Inside The Huskies

As UW Basketball Program Suffers, Here's a Ready Solution

Wesley Yates III, possibly the team's top player, weighed in with what he wants.

Dan Raley

As UW Basketball Program Suffers, Here's a Ready Solution
As UW Basketball Program Suffers, Here's a Ready Solution /
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While super short-term University of Washington athletic director Troy Dannen cleans out his office or simply retrieves the boxes he never unpacked — did you not like the rain or was it the traffic? — the Husky basketball program continues to be neglected, harmed, ignored.

It has no coaches, no Koren Johnson, no immediate hope for revival the longer the UW athletic department goes without someone in charge to hire a new basketball leader.

The more this situation persists, putting Husky basketball back on solid footing becomes a bigger challenge day after day.

On Thursday, freshman guard Wesley Yates III, possibly the most talented player on the roster, put something on social media that just made a lot of sense.

He didn't announce he was leaving, that he was entering the transfer portal, that he was grateful for all of his time spent in Montlake training rooms.

Rather the 6-foot-4 first-year guard from Beaumont, Texas, offered a ready solution to a sticky situation caused by Dannen firing UW coach Mike Hopkins and walking away without hiring a replacement. 

"Would love coach Conroy and Quincy to take over this program and lead us into the Big 10," Yates posted. 

That would be Will Conroy and Quincy Pondexter, both former Hopkins assistant coaches, one-time UW and NBA players themselves and two guys with much stronger personalities than the departed head coach to make this thing work.

Make Conroy the head coach, Pondexter the associate head coach and go hire two more like-minded assistant coaches with strong basketball backgrounds, preferably as players.

Brandon Roy would be an ideal addition to the staff, yet that won't happen because he doesn't have a college degree, which is mandatory for UW coaching employment. 

Conroy has nine years as an assistant for Lorenzo Romar and Hopkins, plenty of respect from high school and college players everywhere — Keion Brooks credited Conroy for bringing him to the UW — and would be more demanding than the previous leader, who often gave off a Dr. Feel Good vibe. Pondexter, for that matter, is Yates' cousin.

With Kalen DeBoer and Dannen out the door at the UW nearly as fast as they came in, Conroy wouldn't be moving on to a higher-paying program should he have immediate success. 

Now if you have potentially your best player in Yates stumping for you to run the show, that's built-in loyalty that hard to dismiss.

No one outside the program got a chance to see Yates in action for the Huskies this season because he broke his foot and then was re-injured when he tried to come back at midseason. In practice, he was described as the best player on the floor at times.

The university easily could install Conroy and Pondexter as a permanent coaching staff. They've already been employees, vetted, reviewed. They want the jobs and want the Huskies to do well. They've recruited all of the talent in recent years that didn't always get their best coaching. 

Let these two have control of the program before it suffers even more damage and goes another dozen years or so with just one NCAA Tournament berth.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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