The kid was just 8 years old. His life was hard and he wasn’t too young to know it. But man, did Shantay Legans love basketball. So much that someone with the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization decided it might be a good idea to get the team at UC Santa Barbara involved.
“Any takers,” head coach Jerry Pimm announced at practice one day. “This little guy needs a mentor.”
Silence.
“Anyone?”
No hands went up.
It makes what happened over the next decade even more interesting. Because Legans not only ended up with a mentor -- I’ll tell you about that in a moment -- he ended up with a family. That support would help transform his young life and one day usher Legans into the job he has today as the University of Portland men’s basketball coach.
The Pilots beat Pacific 75-69 on Thursday night. It was the sixth straight win for a Legans-led program that struggled mightily to matter in the last few seasons. He’d inherited low expectations and a roster that went 1-15 in West Coast Conference play a year ago under Terry Porter.
Current record: 17-12.
That six-game win streak is the best for the program since the 2008-09 season and it includes five consecutive WCC wins. Legans and UP will play on Saturday at Santa Clara in the regular-season finale. But the job he’s done in his first season on The Bluff is nothing short of remarkable.
It’s why I asked him this week, “What childhood experience shaped who you are today?”
Legans shot back: “Being matched with Ray Lopes.”
♦♦♦
I reached Lopes by telephone at his home in North Carolina on Wednesday night. The longtime college basketball coach who served as an assistant at Washington State and Oklahoma said he went home thinking about that 8-year-old little boy all those years ago when nobody volunteered to mentor him.
“We were a young family,” said Lopes, who was then an assistant at UCSB. “We just had our daughter. She was a little baby. I went home and talked with my wife about it.
“It felt like the right thing to do.”
This is how Shantay Legans ended up going fishing with Lopes. He also taught him to golf. There were too many family dinners and birthdays and holidays to count over the years. Legans would also come to workouts sometimes and watch the college team play. One day Lopes and his wife joined Shantay’s mother, Susan, at one of her son’s AAU games.
“This little rascal could play,” Lopes said. “He could really play. He had a mouth on him, now. He was a talker on the floor. But he had the game to back it up.”
I’ve never mentioned Oprah Winfrey in a sports column before today. Legans made me think about the television personality this week. He made me wonder about Mark Zuckerberg, too. Also Audrey Hepburn, Steven Spielberg and a fictional wizard named Professor Dumbledore.
All either served as -- or had -- important mentors.
Winfrey was mentored by Maya Angelou. Zuckerberg took walks with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Hepburn mentored Elizabeth Taylor. Spielberg hired J.J. Abrams at 16 and taught him the movie business and we all know what the fictional Dumbledore did for Harry Potter.
He made a wizard out of him.
Winfrey said once, “A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.”
Lopes and his wife decided overnight that they were up for the job. He arrived at work the next morning and informed his coach, “I’ll do it.”
“Do what?” Jerry Pimm said.
“I’ll be there for that kid.”
♦♦♦
The University of Portland men’s basketball team was dismal again last season. The Pilots lost 15 straight games to finish the regular season and coach Terry Porter was fired.
His 2020-21 record: 9-23.
His WCC record in the final two seasons: 1-31.
UP athletic director Scott Leykam locked onto Legans from the beginning of the hiring process. The AD would talk with 17 candidates but had closely watched the program Legans built at Eastern Washington and knew he wanted to make him the Pilots’ next coach.
Announced Leykam last March: “We’ve got our guy.”
Lopes, the mentor, said he’s not surprised the kid he watched grow up, dominate high school basketball and go to Cal has morphed into a talented head coach himself. In fact, when Lopes got his own first head coaching job at Fresno State in 2002, it took only a year before Legans transferred from Cal to Fresno State play for him.
“He knows the game,” Lopes said. “He was a terrific point guard. Great passer, great vision, great leader. He was a talker on the floor with his team. He just made the game easy. He made the game fun, and made it easy.”
Fun.
Easy.
Those words haven’t historically been associated with men’s basketball at UP. Porter posted a .287 win percentage in his four seasons and never won more than 11 games in a single season. Before that, Eric Reveno did much better. He had a stretch of three seasons when he won 19, 21 and 20 games. But Reveno was fired in March 2016 after going 12-21.
Would anyone ever win again at UP?
Leykam dismissed Porter and said, “I’m aware of where Gonzaga is. I’m aware of where BYU is ... we should be able to compete with that next tier of programs in the conference.”
♦♦♦
I asked Legans three questions on Wednesday night. I wanted to know what his favorite television show was as a kid. I asked what’s the best piece of advice he never took. I asked, too, about the biggest influence that shaped his young life. Then, I waited for the answers.
The favorite TV show?
“Martin,” Legans told me, “my mother and I used to watch this show and we’d laugh so much.”
The advice not taken?
“Dress for the job you want and not the job you have,” he said. “The only thing good about COVID is coaches stopped having to wear suits. I always felt the best in athletic attire.”
The influence?
“Ray Lopes,” Legans said. “That gave me a father figure to look up to. He was always there for me.”
Lopes is out of coaching now. He and his wife have three children who grew up with Shantay Legans as part of their family. Both men remember the very first fish that 8-year-old kid caught all those years ago. It was small, caught off a dock. They eventually let it go.
“I didn’t want to touch it,” Legans said, “and neither did he. It was so funny; nobody wanted to grab it.”
A little fish.
A little kid.
“He was like a son to us,” Lopes said. “We loved him. He was a good kid. He had a hard life. He had his mom, but they were just getting by.”
Then Lopes added, “It felt like the right thing to do.”
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Email: John@JohnCanzano.com
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