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Eagles tough it out, find way home
EWU endures early road-heavy schedule, John Blanchette says.
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John Blanchette
The Spokesman-Review

Poise isn't just about the last two minutes of a basketball game, clinging to a three-point lead and slaloming through a trapping press.

It's also about not hightailing it for the ER to treat a paper cut, and about eschewing panic solutions to take the edge off overnight despair.

It's about just keeping on keeping on.

And now on to today's poise-ter children -- the Eastern Washington University Eagles, who just happen to be sitting atop the Big Sky Conference standings, not a basketball Everest but no speed bump, either.

Like the news that the national debt is growing like a shot putter on THG, Eastern's cool perch is no great bulletin. The Eagles have pulled a few shifts in first over the past several seasons and were among the preseason favorites again.

And then came the desperation of December.

When the clock struck 2004, the Eagles were 3-9 and seemingly an afterthought before they were a thought at all. They were overscheduled and underachieving -- the only good news being that the Big Sky lifeboat was being inflated off the bow and every other team in the league was bobbing in the same water.

Eastern got to it first.

"We're in it, anyway," said coach Ray Giacoletti, "though in this league it's weekend-to-weekend."

And this weekend, the Eagles can actually sample a rare treat: home games. Maybe you've heard of the concept.

Idaho State and Weber State visit Reese Court on Thursday and Saturday, just the sixth and seventh dates there this season. Montana State, just for comparison's sake, has already played 11 home games.

Giacoletti lists this as chapter one in a season full of hard lessons.

"I need to be smarter, probably," he admitted. "We don't need to play 10 of 13 non-conference games on the road."

Well, need and demand are two different things. The fact is, the budget obliges the Eagles to do some hard time in some storied and hostile venues. Payday basketball took them to tournaments in Oklahoma and Iowa this year, just as they've been to Wisconsin and Cal and Indiana in previous ones. The difference is that this year, the Eagles didn't manage to snake out a win against a lesser foe the second night. Instead, they were drummed by the likes of South Carolina State and Illinois-Chicago, neither of which are chumps.

That sort of thing happens. Not surprisingly the cash prize doesn't make it feel any better.

"It's part of the challenge," Giacoletti shrugged. "Everybody, no matter where you're at, has issues and problems they need to deal with."

Eastern's fiscal issues will always be in play, but this endless cycle of playing just three games in Reese before New Year's (it's three years running now) mitigates against building both momentum and a local audience for the product -- which the Eagles need just as desperately as a dollar. And while the players certainly relish the challenge, they could stand to be cut a break, too.

But it's just as true that the Eagles aren't going to access the Big Sky's lone NCAA Tournament bid in December. And with three straight road victories, Eastern has found the diamond lane on that high road.

The subject of this leaflet was supposed to be poise, and Eastern has bathed in it these past couple of weeks. Down 12 at halftime at Northern Arizona, the Eagles rallied to win 63-57. Held to just 21 points in the first half at Portland State, they buffaloed the Vikings with defense and produced 50 in the second.

"A bucket here, a stop there," Giacoletti said. "We didn't get in a hurry and do things out of character. Maybe we've all learned -- our staff, our team, myself -- how important it is to keep your composure."

The Eagles aren't necessarily doing things differently -- well, maybe a little zone against PSU -- but simply better against, naturally, a different level of opponent. And the numbers show it. Opponents' scoring is down nearly seven points a game; their shooting overall and from 3-point range are off 26 and 35 percentage points, respectively.

Still, it was clear during Eastern's dire December that Giacoletti himself wasn't the picture of patience. Another loss meant something that wasn't working needed to be changed, which is the ultimate coach's trap.

Giacoletti grappled with that as it became obvious the Eagles missed the athletic wing play of Chris Hester, who exhausted his eligibility last year. On the Eastern bench, redshirting this year, is a physically gifted but basketball-raw freshman named Henry Bekkering who, as time passed, definitely could have restored some of that.

"Oh, we wrestled with it," Giacoletti admitted. "I almost took him off his redshirt at Fullerton and thought better of it.

"It was just best for him that we not do it. Early, I didn't think he was going to progress quickly enough defensively and it was going to be a waste of time to play him five minutes a game. But he progressed so quickly that we thought, `He can help us win now.' Finally it got to the point where we went and asked Henry and his father. We'd sold them on redshirting at first, and really it was too far into the season to make sense.

"And for the program down the road, it's the best thing."

The funny thing is, everyone else saw Hester's missing ingredient as an offensive deficiency -- that the Eagles were lacking another player who could create points on his own. Giacoletti saw it more on defense, and has tweaked his approach by having Alvin Snow -- who used to just get the toughest defensive assignment, period -- pressure ballhandlers out of the middle instead.

Because always with Giacoletti, it comes back to defense.

"It's what we can control," he said. "It's a fine balance, staying in character and doing what you want to get better at."

Keeping on. At this point, it seems to be what the Eagles are best at.

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