For someone who has been retired since 2009, Eric Hays, who was hired recently to complete Shannon Schweyen’s first Lady Griz coaching staff, doesn’t give the impression he’s ready to slow down anytime soon. Or give up involvement in his favorite sport.
“An ideal day for me would be to coach women’s basketball in the morning, spend a little time in the afternoon on my day job (as a financial planner) and be able to work with Hellgate boys’ basketball in the evenings,” he says. “That would be a great day.”
The NCAA will have the final say on whether Hays can continue to work with Hellgate — impermissible contact and endorsement and all that — where he won three state titles during a 25-year career and where his son Jeff is the head coach, but this much is certain: the former Griz is back at Dahlberg Arena.
He joins Sonya Stokken and son-in-law Mike Petrino on Schweyen’s staff, and by agreement on both sides, it will be a short-term assignment. He is expected to coach for one year, maybe two.
“At my age, everything is short term,” Hays joked last week. “I like the idea of being able to try this for one year, two at the most. I’m not looking for anything more than that.”
In Hays, Schweyen, who was hired in August, two weeks after longtime Montana coach Robin Selvig announced his retirement, found a perfect solution to a problem she was facing.
Hired at an inopportune time to fill out a staff, Schweyen moved quickly to get her first two assistants in place. She retained Stokken and was able to lure Petrino, who spent four seasons at Wyoming and one at Colorado, back to his home state. One spot still remained.
Schweyen knew the coach she wanted for the staff’s lead assistant position, but the timing wasn’t right to get it done. At least for now. It left Schweyen scrambling and willing to consider a temporary solution.
“Initially I had somebody in mind, but it didn’t work out, so I kind of went back to the drawing board,” she says. “I still think I can get that person on my staff, so I didn’t want to hire somebody I would have to let go of after one year.
“I started to brainstorm coaches who I thought might be interested in coming here for a year. I actually started with Missoula itself and started writing down names, and Eric came to mind.”
And why not? Hays was a former All-Big Sky Conference player for the Grizzlies, and he’d long ago proved his coaching ability, leading the Hellgate boys’ program to more than 350 wins and state titles in 1985, ’90 and ’93.
He retired from Hellgate in 2009, after 33 years as a math teacher, but still had a desire to remain in the game, as evidenced by his now six-year stint as an assistant for the Knights. So Schweyen made the call.
“I was shocked, but I was intrigued at the same time,” says Hays, who had a number of conversations with Schweyen before saying yes. “I’ve always respected Shannon, both as a player and as a person, so I thought maybe I could do this. I think it will be fun.”
Montana, with Hays on the sideline picking his spots to voice his input, held its first preseason practice of the year last week. He has names to learn and new rules to pick up on — you can advance the ball to the frontcourt in the final minute? — but the basics never change.
“Coaching basketball is, to me, pretty much the same, no matter what level you’re at,” he says. “I’ve always been about teaching the fundamentals. From that, you can become a pretty good basketball player, and a team can be pretty good.”
His new position continues a lifetime in the sport for Hays, who was born and raised in Junction City, Ore. He was a prep standout, playing high school ball just 15 miles from the campus of Oregon, where his dad played, and 25 from Oregon State, but neither had interest in a 6-foot-3 forward.
So he enrolled at the one Pac-8 school that offered a walk-on program: Washington State.
With freshmen ineligible to play on the varsity those days, Hays attended open gyms for first-year players in the weeks leading up to the start of the season in mid-October. All were there to make Washington State’s freshman team.
“There would be anywhere from 28 to 40 guys, and if I put myself in the top 20, I was probably overrating myself,” he says.
But once practices started and Hays could operate within a structured on-court environment that highlighted his fundamentals, he excelled. “I did well in structure, knowing what was supposed to happen.”
He started the season as the freshman team’s sixth man. A handful of games into the season, he became a starter for a squad that would go 20-2. He finished as the team’s second-leading scorer and rebounder.
But when Marv Harshman left for Washington following the 1970-71 season and his assistant, Jud Heathcote, departed Pullman to become the head coach at Montana, it left Hays having to prove himself to a new set of coaches.
Washington State brought in Bob Greenwood, who would last just one season and is more famous in retrospect for the two assistant coaches he brought with him: Dale Brown and Homer Drew, both of whom would go on — Brown at LSU, Drew at Valparaiso — to distinguished careers.
That fall the new Cougar staff opted to determine varsity spots through a series of scrimmages, which put Hays, never one to stand out in that setting, at a disadvantage. “Twenty-nine guys tried out, and they cut it to 12 in two days by watching us scrimmage. I got cut,” he says.
Even though Heathcote didn’t encourage it — there were doubters everywhere he turned — Hays transferred to Montana at the semester break. He could practice with the Grizzlies, but he couldn’t play in games for a full calendar year.
Finally eligible, he was able to play the back half of the 1972-73 season. He was a second-team All-Big Sky selection as a junior, first team as a senior in 1974-75 when the Grizzlies won their first outright Big Sky title with a 13-1 league record.
That sent Montana up the road to Pullman, where the Grizzlies knocked off Utah State 69-63 — this at a time when the NCAA tournament was made up of just 32 teams — then on to Portland to face mighty UCLA in the round of 16.
It proved to be a game that led to a question he still gets asked today: Are you that Eric Hays? Because in that era, when UCLA was mostly untouchable, few opposing players were able to use the matchup to make a name for themselves.
The player who faced sceptics at every college stop put up 32 points, on 13-of-16 shooting, against the Bruins, who would go on to win their 10th national championship in 12 years in what would be John Wooden’s final season. Final score: UCLA 67, Montana 64, the most memorable loss in Griz history.
Hays graduated from Montana with a degree in math education a few months later.
There was a tryout with the Milwaukee Bucks, who selected him in the ninth round of the 1975 NBA draft, a one-year stop at Sheridan (Ore.) High School to teach and coach, and then an invitation for Hays and his wife Deb to join Heathcote as a graduate assistant at Michigan State.
Heathcote left Montana for the Big Ten after the 1975-76 season, and he convinced Hays to join his staff that first year in East Lansing. The Spartans would win the national championship in 1979, in Heathcote’s third year, but Hays has no regrets about giving up the college game after just a single season.
“It’s not that I didn’t like college coaching. I just didn’t like the lifestyle of being a college coach while trying to raise a family,” says Hays, who has five children, including two sets of twin daughters.
“My family was always going to be the most important aspect of my life, and as an assistant at the college level, you really had no control of your life. You didn’t know from one year to the next what city you might be living in, and a lot of times you didn’t have a lot of say over it.”
He liked the idea of being a high school teacher and coach, which brought him back to Missoula and Hellgate. He would never leave.
He reconsidered the college game in 2002, after Montana AD Wayne Hogan fired his men’s basketball coach. Hays’ kids were mostly grown, and he’d had a good run with the Knights. Maybe it was time for a new challenge.
“I inquired when they first got rid of Don Holst and before they hired Pat Kennedy,” says Hays. “I called Wayne to ask if he’d consider me, but he’d already made up his mind what he was going to do. That was the only other time I’d really thought about being a college coach.”
Until Schweyen called.
“This was totally out of the blue,” says Hays. “But I think I have a lot to offer, and from Shannon’s standpoint, that’s what I really respect about her. She’s open to new ideas. Maybe I can throw in some ideas she’s never been exposed to or thought of.
“That’s the fun part of being an assistant. I think I enjoyed the last six years at Hellgate more than I ever did as head coach. You don’t have to worry about playing time or administrative things. You pretty much just coach, and I love that.”
http://www.gogriz.com/news/2016/9/11/womens-basketball-hays-joins-lady-griz-coaching-staff.aspx
Photo Courtesy Montana Athletics
Tagged with: Big Sky Montana
