Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Pima can cite successes, even as JC football in Arizona is obliterated

Long-time junior college national power Arizona Western College eliminated its football program last week, leaving Thatcher-based Eastern Arizona College as the only JC football team in this state.

A year ago the Western States Football League had seven Arizona schools. Now, there’s one — maybe.

EAC last week held a community forum to discuss the future of its football program, which has a centurylong tradition in Thatcher. The numbers aren’t good: EAC spends $978,000 on its football program and realizes about $475,000 in revenue.

Pima College’s outgoing athletic director, Edgar Soto — promoted to vice president at PCC’s Desert Vista campus — was familiar with such numbers long before EAC made them public. Soto was president of the WSFL a year ago and witnessed the entire organization come tumbling down.

“I told the Maricopa County people that if they cut football at their four schools, the domino effect would get the rest of us,” Soto said last week.

EAC bravely announced a schedule for 2019, which includes games with two Texas JCs and others in Utah and New Mexico, and games against “prep schools” in Colorado, Phoenix and Nevada. It’s not good.

It plans to spend about $100,000 on travel, but sometimes that’s misleading in JC sports.

Soto budgeted about $200,000 for travel at Pima College but because the Aztecs have grown to be one of the nation’s leading junior college athletic programs, that number multiplied when teams reach the NJCAA finals, as Pima teams have done 11 times dating to 2011.

That $200,000 very quickly became $350,000 when PCC’s men’s soccer and men’s basketball teams reached the NJCAA finals in each of the last two years.

Somehow, Soto and PCC executive assistant AD Jerry Stitt were able to balance the books and prepare a sound foundation for the school’s new AD, Jim Monaco.

“The perception might be that Jim is walking into a situation that is a mess,” said Soto. “But that’s not the case. We don’t need someone to ‘save the day.’ We’ve built layers of success.”

Over the last two years, Soto and Stitt have worked to create a modern financial model for PCC’s head coaches. In the school’s first 40 years, Pima coaches were part-time employees, with none paid more than about $12,000 per year, if that.

But in the last few years, PCC has made women’s basketball coach Todd Holthaus and men’s soccer coach Dave Cosgrove full-time employees. In the new fiscal year, men’s basketball coach Brian Peabody and women’s soccer coach Kendra Veliz will be paid full-time salaries, probably in the neighborhood of $55,000 annually. The master plan is to add PCC baseball and softball coaches to the FTE list by 2020 or thereabouts.

Soto also acted to make sure golf and tennis were not eliminated, as had been mentioned as a possibility when PCC’s football program was dropped in June.

Eliminating Pima football was a negative headline that didn’t go down easily. But in retrospect, it’s no wonder junior college football in America has diminished so broadly. Do you realize there are only seven JC football teams in Texas? And now one in Arizona, one in Utah, one in Colorado and one in New Mexico?

How do you properly house and feed 100 football players? Some PCC football players were sleeping six to an apartment.

That’s because the support system of football is too expensive for most junior college budgets. There aren’t enough financial resources for support staff and risk-management issues, or for the behavioral, academic, financial and medical/training components that come with a 100-member football team.

As Soto leaves after a successful 10-year run as AD, Pima will go forward with about 250 student-athletes, 15 sports, a manageable budget and a record for its greatest on-field success in school history.

The first month of Pac-12 basketball was such that its four “shining moments” weren’t exactly successes. Here’s the league’s top four outcomes of the month:

• Arizona State 72, Mississippi State 67
• Oregon 80, Syracuse 65
• Gonzaga 81, Washington 79
• Kansas 90, Stanford 84

There has yet to be a resounding victory for the entire conference, and part of that is because, except for Washington and Stanford, Pac-12 teams haven’t dipped their toes into the Big Boys pool yet.

Before conference play begins in January, the Pac-12 will be engaged in just one game of national attention: Kansas at ASU on Dec. 22. You might argue that Utah’s trip to Kentucky and the Utes’ Dec. 29 home game against Nevada are big-game worthy, but Utah has been a major disappointment, losing to Northwestern and Hawaii and getting blown out Saturday by an ordinary BYU team.

Gonzaga and Nevada rule basketball in the western precincts, a rarity that can be counted on one hand. Since the Pac-10 was formed in 1978, multiple Western teams outside the conference have been ranked ahead of Pac-10/12 teams in the final AP poll just six times:

• 2012-13: 1, Gonzaga; 10, New Mexico
• 2011-12: 21, New Mexico; 22 San Diego State; 23, UNLV; 24, Saint Mary’s
• 2010-11: 6, San Diego State; 10, BYU.
• 2009-10: 10, New Mexico; 17, BYU; 22, Gonzaga
• 1985-86: 11, UNLV; 20, UTEP
• 1983-84: 9, UTEP; 13, UNLV

This looks to be the seventh year the Pac-12 will be outranked in its own backyard.

Long before Larry Scott became commissioner of the Pac-12, his management tactics were criticized.

In 2007, Scott and prominent American sports attorney Donald Dell — who represented tennis icons Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl and Arthur Ashe — clashed over Scott’s geographical changes on the WTA and ATP tours.

“With Larry, it is all about the money,” Dell told Sports Business Journal in 2007. “I don’t think he cares much about the American circuit. If you look where he put the championships, there is no denying it.”

Dell was upset Scott moved traditional USTA and American-based tournaments to places such as Turkey, Spain and Dubai.

Dell told the Sports Business Journal that Scott took a cut of all WTA deals as part of an incentive compensation plan that saw him earn more than $1 million in 2007, a structure, Dell said, that led some to question Scott’s motives in business deals.

Scott earned $69,700 as a pro tennis player in the 1980s, often playing doubles with former Tucson High standout Jim Grabb. How good was Scott? He won a first-round match at Wimbledon in 1987.

Tucsonan Krystal Quihuis won the Arizona Women’s Open last week in Phoenix, shooting rounds of 70-69-66 (or 11 under par) to earn $5,500. Quihuis, a three-year starter at Arizona and two-time state champion at Salpointe Catholic, struggled in her 2018 debut on the LPGA’s Symetra Tour, earning $12,732 and finishing 72nd on the money list. Among those Quihuis beat at the Arizona championship was ex-UA teammate Gigi Stoll, who finished 11th overall to earn $575. If Stoll elects to take the money, she will forfeit her final semester of eligibility at Arizona; Stoll was a key piece of the UA’s 2018 NCAA championship, winning playoff matches against favored golfers from Stanford and UCLA to help the Wildcats into a championship showdown against Alabama.

I can’t imagine anyone busier in the basketball season than Pueblo High School girls coach Izzy Galindo. Having established himself as one of the better basketball coaches in the state, Galindo has coached the Warriors to an 89-12 record the last 3½ seasons. He works full time for the Tucson Parks and Recreation department and also squeezes in time to watch his son, Ismael Galindo, play for Pueblo’s boys basketball team. Unfortunately, the Pueblo boys and girls team routinely play opposite schedules; when Pueblo’s boys play at Sabino, for example, the PHS girls team plays at home against Sabino. One of the leading girls basketball players in Arizona is Pueblo senior Summer Fox, who is averaging 19.6 points so far this season, third of all Tucson girls players. Fox has scored 941 points in her Pueblo career and almost had a triple-double last week in a 22-point, nine-steal, eight-assist game against Casa Grande Vista Grande. Typical of the success of Galindo’s program, Fox has been widely recruited and on Wednesday afternoon at the Pueblo library will sign a letter of intent to play basketball at Black Hills State, a NCAA Division II team in South Dakota. A four-year scholarship like that can be worth as much as $100,000.

Three things to keep in mind this week in Tucson sports:

1. The Baylor-Arizona basketball game Saturday at McKale Center tips off at 9 p.m. Groan.

2. Former Arizona All-Pac-10 infielder Chip Hale could become the manager of the Baltimore Orioles. Hale, who managed the Diamondbacks in 2015 and 2016, has interviewed for the vacancy.

3. The game of the week in boys high school basketball is likely to be unbeaten Salpointe Catholic with Evan Nelson and Majok Deng at 6-2 Cholla on Friday, 7 p.m. The emerging impact player in Tucson prep basketball is 6-foot-4-inch Cholla freshman Issac Garcia, who is averaging 22.5 points and 8.6 rebounds in his first month of high school basketball. Cholla knocked off powerful Catalina Foothills on Friday night.

Former Pima College offensive lineman Jordan Agasiva was selected to the All-Pac-12 first team last week. Agasiva plays for Utah; he was not recruited by Rich Rodriguez’s staff at Arizona. The UA last had a first-team All-Pac-12 offensive lineman in 2008, when Eben Britton earned the honor. Before that, it was 1998, with guard Yusuf Scott. Think the UA could’ve used Agasiva this year?

Pima County Sports Hall of Fame track/field official Dan Reynolds was invited to the epic 50th anniversary celebration of Team USA’s 1968 Olympic track and field team last week in Indianapolis. Reynolds, who has officiated at most of the U.S. Olympic Trials meets over the last 35 years, spent time with former Arizona All-American and Olympic silver medalist high jumper Ed Caruthers. The two plan to meet again in May when Arizona hosts the Pac-12 track and field championships at Drachman Stadium.

On Saturday, Salpointe Catholic junior running back Bijan Robinson deservedly won the 2018 Ed Doherty Award. The award committee suggests that it is the Arizona prep equivalent of the Heisman Trophy, and indeed the history of the Doherty award — created in 1987 — has gone to many of the top names in Tucson prep football history: Santa Rita receiver Eric Drage in 1988; Sahuaro tackle Mike Ciasca in 1989; Amphi running back Mario Bates in 1990; Mountain View running back Kevin Schmidtke in 1993; and Palo Verde athlete Adam Hall in 2008. Former Arizona standouts Scooter Sprotte (1994), Bobby Wade (1998) and Mike Bell (2000) were also Doherty Award winners.

After Pima College’s men’s soccer team won the NJCAA national championship a few weeks ago, the Aztecs were stumped in attempt to buy championship rings for every team member.

“We just couldn’t afford it,” said head coach Dave Cosgrove.

But that issue was solved when Tucson attorney Ted Schmidt, long one of the community’s leading soccer voices, offered to pay for the rings. They will be presented to the Aztecs in a ceremony at the PCC gymnasium Wednesday at 4:30 p.m.

“This offer by Ted and his law firm (Schmidt, Sethi & Akmajian) has gone beyond my expectations,” Cosgrove said. “If not for his company stepping up, I’m not sure we could have gotten the rings.”

And there’s more: PCC has learned that sophomore standout Hugo Kametani has been selected as the national player of the year by the United Soccer Coaches Association. Kametani, who won the national championship game with an overtime goal, will be the guest of honor at the annual All-American banquet in Chicago on Jan. 12.

Happy holidays, indeed.