Chances are, you don’t know Scott Rueck.
More than 4 years ago, Rueck took the reins of an Oregon State women’s basketball program circling the drain. Former head coach LaVonda Wagner had been relieved of her duties and prior to such, had fleeced the program of nearly all of its talent due to behavior deemed unbecoming by the players who’d left, and the administration dealing with their departure. It was a program in peril, and a program desperately in need of a coach capable of saving it from just that.
More than 4 years later; Rueck has taken a team devoid of personnel, let alone talented personnel, from the abyss to the upper-echelon of the college game.
I know, it’s women’s basketball.
I get that for the most part women’s athletics lack the panache of their male counterparts. But in spite its rank in the popularity pecking order, what Rueck has done since taking over for LaVonda Wagner has been nothing short of phenomenal, and the job coupled with the manner in which it’s being done deserves the recognition it simply isn’t getting.
Rueck has taken a team which at the time of his arrival necessitated open tryouts, to the top of the Pac-12 standings and a #7 overall ranking. He’s done so via elevated talent, hard work, and the type of relative obscurity and mild-manneredness (If that’s a word) Oregon State seems to thrive amidst. Mike Riley did it with the football program, Pat Casey has done it with the baseball program, and now the short-statured coach from Hillsboro is doing it in spades.
Following his first 2 seasons in Corvallis, I wrote a similar piece regarding the success of the reclamation project to that point. Even then it was remarkable what the coach from “little ol’ George Fox” had done with OSU. But while impressive to raise a program from the ashes from which it had laid, to take them from a heartbeat to the elite world in which they currently reside, at a university lacking the elite resources to do it, is nothing short of miraculous.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised; after all, Rueck left Division-III George Fox with a 288-88 record, including 85-8 over his last 3 seasons, and culminating with an undefeated national championship season in 2010. But I was a couple years ago, and am now. Not because he’s winning, but that he’s doing so at a rate I wouldn’t have thought possible. Not in Corvallis and not with an Oregon State program nearer to extinction than relevancy when Rueck took the job.
I’m rooting for Oregon State women’s basketball, I admit it. The underdog is always a good story and there was no bigger one than the Beavers in 2010. But I’m in their corner not because of who they are now, but more so because of who they were then. Scott Rueck may not have been responsible the prior, but he is for the latter and beyond … and that’s something he, the university, and fans of sport should be proud of.
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