First, a brief history of Washington basketball. The first reported record of the team was 1-1 way back in 1896. In 1902, the Huskies went 7-0. In 1911, Warner Williams coached them to an 11-1 record in the Northwest Intercollegiate Conference. In 1921, Hec Edmundson took over and three years in, earned the first of his 12 conference titles in 27 years as coach of the program while it was in the Pacific Coast Conference (the first amphibian on land in the long evolution of what is now the Pac-12). Of course, the Huskies now play in the Hec Edmundson Pavilion, a building that opened in 1927 but was renamed in 1948 at the end of the long-time coach’s career. However, six years later in 1953, it was Tippy Dye who took the Huskies to the only Final Four in program history. That was the end of the First Golden Age of Washington Basketball, as the team suffered through an NCAA Tournament drought of over 20 years after that Final Four run. There were obvious external reasons for the malaise (the emergence of UCLA and an era where only conference champions were deemed worthy of NCAA Tournament appearance), but Washington basketball slipped off the radar for a long time.

Hec Edmundson: Jim Tressel’s Great-Uncle, And The Bricklayer of the Washington Basketball Program

The Second (Brief) Golden Age of Washington Basketball came in the mid-80s, where the Huskies made three NCAA Tournaments in three seasons, with Marv Harshman taking Detlef Schrempf and Christian Welp (RIP) to the Sweet 16 in 1984 (where they lost to a Cinderella #10 Dayton squad in that regional semifinal – sound familiar?). The next two seasons saw the Huskies bow out in the 5/12 game in the first round, once as the #5 seed, once as the #12; the former under Harshman, the latter under first-year head coach Andy Russo. Three more seasons under Russo, three seasons with no Tournament. Four seasons of Lynn Nance also resulted in NCAA misses. Bob Bender was hired in 1993-94 and took a team that went 5-22 in his first season to the first of back-to-back NITs in March of ’96, then back-to-back NCAA Tournaments in ’98 and ’99. The ’98 squad was the Todd MacCulloch/Donald Watts/Deon Luton team that lost a heart-ripper to eventual champion UConn and Richard Hamilton. We’ll go so far as to call that team a part of the Bronze Age of Washington Basketball, but the following three years saw the Huskies finish eighth or worse in the Pac-10, paving the way for Lorenzo Romar, a former two-year player (1978-80) for the Huskies, to be hired in spring 2002.

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