By Jeff Faraudo
#WCChoops columnist | ARCHIVES
Stan Johnson was 10 years old when civil war tore apart his native west African homeland of Liberia.
“Growing up in Liberia was awesome before the war broke out,” the first-year Loyola Marymount coach shared this week. “That’s always going to be a part of me, part of my story. It’s home, my birthplace. My dad is from there.”
It all changed in 1990.
“There’s nothing like war,” Johnson said. “In that stretch, any day you thought you were going to die. I was 10 years old, sitting at gunpoint with rebels, some of them not much older than me. They had M16s pointed at me. It was extremely scary.”
Because Johnson’s mother was American, the family was able to get out of Liberia and come to the U.S. The airport had been destroyed but a large aircraft landed at a mining facility where his father worked as an executive.
“We lost everything,” Johnson said. “We left with a couple bags and started life over completely. It wasn’t fun.”
But the end of that chapter also created a new opportunity after the family made their home in the Salt Lake City suburb of Taylorsville, Utah. Johnson watched as his dad rebuilt his career in a new country, ultimately retiring as a CEO. Johnson earned a basketball scholarship at Southern Utah University, where he became team captain of a conference championship team his senior season.
The experience shaped him. “It taught me there is beauty in the struggle.”
Johnson, 41, has faced a daily struggle since being hired on March 20, just a week after the emerging COVID-19 pandemic caused the shutdown of sports in America, including cancellation of the NCAA tournament.
“I didn’t have any sense of how long it would last,” Johnson said this week. “I kept thinking a month. Finally, I realized this is going to be a while.”
The pandemic endures still, and has made everything Johnson is trying to accomplish more challenging. He and his staff got commitments from three Southern California high school recruits over the summer, and signed what is regarded as a top-50 class in November.
“I still haven’t met them face to face,” he said.
The Lions won their season opener against Southern Utah, posting an 85-83 victory when freshman Jalin Anderson hit a game-winning shot at the buzzer.
LMU is 5-3 and riding a three-game win streak but hasn’t played since Dec. 19. The Lions have had four games canceled due to COVID, three more postponed. None of their past six scheduled games have happened.
On Thursday the team was scheduled to resume full practice after the program paused all activities on Dec. 26 because of positive tests and related contact tracing. The Lions expect to open West Coast Conference play on Sunday afternoon at home against USF.
Through 10 months, Johnson has leaned on the slogan, “Win the wait.” He didn’t want to waste a single day and credits his two decades of working as an assistant coach, most recently five seasons as Marquette, for instilling the importance of organization.
“While everybody’s waiting, how can we find ways to win?” he said, listing the areas that needed improving, including facilities, relationships with donors, connections with local high school coaches and the national media.
Johnson began holding “Coffee with the Coach” Zoom meetings with ex-players, alumni, donors, and students. He meets Mondays with the academic support staff, strength staff and sports medicine, where they provide updates on every player in the program. He created a network of advisors to help him meet people key to fundraising and he began writing a regular blog titled, “A New Standard.”
LMU has just one winning season the past eight years, and Johnson knows the rebuild won’t happen overnight. He says his players have been great. “The willingness to listen is there. The commitment is there,” he said.
LMU hasn’t played in the NCAA tournament in 31 seasons, since All-American Hank Gathers died on the court and Bo Kimble powered the Lions to the Elite Eight.
That was 1990, the same year Johnson came to America.
Three decades later, he embraces the “beauty of the struggle” his program will face while attempting to ascend in a conference dominated by Gonzaga, Saint Mary’s and BYU.
“My goal is for us to be a program that wins, in every way,” he said. “We play in a terrific league. There’s a lot to sell. There’s no doubt in my mind we can get it done.”
SHORT NOTICE, LONG ODDS: Top-ranked Gonzaga and BYU — voted 1-2 in the preseason WCC coaches poll — agreed just 48 hours earlier to meet Thursday night in Spokane. The impromptu date was agreed to because both teams had holes on their COVID-ravaged schedules.
The Zags, as they have done to every opponent, made short work of the Cougars in an 86-69 victory that was rarely that close. They roared to a 23-2 lead after barely 7 minutes, using their defense to hold the visitors to 1-for-10 shooting with six turnovers.
“You need to come out and play like that because you know BYU is going to bring it,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few said. “I thought we just flew around. We ball-hawked really well. And swarmed to the ball. I thought that was the biggest key out of everything.”
While Gonzaga improved to 11-0, BYU was playing for the first time since Dec. 23 after its first three WCC games were postponed. Thursday night’s TV crew reported the Cougars were 30 minutes into their flight to California when the plane was turned around because Pepperdine had a COVID-19 issue. Days later, the Zags were on a bus to the airport when San Diego was forced to cancel.
Far from discouraged, BYU coach Mark Pope is eager to see how his team progresses from here.
“I’m really excited about getting this out of the way, the first game of the conference, because it just shows us clearly and glaringly some areas where we have to get massively better,” Pope told the Salt Lake Tribune.
“And you like that. You like it because it gives you a benchmark that’s real and tangible that you can shoot for and work towards every day and talk about it. And I have a locker room full of guys that will do that.”
USF’S HARDY DIES: Bill Cartwright, who played in the NBA alongside Michael Jordan, had this to say about former USF teammate James Hardy: "In all of my years of playing basketball, he was maybe the best athlete I have ever played with, which I think says a lot.”
Hardy, who died of a heart attack on Dec. 29 at the age of 64, was part of a 1975 USF recruiting class that was the program’s best in more than a half-century. As fellow sophomores in 1976-77, Hardy, Cartwright and Winford Boynes led the explosive Dons to a 29-0 start and a No. 1 national ranking before back-to-back defeats suddenly ended a magical season.
Hardy, a 6-foot-9 power forward, averaged 13.4 and 9.7 rebounds in three seasons, was the 11th pick in the 1978 NBA draft and played four seasons in the NBA before completing his professional career overseas.