne $775,000. Louisville’s Kenny Johnson has a $550,000 per-year contract.
Irony: After UCLA won the 1995 Final Four, the Bruins gave Romar a contract worth $110,000 per year, which made him the league’s highest-paid assistant at a time Arizona assistants were being paid $70,000.
There are almost no similarities between the fractious O’Neill of 2007 and affable Romar of 2017. O’Neill was hired to extend Olson’s career; Romar was hired to enhance Miller’s career.
Over the last 25 years, only three long-tenured Division I head coaches re-entered the game as an assistant: Purdue’s Gene Keady served on Steve Lavin‘s staff at St. John’s; New Mexico’s Gary Colson helped Lou Campanelli at Cal; and Utah’s Lynn Archilbald joined Bill Frieder‘s operation at Arizona State.
All three of those men — Campanelli, Frieder and Lavin — were soon fired. Don’t expect that to happen with the Romar/Miller enterprise.
Arizona has won eight Pac-12 golf championships but getting No. 9 Monday through Wednesday at Sewailo Golf Club, the UA’s home course, might be too much to ask. Even though Laura Ianello’s club is ranked No. 13 nationally, five Pac-12 teams are ranked between Nos. 2-10. Arizona sophomore Haley Moore, who finished No. 2 in the NCAA finals last year, is viewed as one of the favorites to win the individual championship, but Stanford’s Andrea Lee and UCLA’s Lilla Vu are also strong contenders for NCAA Golfer of the Year.
Tucson’s Craig Curley, a former Pima College distance running All-American, had a strong finish in the Boston Marathon last week, 59th overall. Fellow Pima alumnus Abdi Abdirahman of Tucson was sixth overall, the highest placing ever at Boston for someone 40 or over. Abdirahman and his girlfriend, Diane Nukuri, who finished fifth in the women’s race in Boston, train together in Flagstaff. They met at the 2000 Olympics in Australia, but only recently have become a couple. She is the sister of ex-Arizona NCAA 800 meters champion Patrick Nduwimana.
Arizona softball coach Mike Candrea has accepted recruiting commitments from girls as young as the eighth grade, and also from Tucson High ninth-grader Carlie Scupin. That’s now the nature of the game. Gridley Middle School sixth-grader Aissa Silva, a pitcher, has been chosen to USA Softball’s Future Elite team for 2017, repeating her selection last year. Silva already has strong ties to Candrea’s program: She takes pitching lessons from UA standout Danielle O’Toole.
It has been “old home week” for Arizona’s baseball program at Hi Corbett Field. At Thursday’s UA-Utah game, ex-Wildcats Clark Crist of the Angels, Ben Diggins of the Angels and Scott Stanley of the Marlins, were scouting the Utes and Wildcats. UA draft-eligible juniors J.J. Matijevic and Jared Oliva both are projected among the top 120 picks in June’s draft. Jerry Kindall and his much-valued Arizona coaches, Jim Wing and Jerry Stitt, also were at Hi Corbett Field after spending time with Utah coaches Bill Kinneberg and Mike Crawford, both former Wildcat pitchers. Not only that, ex-UA first baseman J.T. Snow has been the analyst for Pac-12 Networks’ broadcasts of the series.
Arizona baseball coach Jay Johnson got a significant recruiting commitment last week from Las Vegas Bishop Gorman catcher Austin Wells, who is the son of former Arizona pitcher Greg Wells. Austin initially committed to Stanford; he is hitting .475 for Bishop Gorman, the No.1-ranked team in Nevada. Greg is now the CFO for an investment firm in Las Vegas.
New York Mets hitting coach Kevin Long, another ex-Wildcat baseball player, hosted the entire George Washington University softball team on the field at the Mets’ Citi Field on Friday. Long was teammates at Arizona with John Tejcek, whose daughter, Riley, is an infielder at George Washington. John is now a financial advisor in Indianapolis.
Sabino High and UA grad Mike Meyer, a pitcher in the St. Louis Cardinals chain after his Pac-10 days, is now the head coach of the Sioux Falls Canaries of the American Association. Last week he signed ex-Catalina High state championship pitcher Nicco Blank, who previously pitched in the Mets organization. Meyer has been coaching in the minor leagues since retiring from baseball eight years ago.
Two weeks ago I wrote that Catalina Foothills grad Harrison Jacobs was part of a historic Caltech baseball victory that broke a 29-year, 533-game losing streak in the Division III SCIAC. Last week, Harrison had three hits as Caltech won again, 13-12, over Whittier, its first season with two conference victories since 1988.
Pima College football coach Jim Monaco signed Desert View High School running back Alex Courtmanche, who gained 1,981 yards as the Jaguars had a breakout 8-3 season in 2016. Among the 26 players in Monaco’s recruiting class are seven prospects from Hawaii and two of Catalina Foothills’ leading players from an 11-3 state championship game team. Linebacker Brandon Smith, who made a team-high 107 tackles, and defensive back Blake Rashad, who made 61 tackles, both will play for the Aztecs. Foothills coach Jeff Scurran, who turns 70 this year, told me last week he will not retire, as had been speculated. After giving football clinics in Europe for five weeks this summer, Scurran will return for his fifth season at Foothills.
The Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl begins a three-year window in which it is locked into the Mountain West and Sun Belt conferences. The game’s founder, Ali Farhang, who recently completed a deal to broadcast this year’s game on the CBS Sports Network, has some difficult choices to make. It’s possible that Air Force would agree to be an anchor “home team” for Tucson’s bowl game the next three seasons. The Falcons and their military connection are virtually a can’t-pass-up option. One good thing Farhang did with CBS was to negotiate an option to avoid conflict with Arizona basketball. The third Arizona Bowl will be played early in the afternoon on a Friday or Saturday on either Dec. 29 or Dec. 30, whatever date doesn’t correspond to Arizona’s likely debut for the Pac-12 season.
About three weeks after its last spring practice, Arizona completed a somewhat irregular spring football season Saturday by staging Fan Appreciation Day at Arizona Stadium.
I walked into the stadium about 12:30, midway through the event, and there couldn’t have been more than 200 fans. Remember, this is a Power 5 Conference school in a metro area of more than 1 million people. Even notoriously fan-needy ASU drew 4,600 for its “Fan Fest” a week earlier.
A ticket bench set up by the entrance at Arizona Stadium, manned by three people Saturday, did virtually no business. Part of it is that Arizona’s home schedule doesn’t have a get-your-tickets-now appeal: NAU, Houston, Utah, Wazzu, Oregon State and UCLA.
Additionally, the UA football program has no real personality. There are no stars around which to build a marketing campaign, as UA basketball did last week when it sent an email blast about the return of Allonzo Trier.
Across the five months since beating ASU in the Territorial Cup, the “biggest” news created by the Arizona football program was that it scheduled a home game against FCS powerhouse North Dakota State in 2022.
Pretty. Darn. Sad.
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