Two Rebels on the rise

It's one of his favorite stories, and Ron Ganulin tells it not so much for its entertainment value but to maintain some sort of perspective on the wacky world that is coaching Division I college basketball.

Ganulin had just completed his first season as an assistant to Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV. The Rebels had been bounced from the 1988 NCAA Tournament by Iowa and everyone was downcast.

As Ganulin was preparing to leave the arena, Tarkanian's wife Lois told him he better find some players for next season, and pronto. This for a program that had just completed a 28-6 season.

"That's when I knew what pressure was," he said.

So when Ganulin went 1-26 in his third year at St. Francis College, he was sweating it. But after having been to the top as a member of the UNLV staff from the 1990 national championship team, he knows all about perspective and expectations.

So does Jay Wright, who also spent two years as a UNLV assistant to Rollie Massimino and is now his own boss at Hofstra. He, too, has stories about perspective, and one of his favorites is about the UNLV mystique.

"I saw so much," Wright said. "To have the media around you every day, to deal with the intensity of the coverage, we never had that at Villanova.

"You look at the town, the tradition, the interest, it was great for someone who was a young coach."

The two former assistants now call their own shots, just a 35-minute drive away from each other in the New York metropolitan area. While both took their lumps early, Ganulin and Wright are closing in on what was another UNLV tradition for their up-and-coming programs -- a chance to keep playing in mid-March.

Hofstra, located just a 3-point shot away from the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, is 18-7 overall and in second place in the America East Conference. After going 10-18 and 9-18 his first two years with the Flying Dutchmen, Wright has turned it around.

Hofstra was 19-12 last season. This year, in addition to posting the impressive 18-7 mark, the Flying Dutchmen captured the ECAC Holiday Festival in late December, beating Georgia Tech and Pennsylvania on consecutive days at Madison Square Garden.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to Wright about his surprising team. And he was ready for them.

"That's where being at UNLV really helped," he said. "I knew how the media worked from being around it every day in Vegas. So when all the interview requests came, I was ready for it."

Ganulin, who left UNLV a year after the national championship season to take over the program on a campus consisting of an office building in downtown Brooklyn, has come a long way since that 1-26 season in 1994, the worst in school history. At the time, dealing with the media was the last thing on his mind. He was just trying to survive to coach another year.

Not only did Ganulin remain coach, he has the Terriers on track for their second straight winning season at 15-6, earning 1997 Northeast Conference Coach of the Year honors in the process.

He is also coaching the nation's leading scorer in 6-foot-2 senior guard Ray Minlend, who averages 24.9 points a game. Minlend, a transfer from Davidson, is described as a cross between former Rebels Larry Johnson and Greg Anthony.

"He can post up like Larry and he can drive into gaps and make plays like Greg could," Ganulin said of his star player who has St. Francis, a low-level Division I school, in the thick of the Northeast title chase.

If the Terriers can keep it going over the next two weeks, they have a legitimate shot to win the conference tournament at the end of the month. And with it would come the school's first NCAA appearance.

"That's the goal," Ganulin said. "But I'm happy with the way things are going. We're in the hunt. It's the deepest and most mentally tough team I've had."

Barry Rohrssen, UNLV's director of basketball operations and a former assistant to Ganulin at St. Francis, said the school is fortunate to have Ganulin at the helm.

"He deserves all the success in the world because he's a great person," Rohrssen, a SFC alumnus, said. "He has a passion for the game and he's a New York City guy -- he's a fighter.

"The years he took his lumps in the league, he was always courteous and diplomatic. Obviously, he's very mature in his thinking and he handles adversity very well."

Likewise, Wright, who was only 33 when he took the Hofstra job, learned to grow up quickly. He went 10-18 his first year. But Wright's bosses also were patient and they extended his contract.

That loyalty has been rewarded, as the Flying Dutchmen have posted back-to-back winning seasons and are almost a lock for postseason play.

"They've stuck with us," Wright said of the Hofstra administration. "It really makes you feel good for the players.

"When we got here, our RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) was 294 (out of 306). Now it's 88 (out of 310). We've come a long way."

Wright said it took a healthy dose of failure to learn how to succeed.

"Ironically, we were playing in the (1996) Holiday Festival and got beat by Georgia Tech and Manhattan," he said. "But we played really well and people were coming up to us and saying, 'Man, you guys are really good' and that gave me a good feeling inside.

"I knew we were close. Then we went 19-12 last year and now we're closing in on 20 wins. But I look back on two years ago as the key for us."

Wright never stopped believing. Neither did his staff, which includes Tom Pecora and Brett Gunning, who were on board with Wright under Massimino's regime, Pecora as the Rebels' administrative assistant, Gunning as head student manager. Together, they applied their knowledge from their short UNLV stint along with what they had learned at previous stops to get Hofstra flying right.

And while both Wright and Ganulin aren't in the spotlight of New York college hoops that is usually occupied by St. John's, they've both basked in it from their days in the desert.

"I loved my two years there," Wright said of his UNLV stay. "There were some tough times, but overall, it was a great experience. To be in the Thomas & Mack against Georgetown and to see the place packed and rockin', that was the best.

"Every summer, I feel like I'm home when I come to Vegas. And it's great to see the job Billy (Bayno) is doing with the team. I'm really happy to see them having success."

Ganulin, who also gets out to Las Vegas every summer, will never forget the success the Rebels enjoyed. More importantly, he'll never forget the friendships he made while at UNLV from 1987-90.

"I got to work with some great people," Ganulin said. "There was great camaraderie and I always remembered the aura, the interest in the team was amazing.

"It's like going from Broadway to Off-Off-Broadway. But you're still on the stage performing. We're the little engine that could."

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