Ron Kantowski reads the writing on the wall for a UNLV women’s coach who deserves to stay

By Ron Kantowski

Friday, Feb. 22, 2008 | 2 a.m.

So I see where UNLV Athletic Director Mike Hamrick is trying to run off his women’s basketball coach.

OK, so he didn’t actually say that. He said he expects every UNLV team to compete for Mountain West Conference championships and the NCAA bids that go with them.

Every UNLV team except football, I guess.

But in terms of reading between the lines, you don’t have to be a fly on the wall of Cox Pavilion to know that Regina Miller’s head is being measured for the space between Hamrick’s not-so-cryptic comments about expectations and the failure to meet them.

I was going to say that their relationship reminds me of that Neil Diamond-Barbra Streisand duet. But then, that would suggest there actually was a time when they brought each other flowers and sang each other love songs.

Not these two.

Forget about hardly talking when they come through the door at the end of the day. If these two ever had a kind word to say about each other, the door would probably fall off its hinges.

Hamrick inherited Miller, and there wasn’t a darn thing he could do about it when she was winning. In other words, until recently.

Unlike her athletic director, one shouldn’t be so quick to forget that in the three years before Miller came onboard, the Lady Rebels finished 4-21, 4-23 and 4-23. Whereas Hamrick inherited Miller, she inherited a disaster. I’d rank the women’s hoops program when she took over just to the right of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Yet her first team finished 17-11. Damn the torpedoes. And the life preservers. Her second team won, too. So did the third. And the fourth. And the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth.

Last year the Lady Rebels finished 14-15. It was their first losing season under Miller. This year will be their second.

The Lady Rebels are rebuilding, but Miller didn’t call on Bob Vila. She called on a bunch of young players who either A) got hurt or B) can’t hit the broad side of Cox Pavilion with their jump shots. The Lady Rebels are 8-16.

That, apparently, is all the ammunition Hamrick needs to march Miller out to the courtyard at dawn with a blindfold. If you listen to those in both of their inner circles, it’s not a matter of if but when she gets the last cigarette.

So this is where I get to ask a dumb question. A couple of them, actually. In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter if the Lady Rebels finish 18-12 instead of 12-18? If a jump shot falls at Cox Pavilion, and only 614 are there to see it, did it really fall?

Does it really matter if the women’s tennis team wins, if the men’s swimming team can make it to the deep end of the pool, if the baseball team can hit a curveball or the cutoff man? Should winning at all costs, or even any cost, be a priority in the nonrevenue sports?

These days, they like to call nonrevenue sports “Olympic” sports. Last time I checked, they awarded only three medals at the Olympics. The rest get a great story to tell the grandkids.

So what’s more important at that Olympic sports level — winning the game, or how you play it?

I like the way Regina Miller plays it. I like the way Jim Reitz, the longtime UNLV swimming coach whose kids graduate with honors, plays it. I like the way Buddy Gouldsmith, the baseball coach, plays it.

I don’t know Kat Mertz, the women’s soccer coach, but I like the way she plays it. She even signed three local kids to scholarships last week. Imagine that, a UNLV coach talking a local kid into staying home.

If I were an athletic director, I would insist that my football team won and my basketball team won, because they are the only ones that count when it comes to balancing a budget. Then I would surround myself with good people. People like Regina Miller and Jim Reitz and Buddy Gouldsmith and Kat Mertz and Dwaine Knight and Mario Sanchez and Owen Hambrook and Kevin Cory and Lonni Alameda and Allison Keeley and Missy Ringler and anybody else in the athletic department I may have left out who returns my phone calls. I’d let them coach as long as they want.

Unfortunately for Regina Miller, I am not an athletic director. As for her colleagues, I would suggest they continue winning, because you never know when Mike Hamrick might be watching.