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Feb 23, 2020
9:45:49pm
Spocougar All-American
Every fall, Gonzaga sends several
Basketball players from the men’s and women’s teams to my children’s elementary school for a morning assembly called “Doughnuts with Dad”. They usually send their star players. The assembly is always packed with the kids and many of their dads. The players sit in front and take questions from and interact with the kids. It’s always a great time.

Gonzaga means a lot here in Spokane. Aside from the Seahawks, there isn’t really a team we have to call our own. And even though the Seahawks are popular, it’s not quite the same as a truly hometown team.

All the Gonzaga fans I know, with very few exceptions, are classy and great about my BYU fandom. I wore my BYU scrub cap at the hospital most of last week and got congratulatory texts last night. Today one of the nurses congratulated me at work.

I’m pretty excited about this rivalry and enjoy having a rival that is easy to respect and root for when they aren’t playing us. Mark Few is a classy gentleman and an elite coach. The program is clean and successful in Spokane! This isn’t an elite school like Duke, or a spectacular location in SoCal. Nor do they have a long legacy of success like many other famous programs. But they have had an amazingly successful and consistent run for the last couple of decades in a place that no one would have picked as a likely location for that to happen. Spokanites are proud of that and deserve to be proud of it. They support that team very well.

Personally, I’m glad we landed in the WCC for basketball. Not a perfect situation, but, unlike football, it’s imperfections won’t stand in the way of success. The NCAA tournament is open to all and Gonzaga has proven over and over that you don’t have to belong to a “power” conference to have sustained success. Mostly I’m glad because I can take my kids to volleyball, baseball, and basketball games when BYU comes up here and that’s a great way to develop their fandom since we don’t live close in Utah.
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