Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Rick DeMont stepping away from 'mammoth' job with few regrets
- Updated
Star sports columnist Greg Hansen offers his opinion on recent sports news.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
At the 1973 World Championships in Yugoslavia, Rick DeMont became the first swimmer in history to break the 4-minute barrier in the 400 meter freestyle.
He was 17, a student at Terra Linda High School near San Francisco.
“I could’ve gone anywhere,” he said last week. “My final two choices were USC and Washington.”
Over the next 44 years, he became much more than a hotshot swimmer whose gold medal performance at the 1972 Munich Olympics remains one of the biggest controversies in swimming history.
After transferring from Washington to Arizona in 1976, DeMont became, in my opinion, the most accomplished assistant coach in Pac-12 history, in any sport. For the last three years, he was Arizona’s head coach, trying to pick up the pieces after the departure of two-time NCAA championship coach Frank Busch.
It was the most difficult challenge of DeMont’s swimming career.
“It’s a mammoth job,” he said. “It was little about swimming and little about coaching.”
Arizona’s men’s and women’s swimming roster had 57 athletes this year. DeMont had a staff of five. By comparison, Rich Rodriguez has 85 football players and a staff of 28.
“It took a lot out of me, for sure,” said DeMont. “Sometimes I wouldn’t have a day off in a month. My wife (Carrie) and I have become ships that pass in the night. I just ran out of gas.”
So at 61, after several visits to the human resources department at McKale Center, after searching his competitive soul, DeMont chose to retire.
“It’s not like I don’t like to work,” he said, “but I’ve got so much more I want to do. My two youngest daughters are only 9 and 12, and I have grandkids.
“I’ve got the means to retire. This is the right time.”
It was a grand idea that DeMont — who coached so many Olympic medalists, from Ryk Neethling to Roland Schoeman and Darian Townsend, that it’s hard to keep track — could restore Arizona to the level of its remarkable 20-year run under Busch.
But three years of poor recruiting under Busch’s successor, Eric Hansen, put Arizona in an imposing deficit.
Rick and Carrie DeMont operate the DeMont Family Swim School in Northwest Tucson. Moreover, he is an artist with a national reputation; his landscape watercolors are on display in a dozen Western art galleries.
“I’ve got another passion besides swimming and I’ve got so many paintings in my mind,” said DeMont.
“I’m eager to get started on the next part of my life. I’m humbled; there have been tears.”
The next move is up to Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke as the UA attempts to return as one of the NCAA’s top five swimming schools. There is a surplus of capable replacements:
- Augie Busch, Frank’s son, has turned Virginia into a top-10 swimming school.
- His younger brother, Sam, who coached at Arizona and Auburn, is now the No. 2 coach at Virginia.
- Whitney Hite is head coach at Wisconsin and the former head coach at Washington. Hite was a Frank Busch assistant at the UA.
- Coley Stickles, a 14-time UA All-American, runs a power California swim club and is also the top assistant at Indiana.
- Sergio Lopez, a former Busch assistant who ran the powerful Bolles swim academy in Florida, is the No. 2 coach at national contender Auburn.
DeMont was paid $143,000 at Arizona. Augie Busch’s listed salary on the Virginia website is $118,000, although outside income likely pushes that total well past $200,000.
Either way, losing a coach of DeMont’s ability and reputation doesn’t have to mean that Arizona’s once-thriving swimming program is hopeless.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
With a 13-man roster finally intact, Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller said that the uncertain weeks from the Final Four through the NBA Draft Combine are “a period of time that maybe is the most important time of the year in college basketball.”
It’s the “It’s All About Me” season of transfers, early-entrée candidates and more recently, those such as five-star prospect Emmanuel Akot leaving high school a year early in the newest category of college basketball confusion: “reclassification.”
Only now does sanity return to a college basketball program of Arizona’s stature.
Now it’s about getting Allonzo Trier, Rawle Alkins, DeAndre Ayton and their teammates to share the ball.
“Sacrifice is a big word here,” Miller said last week. “Everybody has to play for the bigger goal.”
Good luck with that.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Here are my Super Six selections for Tucson’s 2017 high school baseball season:
• George Arias Jr., Tucson High. In a year that Tucson lacked star-level pitching depth, the Badgers’ junior stood out, striking out 70 in 48 innings with a 2.16 ERA. He has committed to play at Arizona.
• Nick Gonzales, Cienega. The Bobcats won 23 games and Gonzales was the triggerman, hitting .543 with 38 RBIs and 16 extra-base hits.
• Tyler Wiltshire, Sabino. Under new coach Mark Chandler, Wiltshire emerged as a top prospect, hitting .482 as a junior shortstop and going 5-3 as a pitcher.
• Daniel Durazo, Salpointe Catholic. In the Lancers’ race to the 4A state championship game, Durazo, a junior, hit .376 as the No. 3 hitter in coach Danny Preble’s lineup.
• Efrian Cerrantes, Salpointe Catholic. The Lancers’ top everyday hitter, .415 for the year, had 26 RBI in the cleanup spot.
• Andres Holguin, Flowing Wells. Another in a strong Tucson junior class, Holguin hit .418 as a top defensive catcher.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Doug Pfaff earned his way into UA football history in 1989 when he kicked game-winning field goals in the last minute to beat No. 3 Oklahoma 6-3 and No. 11 Washington 20-17. The transfer from El Camino College in California was outstanding at Arizona; he made 26 of 36 field goal attempts and was 42-for-42 on extra points. Last week, he and his wife, Christina, posed for a graduation picture in Tyler, Texas, with their son, Blake Pfaff, who will join Arizona’s football team in July. Blake is a safety. All three were wearing Arizona gear. Doug is now a health care manager in Texas.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Tucson Athlete of the Week: Amphitheater High School grad Jessica Williams finished second in the NAIA women’s golf championships Saturday in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Williams, a freshman at Prescott’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, shot rounds of 78-72-73 and lost the title by one stroke. A year ago, she finished second in the state finals while at Amphi. Williams is coached by ex-UA women’s golf coach Kim Haddow, who recruited Annika Sorenstam to Arizona 18 years ago.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Tucson High grad Alex Robles was selected to the All-Ohio Valley Conference baseball team for a second year last week. Robles, who was twice the OVC player of the week this year, hit .347 with 10 home runs and 47 RBIs. As a pitcher, he won six games and struck out 85 hitters in 73 innings.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Arizona won’t play basketball games at UCLA and USC in 2017-18, a trip that could be the most difficult weekend in college basketball. Trojans coach Andy Enfeld has a roster so good it’s likely to expect USC to win 30 games. The Pac-12’s rotating basketball schedule — each school misses one geographical twosome and a home series against two traveling partners each season — doesn’t always have a rhythm to it. Unfortunately, if the two-year cycles of “misses” continues UCLA and USC won’t play at McKale Center in 2018-19. Commissioner Larry Scott’s system isn’t easy to follow. Arizona last missed the Cal-Stanford trip in 2013 and then missed the UCLA-USC trip in 2015. It should be Arizona’s turn to miss the Bay Area weekend. Additionally, it wasn’t the best week for the Pac-12 commissioner: The former national-class tennis player at Harvard stages a ping-pong championship at the Pac-12 headquarters in San Francisco each year. He lets his hair down and plays (very competitively) with much younger staffers. This year Scott was eliminated in the semifinals.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
New UA president Robert C. Robbins attended the UA-Cal baseball game Friday night at Hi Corbett Field. During the job interview process, Robbins told UA officials he is something of a sports junkie, and can be expected to be a regular at McKale Center and other UA sports events. I would get Robbins to Hillenbrand Stadium ASAP. Over the last month, Mike Candrea’s team has staged exhilarating series against Oregon and Arizona State, and Friday’s super-regionals victory over Baylor might’ve been the most compelling UA sports event I attended all year. The last UA president to involve himself deeply in sports was John Schaefer, who was the force behind Arizona’s move from the WAC to the Pac-10.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Canyon del Oro High School grad Ryan Retz, who hit .345 with 12 home runs for the Tucson Saguaros last season, opened this year with the New Jersey Jackets of the Can-Am Independent baseball league. Retz, who was an all-Big South player at High Point University, was the Star’s 2009 All-Southern Arizona Player of the Year. Baseball is in his blood; his father, Tucson businessman Bobby Retz, was on Pima College’s first NJCAA World Series baseball team under Rich Alday and later played at UTEP and was drafted by the Houston Astros in 1983. Bobby Retz was the first player honored on CDO’s “Wall of Fame” at the school’s baseball facility.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Rincon High grad and former Pima College basketball player Lance LaVetter spent 12 years on Lorenzo Romar’s basketball staff at Washington. LaVetter left three years ago to be an assistant coach at Seattle University, adding to a coaching career in which LaVetter coached at Portland, St. Louis and New Mexico State. LaVetter recently accepted a position as director of operations for the San Diego Toreros. His father, Roland LaVetter, coached Pueblo High School to back-to-back state championships in 1977 and 1978.
- Greg Hansen
- Updated
Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne fired first-year baseball coach Greg Goff last week. Goff, whose team went 19-34, was in the first year of a five-year contract. It cost Alabama $1.06 million to fire Goff, who was paid $450,000 this year.
It doesn’t take any time to connect the dots: Byrne hired UA coach Jay Johnson away from Nevada two years ago and last year doubled his salary, to $335,000. When Byrne left Kentucky to become the AD at Mississippi State, he hired Kentucky baseball coach John Cohen.
There’s not much mystery here. Byrne considers Johnson one of the top hires of his career. Given Alabama’s almost bottomless financial resources, he could offer Johnson more than double his Arizona salary to move to Tuscaloosa.
Arizona’s baseball tradition is far superior to Alabama’s, but a year ago, when the Crimson Tide was 5-19 in the SEC, it drew 11,500 for a three-game series against Florida. The potential is there.
If Byrne wants Johnson to be the coach to realize the Crimson Tide’s baseball potential, there’s almost nothing economically Arizona can do to stop it.
- Greg Hansen
At the 1973 World Championships in Yugoslavia, Rick DeMont became the first swimmer in history to break the 4-minute barrier in the 400 meter freestyle.
He was 17, a student at Terra Linda High School near San Francisco.
“I could’ve gone anywhere,” he said last week. “My final two choices were USC and Washington.”
Over the next 44 years, he became much more than a hotshot swimmer whose gold medal performance at the 1972 Munich Olympics remains one of the biggest controversies in swimming history.
After transferring from Washington to Arizona in 1976, DeMont became, in my opinion, the most accomplished assistant coach in Pac-12 history, in any sport. For the last three years, he was Arizona’s head coach, trying to pick up the pieces after the departure of two-time NCAA championship coach Frank Busch.
It was the most difficult challenge of DeMont’s swimming career.
“It’s a mammoth job,” he said. “It was little about swimming and little about coaching.”
Arizona’s men’s and women’s swimming roster had 57 athletes this year. DeMont had a staff of five. By comparison, Rich Rodriguez has 85 football players and a staff of 28.
“It took a lot out of me, for sure,” said DeMont. “Sometimes I wouldn’t have a day off in a month. My wife (Carrie) and I have become ships that pass in the night. I just ran out of gas.”
So at 61, after several visits to the human resources department at McKale Center, after searching his competitive soul, DeMont chose to retire.
“It’s not like I don’t like to work,” he said, “but I’ve got so much more I want to do. My two youngest daughters are only 9 and 12, and I have grandkids.
“I’ve got the means to retire. This is the right time.”
It was a grand idea that DeMont — who coached so many Olympic medalists, from Ryk Neethling to Roland Schoeman and Darian Townsend, that it’s hard to keep track — could restore Arizona to the level of its remarkable 20-year run under Busch.
But three years of poor recruiting under Busch’s successor, Eric Hansen, put Arizona in an imposing deficit.
Rick and Carrie DeMont operate the DeMont Family Swim School in Northwest Tucson. Moreover, he is an artist with a national reputation; his landscape watercolors are on display in a dozen Western art galleries.
“I’ve got another passion besides swimming and I’ve got so many paintings in my mind,” said DeMont.
“I’m eager to get started on the next part of my life. I’m humbled; there have been tears.”
The next move is up to Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke as the UA attempts to return as one of the NCAA’s top five swimming schools. There is a surplus of capable replacements:
- Augie Busch, Frank’s son, has turned Virginia into a top-10 swimming school.
- His younger brother, Sam, who coached at Arizona and Auburn, is now the No. 2 coach at Virginia.
- Whitney Hite is head coach at Wisconsin and the former head coach at Washington. Hite was a Frank Busch assistant at the UA.
- Coley Stickles, a 14-time UA All-American, runs a power California swim club and is also the top assistant at Indiana.
- Sergio Lopez, a former Busch assistant who ran the powerful Bolles swim academy in Florida, is the No. 2 coach at national contender Auburn.
DeMont was paid $143,000 at Arizona. Augie Busch’s listed salary on the Virginia website is $118,000, although outside income likely pushes that total well past $200,000.
Either way, losing a coach of DeMont’s ability and reputation doesn’t have to mean that Arizona’s once-thriving swimming program is hopeless.
- Greg Hansen
With a 13-man roster finally intact, Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller said that the uncertain weeks from the Final Four through the NBA Draft Combine are “a period of time that maybe is the most important time of the year in college basketball.”
It’s the “It’s All About Me” season of transfers, early-entrée candidates and more recently, those such as five-star prospect Emmanuel Akot leaving high school a year early in the newest category of college basketball confusion: “reclassification.”
Only now does sanity return to a college basketball program of Arizona’s stature.
Now it’s about getting Allonzo Trier, Rawle Alkins, DeAndre Ayton and their teammates to share the ball.
“Sacrifice is a big word here,” Miller said last week. “Everybody has to play for the bigger goal.”
Good luck with that.
- Greg Hansen
Here are my Super Six selections for Tucson’s 2017 high school baseball season:
• George Arias Jr., Tucson High. In a year that Tucson lacked star-level pitching depth, the Badgers’ junior stood out, striking out 70 in 48 innings with a 2.16 ERA. He has committed to play at Arizona.
• Nick Gonzales, Cienega. The Bobcats won 23 games and Gonzales was the triggerman, hitting .543 with 38 RBIs and 16 extra-base hits.
• Tyler Wiltshire, Sabino. Under new coach Mark Chandler, Wiltshire emerged as a top prospect, hitting .482 as a junior shortstop and going 5-3 as a pitcher.
• Daniel Durazo, Salpointe Catholic. In the Lancers’ race to the 4A state championship game, Durazo, a junior, hit .376 as the No. 3 hitter in coach Danny Preble’s lineup.
• Efrian Cerrantes, Salpointe Catholic. The Lancers’ top everyday hitter, .415 for the year, had 26 RBI in the cleanup spot.
• Andres Holguin, Flowing Wells. Another in a strong Tucson junior class, Holguin hit .418 as a top defensive catcher.
- Greg Hansen
Doug Pfaff earned his way into UA football history in 1989 when he kicked game-winning field goals in the last minute to beat No. 3 Oklahoma 6-3 and No. 11 Washington 20-17. The transfer from El Camino College in California was outstanding at Arizona; he made 26 of 36 field goal attempts and was 42-for-42 on extra points. Last week, he and his wife, Christina, posed for a graduation picture in Tyler, Texas, with their son, Blake Pfaff, who will join Arizona’s football team in July. Blake is a safety. All three were wearing Arizona gear. Doug is now a health care manager in Texas.
- Greg Hansen
Tucson Athlete of the Week: Amphitheater High School grad Jessica Williams finished second in the NAIA women’s golf championships Saturday in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Williams, a freshman at Prescott’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, shot rounds of 78-72-73 and lost the title by one stroke. A year ago, she finished second in the state finals while at Amphi. Williams is coached by ex-UA women’s golf coach Kim Haddow, who recruited Annika Sorenstam to Arizona 18 years ago.
- Greg Hansen
Tucson High grad Alex Robles was selected to the All-Ohio Valley Conference baseball team for a second year last week. Robles, who was twice the OVC player of the week this year, hit .347 with 10 home runs and 47 RBIs. As a pitcher, he won six games and struck out 85 hitters in 73 innings.
- Greg Hansen
Arizona won’t play basketball games at UCLA and USC in 2017-18, a trip that could be the most difficult weekend in college basketball. Trojans coach Andy Enfeld has a roster so good it’s likely to expect USC to win 30 games. The Pac-12’s rotating basketball schedule — each school misses one geographical twosome and a home series against two traveling partners each season — doesn’t always have a rhythm to it. Unfortunately, if the two-year cycles of “misses” continues UCLA and USC won’t play at McKale Center in 2018-19. Commissioner Larry Scott’s system isn’t easy to follow. Arizona last missed the Cal-Stanford trip in 2013 and then missed the UCLA-USC trip in 2015. It should be Arizona’s turn to miss the Bay Area weekend. Additionally, it wasn’t the best week for the Pac-12 commissioner: The former national-class tennis player at Harvard stages a ping-pong championship at the Pac-12 headquarters in San Francisco each year. He lets his hair down and plays (very competitively) with much younger staffers. This year Scott was eliminated in the semifinals.
- Greg Hansen
New UA president Robert C. Robbins attended the UA-Cal baseball game Friday night at Hi Corbett Field. During the job interview process, Robbins told UA officials he is something of a sports junkie, and can be expected to be a regular at McKale Center and other UA sports events. I would get Robbins to Hillenbrand Stadium ASAP. Over the last month, Mike Candrea’s team has staged exhilarating series against Oregon and Arizona State, and Friday’s super-regionals victory over Baylor might’ve been the most compelling UA sports event I attended all year. The last UA president to involve himself deeply in sports was John Schaefer, who was the force behind Arizona’s move from the WAC to the Pac-10.
- Greg Hansen
Canyon del Oro High School grad Ryan Retz, who hit .345 with 12 home runs for the Tucson Saguaros last season, opened this year with the New Jersey Jackets of the Can-Am Independent baseball league. Retz, who was an all-Big South player at High Point University, was the Star’s 2009 All-Southern Arizona Player of the Year. Baseball is in his blood; his father, Tucson businessman Bobby Retz, was on Pima College’s first NJCAA World Series baseball team under Rich Alday and later played at UTEP and was drafted by the Houston Astros in 1983. Bobby Retz was the first player honored on CDO’s “Wall of Fame” at the school’s baseball facility.
- Greg Hansen
Rincon High grad and former Pima College basketball player Lance LaVetter spent 12 years on Lorenzo Romar’s basketball staff at Washington. LaVetter left three years ago to be an assistant coach at Seattle University, adding to a coaching career in which LaVetter coached at Portland, St. Louis and New Mexico State. LaVetter recently accepted a position as director of operations for the San Diego Toreros. His father, Roland LaVetter, coached Pueblo High School to back-to-back state championships in 1977 and 1978.
- Greg Hansen
Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne fired first-year baseball coach Greg Goff last week. Goff, whose team went 19-34, was in the first year of a five-year contract. It cost Alabama $1.06 million to fire Goff, who was paid $450,000 this year.
It doesn’t take any time to connect the dots: Byrne hired UA coach Jay Johnson away from Nevada two years ago and last year doubled his salary, to $335,000. When Byrne left Kentucky to become the AD at Mississippi State, he hired Kentucky baseball coach John Cohen.
There’s not much mystery here. Byrne considers Johnson one of the top hires of his career. Given Alabama’s almost bottomless financial resources, he could offer Johnson more than double his Arizona salary to move to Tuscaloosa.
Arizona’s baseball tradition is far superior to Alabama’s, but a year ago, when the Crimson Tide was 5-19 in the SEC, it drew 11,500 for a three-game series against Florida. The potential is there.
If Byrne wants Johnson to be the coach to realize the Crimson Tide’s baseball potential, there’s almost nothing economically Arizona can do to stop it.
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