SURVEYING THE LANDSCAPE
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Pirate Notebook No. 264 Friday, February 17, 2006 By Denny O'Brien

Stokes needs time to fortify undermanned program

©2006 Bonesville.net

Ricky Stokes wouldn’t have been my first choice to oversee the East Carolina basketball program. Fact is, he wouldn’t have made the short list of candidates to call.

Given the chance, I would have targeted an aging coach with a well-recognized name who was seeking his final challenge before calling it quits. Cliff Ellis was one who fit that formula — and his success at traditional football schools made him particularly intriguing.

Even so, Ellis would have been no more a guarantee for success than Stokes. And it would be foolish to think that ECU’s results would be dramatically improved this season under a different coach.

That’s exactly why any judgment on Stokes shouldn’t be passed until at least 2009.

By then we should have a better gauge on his ability to advance ECU out of its current position in hardwood purgatory. But even that timeline goes to wash if East Carolina is included in another round of conference shuffling.

If nothing else, East Carolina’s inability to improve its posture in recent years can be directly attributed to the changing landscape that has placed the Pirates in three league configurations in five years.

The transition from the Colonial to Conference USA proved even more difficult than almost anyone could anticipate. Though already a solid league, C-USA improved each season as Louisville, Marquette, Memphis, and UAB rejoined the ranks of Charlotte and Cincinnati as annual visitors to the Big Dance.

With the arrival of veteran coaches John Calipari and Rick Pitino and up-and-comers Mike Anderson and Tom Crean, C-USA separated itself from the likes of the Atlantic 10 and joined the elite. That magnified former coach Bill Herrion’s challenge on the court, and introduced the daunting task of attracting higher caliber talent to a lower profile program.

The end result was a series of recruiting gambles that has left Stokes with very few chips and an unimpressive hand. Had they paid off, ECU likely opens against Rice Wednesday with a completely different starting five.

However, academic casualties and misjudgments in character have generated a scenario where an overachieving Corey Rouse has become the most significant piece of ECU’s basketball puzzle.

But that’s all in the past.

As for the present, the latest round of conference restructuring has depleted C-USA to the point where CAA membership would actually advance the program. That’s not a favorable environment in which to sell a program that lacks tradition, especially when it is located a lay-up away from four of the nation’s most successful basketball schools.

As worn out an excuse as it may be, survival in a hoops-crazed state that includes Duke, North Carolina, N.C. State, and Wake Forest couldn’t be more difficult. Charlotte has come the closest to sidestepping that hurdle, but even it has struggled to make the leap from being a consistent postseason participant to a perennial Top 25 program.

And that’s a school that puts an overwhelming majority of its monetary emphasis on hoops.

"It's not an easy road," Stokes said recently. "The old adage is, take one step forward and two steps back. We know that in the long road ahead of us there will be some bumps in the road."

Just how many more potholes can the program withstand? That’s one of the questions East Carolina faces.

Another that long has hovered over the program is where it eternally fits on the basketball landscape: Is it a sleeping giant, or one of the most difficult coaching jobs in the nation?

Aside from the brief period of reasonable success during the Eddie Payne/Joe Dooley era, historical trends point toward the latter. The responsibility of writing a different conclusion rests solely on Stokes.

Given the unfavorable scenario he inherited, that task would be labeled a significant challenge by almost any coach.

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02/23/2007 02:02:51 AM