Eastern Washington debuts veteran coach Dan Monson against CU Buffs – Boulder Daily Camera

On November 5, 2024By Pranco

Colorado will have some familiarity with Eastern Washington’s new head coach.

The rest of the Eagles will be completely unknown.

The CU men’s basketball team opens the 2024-2025 season Monday night with a home game against Eastern Washington at the CU Events Center (7 p.m., ESPN+). Both teams have revamped rosters, Eastern Washington even more so than the Buffs.

The Eagles won the Big Sky Conference regular-season crown last year before an upset in the league tournament, but former coach David Riley parlayed that success into his new job leading Washington State. Eastern Washington turned to veteran coach Dan Monson, best known for his time at Gonzaga, who also spent 17 years at Long Beach State, which Monson fired last spring despite leading Long Beach to the Big West tournament championship and the NCAA tournament led. .

Monson is the all-time winningest coach at Long Beach State (275) and owns 445 total Division I wins. Monson led Gonzaga to the 1999 Elite Eight with a staff that included CU assistant Bill Grier, who is about to begin his ninth season with the Buffs.

As has become typical in college basketball, Monson takes over with a completely revamped roster that doesn’t feature any of the top seven scorers or rebounders from last year’s Big Sky championship.

“Bill Grier and Dan Monson both coached together at Gonzaga. They know each other,” CU head coach Tad Boyle said. “Coach Monson is a great coach. He has won many games at the Division I level. So they will be ready. They will compete. They’ll show some things. We just have to be prepared for anything.

“At the beginning of the season you don’t know what they are going to do. So we have to be prepared for everything. Therefore, it probably won’t be perfect. We will have to adapt, we will have to adapt on the spot.”

CU debut

The Buffs’ three transfers — Elijah Malone, Trevor Baskin and Andrej Jakimovski — will almost certainly make their CU debuts against Eastern Washington. Buffs fans can also get a glimpse of the team’s three true freshmen (Sebastian Rancik, Felix Kossaras, Andrew Crawford), in addition to redshirt freshman Courtney Anderson, whose preseason was limited by a groin injury.

“This will be a work in progress,” Boyle said. “Again, we have a lot of depth on this team. I had individual meetings with all these guys (last week) and talked to each player about where I see them now and today. Where they are now and today may be completely different from where they will be in two weeks or a month. What I want freshmen to do is just come to work every day and learn and grow and get better. I don’t know how much they’ll play early. We’ll see.

“Now I’m going to try to play against ten guys, maybe eleven, on Monday. But we’ll see. Maybe I’ll get to eight.”

Local ties

Two staff members with close ties to Boulder work in Eastern Washington. Assistant coach Ben Beauchamp is a former standout at Monarch High School the 2014 BoCoPreps Boys Basketball Player of the Year. Another assistant is Will Turgeon, who has spent the past two years as a graduate assistant with the Buffs.

Remarkable

The Buffs’ most recent game against Eastern Washington was a 60-57 home victory on Dec. 8, 2021. Hammond, then a freshman, scored three points in 13 minutes off the bench. … Colorado is 86-35 all-time in season openers, with wins in the past eight in a row. … Jakimovski, a four-year player at Washington State, enters the season needing 145 points to reach the 1,000-point mark for his career. … One of several new transfer signings in Eastern Washington is guard Sam Stockton, the son of Hall of Famer John Stockton. Sam Stockton, a graduate transfer, spent the past four seasons at Division III Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho.