LONG BEACH, Calif. — Walk into Dan Monson’s office and you will immediately be pulled back and forth through time. The five-walled room inside the Walter Pyramid at Long Beach State is a museum that is still adding pieces.
In one corner, there’s a West Coast Conference Coach of the Year award from his time as a head coach at Gonzaga. In another, a basketball commemorating his 100th career win in 2005 while at Minnesota near another signaling his 250th career win while at Long Beach State. And behind the seat at Monson’s desk, perched proudly on the window, there’s a recent addition of an old memory: a framed diagram of the play Monson used to beat Florida in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament in 1999, complete with the words of the iconic Gus Johnson call: “The slipper still fits!”
There’s seemingly no rhyme or reason to how all the memorabilia is arranged. And perhaps that’s fitting for a coach whose career has been anything but linear. Two dazzling years at Gonzaga. Eight hard years at Minnesota. Fifteen fascinating years at Long Beach State.
“One of my best years came so early in the career, you know, I didn’t appreciate it as much as I wish I would have,” Monson says. “But how lucky am I that I had it? So many coaches never have that kind of experience in their whole career.”
Monson knows: Do this long enough and you’ll realize that a basketball life cannot be neatly crafted or even summed up. No matter what decisions you made or didn’t make, or what trophies and pictures get placed on pedestals, the journey is anything but simple. Whatever storybook parallels may occur along the way are the exception, not the rule.
This is what allows Monson to look back and see his Elite Eight run with then-small-time Gonzaga, not with a painful pang of nostalgia but rather with a glimmer in his eye. Beaming with pride, Monson points out the framed vintage tickets from that famous 1999 tournament session his kids recently bought him off of…
Source : espn
