Confidence was everything for Saint Mary’s point guard Augustas Marciulionis. Over his first two seasons, that self-belief wasn’t yet firmly established.
But last year . . . well, the Gaels won the West Coast Conference championship and Marciulionis was voted the WCC’s Player of the Year.
“He just got real confident. It finally clicked,” Gaels coach Randy Bennett said Thursday at WCC basketball media day in Las Vegas.
Marciulionis, whose father is Lithuanian basketball legend and former NBA star Sarunas Marciulionis, said hard work provided him with results and that allowed his confidence to blossom.
“If somebody told me in the beginning of the year I would make that big of a jump, I’d be surprised,” he said. “But at the same time, I’d been two years in the program and worked really hard to learn our system. I feel like that came with the work. Last year we had a pretty good year and I was able to contribute well and both individual and team success happened.”
Center Mitchell Saxen, who joined Marciulionis on the 2024 All-WCC team, talks with admiration about a teammate who made such varied contributions to the team and rarely came out of games.
“He stacked really good games where he was doing his job as a guard defender,” Saxen said. “If you look at the matchup of the guards we went against, I can think of one game where (USF’s) Marcus Williams had a good game against us.
“Every other game he pretty much shut guys down. And then he was our lead guard on offense, too. Not a lot of guys are tough enough to do that for 40 minutes.”
Marciulionis didn’t always put up monster offensive statistics, but his impact on the team’s success was undeniable. Over a 10-week stretch from the week after Christmas through a victory over Gonzaga in the championship game of the WCC Tournament, he averaged 13.7 points, 6.6 assists, 1.5 steals and 36 minutes on the floor as the Gaels won 18 of 19.
Bennett said the coaching staff first took note of the improvement during fall practice before last season, when Marciulionis was assembling eye-catching efficiency metrics.
“His numbers were better than any point guard we’ve had. Then it played out,” Bennett said. “He just kept getting better. We had to change the team where that ball was in his hands a lot. Like it always is, it’s all confidence.”
Marciulionis said his goals for this season include improving as a perimeter shooter and a leader. The latter wasn’t always easy for him, Bennett said.
“I think he’s going to be a better leader because he’s just more comfortable with leading Americans,” Bennett explained. “The language barrier was a little bit of a factor. He’s fine (communicating), but leading a team, that’s a different deal.”
FEW WILL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS: Don’t get Gonzaga coach Mark Few started about his time on the U.S. coaching staff at the Paris Olympics this summer. Few loved it.
“It was absolutely amazing. Just a lifetime experience,” he said. “Borrowing a phrase from Steph (Curry), on a scale of 1 to 10 it was a 12.”
He said the players and coaches spent 44 days together and never had a bad day. Few and head coach Steve Kerr of the Warriors had worked together with the national program for two years.
“He’s unbelievable. He is as good a person as you’re ever going to meet,” Few said of Kerr. “I’m so happy for him to have that gold medal. There’s a lot of pressure as the head coach that you don’t realize going into it.”
Coaches aren’t awarded medals at the Olympics, but Kerr and Few have the satisfaction they contributed to the players achieving a big goal. Asked if he’d do it again, Few expressed mixed emotions.
“I think it’s something that needs to be shared with other coaches who need to experience it,” he said. “But anytime USA Basketball calls or my country calls, I’d go in a heartbeat. As fun and great and rewarding as Gonzaga’s been for me, this thing just felt different. You’ve got your whole country behind you and the whole world watching.”
CANADA’S LATEST CONTRIBUTION TO THE WCC: Dave Smart, who won 656 games coaching at Carleton University in Ottawa and captured 13 Canadian collegiate national titles, is the new coach at Pacific.
But he’s hardly the first Canadian hoping to carve out success in the WCC. Steve Nash came to Santa Clara from British Columbia with little fanfare in the fall of 1992. He went on to total 1,689 points and 510 assists in four collegiate seasons while leading the Broncos to their three most recent NCAA Tournament appearances.
Canada has boasted the biggest international presence on NBA rosters for 10 straight years, but Nash remains the country’s only player to win the league’s MVP. He won two of them before being inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame.
“Steve and Vince Carter and the Raptors are the reason why Canada basketball is what it is now,” Smart said. “He’s an absolutely perfect role model for being as good as you can be — the way he trained, the way he played, his skillset, his understanding of the game.”
Smart, 58, is taking over a Pacific program that was winless in WCC play a year ago. He will begin his rebuild with an entirely fresh roster of 15 newcomers, four of them from above the border.
He could use a player like Nash, with whom he first crossed paths years ago when Smart was an older college player dueling with a precocious teenager at various Canadian team tryouts.
“I played him a couple times when I didn’t know who he was,” Smart said. “He was good then.”
BACK WITH THE BRONCOS: Santa Clara, picked by the coaches to finish third in the WCC behind Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s, returns a strong core of its team from a year ago. Added to that increasingly rare continuity is guard Carlos Stewart.
Stewart played two seasons with the Broncos, averaging 15.2 points and earning All-WCC honors in 2022-23. Then he transferred to LSU in his home state, and got decent playing time before a season-ending knee injury just as conference play was beginning.
After one year away, Stewart made a return to Santa Clara. His knee is healthy and the Broncos are thrilled to have him back.
“He fits in exceptionally well,” Broncos coach Herb Sendek said. “Carlos is a natural scorer but he’s really doing a good job right now of embracing the position of point guard.”
Stewart figures to be paired in the Santa Clara backcourt with French-born Adama-Alpha Bal, who secured all-conference honors last season in his debut season with the program.
FAMOUS SPORTS LINEAGE: First-year Washington State coach David Riley is a nephew to Mike Riley, the former Oregon State football and NFL head coach.
Not to be outdone, Oregon State women’s coach Scott Rueck’s wife is granddaughter to the late coaching legend Phil Woolpert, who guided Bill Russell and USF to back-to-back NCAA titles in 1955 and ’56.