With Fired Coach, Ex-Husky Tsohonis Heads to NCAA Tourney

The former UW guard advances to the Big Dance with a terminated leader in Dan Monson.

Dan Raley | Mar 17, 2024

With Fired Coach, Ex-Husky Tsohonis Heads to NCAA Tourney /

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Marcus Tsohonis' current college basketball coach was fired this past week and his first college coach was dismissed the week before. He can barely run because of a persistent groin injury.

Yet counter to all of these negative developments, the former University of Washington shooting guard is headed to the NCAA Tournament after his Long Beach State team beat UC Davis 74-70 in the Big West Tournament championship game on Saturday night in Las Vegas.

The 6-foot-3 Tsohonis played for a pair of bad Mike Hopkins' UW teams in 2020 and 2021, spent a season at Virginia Commonwealth and transferred to Long Beach State two years ago, and the NCAAs had always eluded him until now.

His team (21-14 overall) banded together and captured three consecutive Big West tournament games after 17-year coach Dan Monson was informed on Monday he wouldn't be coming back once the season ended, which hasn't happened yet.

Monson, of course, is the former Gonzaga coach who launched the Zags into a national entity in the 1999 NCAA Tournament beginning in Seattle and later was pursued for the UW job that eventually went to Lorenzo Romar.

Following Saturday night's game, Monson said in a TV interview he would coach somewhere else next season. The Huskies, of course, are looking for another coach after informing Hopkins he was gone prior to the Pac-12 Tournament.

For now, Monson is still employed at Long Beach State and having a last laugh on the athletic department that is trying to cash him out.

Tsohonis, who finished with 25 points to share game scoring honors with 6-foot-10 teammate Lassina Traore against UC Davis, has had a nice career after growing disenchanted with Hopkins and leaving. he leads Long Beach State in scoring at 17.9 points per game and twice has been named All-Big West honorable mention.

A Portland native, Tsohonis left the UW because Hopkins would start him on occasion but would never commit to him.

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Published Mar 17, 2024

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.