Published: July 13, 2007 10:46 pm            

VELAZCO: Unhappy marriage crumbles

Ball State needs to hit a home run with next hire

A few months ago, as the Ball State men’s basketball team was mired in another awful season, a Cardinal friend of mine and I were conversing via e-mail about whether or not Ronny Thompson was going to work out at Ball State.

I said Thompson picked a really bad time to come to Ball State if he wasn’t going to ingratiate himself to the fan base.

Fast forward to today and he’s gone. One 9-22 season is in the books and the chapter has closed on that disaster.

It took six seasons before the fan base was tired of previous coach Tim Buckley. Two decent seasons, three disappointingly mediocre seasons and one bad one were enough for Buckley to get the boot last spring.

As an unknown quantity coming from a long résumé of assistant positions, Thompson wasn’t heralded as a savior. Athletic director Tom Collins was sure he was a good hire. The fan base, still feisty from the last disaster, needed to be won over.

It wasn’t.

Thompson’s first order of business was to commit NCAA violations in which coaches oversaw offseason “voluntary” practices. Ball State’s next order of business was to keep that news mum for months. Thompson’s staff then repeated the same violations this offseason and got in NCAA trouble again.

A fat lot of good all that shady business did. Cheating is supposed to provide a benefit isn’t it? Even with coaches watching practices in the offseason, Thompson’s first and only team was as awful as in Buckley’s final year, but differently so. I thought I saw some signs of life on offense, but the team got failing grades for intensity and focus.

In the meantime, Thompson was busy winning enemies on campus and in Muncie. Honestly, I don’t have any direct knowledge of it. My contact with him was limited to hearing him bumble his way through radio interviews before BSU games. He came across as anything but a jerk in those audio clips. But a lot of people believed otherwise. A steady flow of unpleasant stories hit my ears from friends closer to the team than I was.

Someone was even stupid enough to leave a racist note for Thompson and his coaches in the basketball offices a few weeks ago. That sentiment doesn’t reflect the fandom at large (which currently seems lined up behind former coach Ray McCallum, who is also black, as their favorite candidate to be the next coach), but make no mistake, the frustration was spread wide.

At a time when Ball State needed to be winning back fans after Buckley’s tenure, Thompson was driving them away. Crowd support plummeted as the season drew to a close. I think that actually helped the Ball State women’s team.

When I went to see BSU’s women play Kentucky in the WNIT in March to do a story on Kokomo’s Audrey McDonald, I was shocked at the robust, energized crowd. It struck me that Ball State fans were desperate for someone to root for and had jumped from the men’s ship to the women’s.

The Cardinal women played with guts and passion. Seven members of the squad were from Indiana and the rest were all from neighboring Michigan and Ohio.

Contrast that with the men’s program. Thompson recruited six players to the squad for his first season and has another eight who are supposed to play for BSU this fall. All are from out of state.

I don’t have the space to write a full rundown of why it’s important for state schools to recruit home-grown products, but the BSU women provided the Cliff’s Notes. Besides my own bias in favor of a Hoosier hoopster, a kid from Indiana is more likely to be comfortable going to school locally and charged up about playing for that team. You can extend that to players from nearby states who grew up around schools in the same conference.

To ignore the state’s talent base is to ignore a wealth of talent from a hoops-mad state that a notable rival has ridden to success.

On Sunday, as the Thompson situation was coming to a head with online rumors hitting fever pitch, a couple high school friends came up to Kokomo to hang out at my house. We talked about Thompson situation and one friend seethed that nothing burns more than watching Butler lap Ball State. The Bulldogs train each new coach to replace the last and make use of abundant talent in the state.

Ball State fans are mad. They’ve got a taste for blood after helping hound two coaches out the door. Athletic director Collins would seem to be next on the block as the fan base has been unhappy with him for months.

So the next hire doesn’t only need to impress Collins, he needs to make fans and alumni happy by being likable and capable. And he has to be interested in talent from Indiana and the surrounding states.

If not, it’s going to be another bumpy ride.

No doubt about it.

Pedro Velazco, Ball State 1996, may be contacted by phone at (765) 454-8572 or by e-mail at pedro.velazco@kokomotribune.com

        

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