Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Brian Peabody has rebuilt Pima College's basketball program

Pima College’s breakthrough as an NJCAA men’s basketball power has some storybook twists that would make for a good fiction book.

But it’s all true.

When Brian Peabody coached the Aztecs to a third consecutive Region I championship Friday, it was easy to forget that he was forced out of the same job in the spring of 2004.

But that’s what happened when oafish PCC chancellor Roy Flores — long since dismissed from his job — told Peabody he could not recruit anyone except high school players from Southern Arizona.

So Peabody went off to coach college basketball at Western Carolina, and then returned to Tucson, leading Ironwood Ridge High School to the 2008 state championship.

A new PCC administration re-hired Peabody in 2013. I wondered what Peabody could’ve possibly been thinking. The Aztecs were so historically bad — 10-49 in two seasons, losing the last 18 games of 2012-13 — that it seemed like a career-ending job.

Until last week, the only PCC coach who had ever led the Aztecs to host the ACCAC/Region playoffs was Norm Patton, in 1980. Patton resigned the day after Pima was upset in those ’80 playoffs by Yavapai College.

Peabody’s second stint at Pima began ominously. He was suspended from the season opener, serving time for the previous coach, Gabriel Van Guse, who had been ejected from the final game of the 2011-12 season.

League rules dictated that PCC’s coach must sit out the next year’s opener. So Peabody was not allowed in the gymnasium when Pima opened the 2013-14 season. It was not an easy reconstruction job. Pima was swept by bottom-feeding Tohono O’odham in 2015.

Now Peabody’s teams have won 79 games the last three seasons, winning three region titles, averaging a cumulative 100.2 points per game, soaring into the NJCAA national championship tournament three years in succession.

And here’s the irony: Peabody’s long-ago order to recruit Tucson-only players has become the strength of the Aztecs. Empire High School’s Deion James and Tucson High’s Murphy Gershman became first-team NJCAA All-Americans. This year’s star point guard, Abram Carrasco of Cholla High, seems sure to be a first-team All-American when the awards are announced in a few weeks.

The backbone of Peabody’s 26-6 team includes Salpointe product Robert Wilson, Tucson High’s Jordan Robinson and Davonte Eason, and Ironwood Ridge’s Cole Gerken.

The Aztecs return to the NJCAA Divison II finals March 19-23 in Danville, Illinois. Last year they were five points shy of the national championship. This year, as Peabody has shown, anything is possible.

A year ago, the Pac-12 changed its rules for induction into the Hall of Honor and opened it to all sports. After 17 years of basketball-only honorees, it was clear that schools like Arizona State, Oregon, Washington State, Colorado and Stanford had run out of worthy Hall of Honor basketball candidates.

The UA’s first non-basketball honoree is 1980s shot put and discus All-American and national champion Meg Ritchie-Stone, who later became the school’s full-time strength and conditioning coach.

That’s a winning decision by the UA, which could’ve rubber-stamped a series of honorees like Terry Francona, Jennie Finch and Tedy Bruschi, but instead did its research and understood that Ritchie left as much of an imprint on UA sports as any of her peers.

Athletic director Cedric Dempsey and football coach Larry Smith hired Ritchie as the first female strength/conditioning coach in Division I football in 1985.

“Larry supported the hire because he said Meg could out-lift anyone on his football team,” former UA associate AD Bob Bockrath said last week. “Later, I hired her when I was the athletic director at Texas Tech. It was met with some apprehension, but she soon won everyone over there as well.

“Meg is an incredible athlete, talent and teacher. She is just flat-out good and I am personally thrilled to see her being inducted into the Hall of Honor.”

Ritchie-Stone will be honored Friday at the Pac-12 Tournament in Las Vegas.

Arizona sophomore point guard Aari McDonald, whose 24.9 scoring average has been surpassed only by two Pac-12 players the last decade — Washington All-American Kelsey Plum and Stanford All-American Chiney Ogwumike has a legitimate chance to make one of the AP’s three All-American teams. The only Wildcat to do so was UA coach Adia Barnes; she was chosen to the AP All-American third team in 1998. As Barnes and McDonald go forward, they’ve got a load of work to do to reach the NCAA Tournament, challenge for the Pac-12 title and break into the Top 25. But the Wildcats averaged 2,035 fans at McKale Center this year, the highest per-game total since 2,326 in 2011. With McDonald as a catalyst, I could see Arizona averaging 3,000 fans next year. Only Oregon (7,217), Oregon State (5,457), Stanford (3,079) and ASU (3,062) were at that level this season. One caution: moving up in Pac-12 women’s basketball is exceedingly difficult. It is much more competitive at the top than Pac-12 men’s basketball.

This year’s only chance to see the UA women’s defending NCAA championship golf team is Monday and Tuesday at the Arizona Invitational, held at Sewailo Golf Course. Laura Ianello’s Wildcats are loaded, one through five in the order, but No. 4 UCLA enters Monday’s competition with three players in the Golfweek top 10. UA senior Bianca Pagdanganan, hero of last year’s NCAA championship, spent last week in Australia, finishing fourth in the Queen Sirikit Cup at 3-under par.

Palo Verde High School grad Sydni Stallworth, a first-team NJCAA All-America guard at Pima College in 2017, was named to the All-GNAC team (honorable mention) last week. Stallworth is averaging 10 points per game for No. 5 Alaska Anchorage, 28-1 through Friday with a 21-game winning streak, bound for the NCAA Division II playoffs. Stallworth is leading the Great Northwest Athletic Conference with 49 percent on 3-point shots.

Tucson Conquistadores executive director Judy McDermott was hired in 1993, working as director of marketing. Now, a quarter-century later, McDermott and the Conquistadores have completed their fifth PGA Tour Champions Cologuard Classic, its best yet. “It was the most well-attended,” she said. “But they’ve all been good.” That’s par for pro golf in Tucson — they’ve all been good. The Conquistadores have made the 16th hole party-central, a double-decked compound to see and be seen. It will never be like the wild No. 16 hole at the Waste Management Open in Phoenix — with 20,000 loud fans — but if the Conquistadores actively market UA students and expand the seating area at No. 16, it could put younger blood at Tucson National, a demographic which is all it lacks. The Conquistadores took a step in that direction this year by hosting a Saturday night concert — LoCash, a six-figures-per-gig band — on the driving range. One of the younger Conquistadores is Mike Saffer, a former all-state football player at Sabino High, who went on to become an All-Pac-10 lineman at UCLA. Now market president of iHeart Radio Tucson, Saffer is among the Conquistadores who coordinated and executed the LoCash concert, which was a big success.

Canyon del Oro High grad Tyler Porter, son of former Arizona All-Pac-10 outfielder and Houston Astros/St. Louis Cardinals player Colin Porter, is starting at second base and batting fourth in the lineup for longtime baseball power Long Beach State. Porter eschewed offers from Arizona and ASU to play for the Dirtbags, and has found that college baseball is a difficult challenge. In its first 12 games, losing 11 times, Long Beach State played eight total games against No. 3 Florida, No. 10 Ole Miss, No. 16 Michigan and No. 23 TCU. Compare that to, say, Arizona State, which was 13-0 through Friday but had not played a Top 25 team. Pac-12 teams will soon face the fire; UCLA, Stanford and Oregon State are all ranked in the top 10.

As good as Arizona sophomore shot-putter Jordan Geist is — he was a Pac-12 champion in the shot put and discus as a freshman — he discovered Friday how difficult it will be to win an NCAA championship. Finishing fifth at the NCAA indoor shot put championships in Birmingham, Alabama, Geist threw the shot 66 feet 6ƒ inches. The winner was North Dakota State’s Payton Otterdahl, who threw 71-2¾. Geist threw 66-8 a year ago, finishing fifth in the NCAA outdoor finals; Otterdahl only threw 64-4 and finished 10th. Tough sport.

Another tough sport: Wrestling. Sunnyside High School grad Roman Bravo-Young, 182-0 as a Blue Devils wrestler with four state titles, was seeded No. 4 entering this weekend’s Big Ten championships for No. 1 Penn State. Bravo-Young went 17-2 in dual meets as a Nittany Lions freshman and outscored opponents 36-3 in dual meets yet is ranked No. 12 in the NCAA at 133 pounds. 

The light jail sentences to those involved in the basketball corruption trials suggest that former Arizona assistant coach Book Richardson will (a) get probation, (b) house arrest or (c) six to nine months in a detention center that doesn’t have bars or razor wire. So far, the punishment has been equal to the “crimes.” The relative short sentences didn’t meet the initial bold declarations of significant punishments. But there is another, more realistic way to look at it: Richardson lost his job, his income and his reputation. His future is murky. That’s a lot worse than six or nine months in a detention center.

MORE: Here's what latest federal sentencing could mean for Book Richardson, Arizona's Sean Miller

Oregon State last week became the first Pac-12 team in almost a decade to eliminate a sport. The Beavers shut down their women’s swimming program — they do not have men’s swimming — saying it would’ve cost about $20 million to renovate existing swimming facilities. Arizona spent about $15 million to re-do Hillenbrand Aquatic Center last year. That means the only Pac-12 schools with men’s and women’s swimming are Arizona, ASU, Cal, Stanford and USC. It makes you wonder about the future of broad-based, non-revenue programs at Arizona and ASU. The Arizona Republic last week reported that ASU has a $15 million facilities annual debt service and Arizona is at $7.6 million annually.

Tucson native and Salpointe Catholic High School and UA grad Jerry Carrillo was chosen the ACCAC men’s basketball coach of the year last week. His Cochise College Apaches were terrific, finishing 20-2 in the difficult ACCAC and going 26-5 overall. But the Apaches, minus their starting point guard, were stunned in the Region 1, Division I finals, losing to Eastern Arizona. Now they await an NCAA-type Selection Monday show that will pick 24 NJCAA teams for the final bracket. Bubble time.

I was sitting in a midtown restaurant for lunch last week when two vans full of softball players and coaches from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, parked, unloaded and ordered lunch.

A day earlier, I saw vans in a hotel parking lot unload baseball players from University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia after a day of baseball at the Kino Sports Complex.

Since the Diamondbacks, White Sox and Rockies left Tucson a decade ago, those who figure the economic impact of such things have wailed about the lost economic impact of spring training in Tucson.

I’m no fiscal genius, but I suspect that the ongoing Tucson Invitational Games — TIG, founded by Tucson businessman Jim Tiggas to help replace spring training income — are equal to or greater than spring training.

Last week, 22 college baseball teams and 24 college softball teams from all over the country were in Tucson for the TIG. Names? Minot State, Bemidji State, St. Cloud State, Wabash College, Briar Cliff University, Dakota Wesleyan and on and on.

On Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., there were 22 softball games played on the eight fields at Lincoln Park on the city’s east side.

Another 46 teams will replace that group of NCAA Division II, III, NAIA and junior college teams in Tucson this week.

You figure that each of those baseball/softball teams brings 20 players and a staff of five or six to Tucson for a week. That’s roughly 500 hotel room nights per week, more than 3,000 meals, ground transportation, entertainment and airfare.

It’s not a headline-driving enterprise, but it sure spends the same.