Suddenly, UCD and Williams are hot items

Sitting in his perfectly plain chair in an unpretentious office inside the wholly ordinary building that houses athletics at UC Davis, a basketball coach named Bob Williams mused recently on the almost absurdly disproportionate effect that a winning sports team can have on an institute of higher learning.

"You win one championship," Williams said, "and that will generate more publicity about Davis than academic programs we have here that are routinely ranked among the best in the country -- and I mean great, great academic programs. It's incredible."

The kicker: Incredibly, it's all true.

Barely two weeks after uttering those words, Bob Williams is living them -- and with a bullet. From a comfortable but relatively low-profile position as the successful coach of the UC Davis men's team, the 44-year-old Williams has seen his university's public stock -- to say nothing of his own -- soar to record levels following the Aggies' nationally televised victory over Kentucky Wesleyan in Saturday's Division II national championship game.

It was a victory that seized the imagination of a sports-loving country, in many ways because of what it was not. Davis' triumph was nearly a direct mockery of the athlete-power-money axis spinning at so many major universities: The Aggies won it all despite offering no athletic scholarships, receiving no direct university funding and having no single star player -- and being the underdog in every tournament game they played.

"I don't know if I ever anticipated the reality of it, to be honest with you," Williams said Monday morning, hours after his team arrived via police escort to a welcoming crowd of hundreds at Hickey Gym on the Davis campus. "But it is fantastic."

And it is still unfolding. Monday afternoon, Williams flew to Southern California to be interviewed for the vacant head-coaching job at UC Santa Barbara, a Division I program of some history and considerable resources.

Aside from confirming that he is a candidate for the Gauchos' top position, Williams declined to discuss the subject, concerned that it would detract from his Davis players enjoying the school's first national championship in basketball. But Santa Barbara's short list includes only a handful of other candidates; Williams, a former assistant at Pepperdine, has long-standing ties with several Santa Barbara officials and is considered a favorite to receive an offer, perhaps by the end of this week.

The Gauchos' interest in Williams predated the Division II title won in Louisville, Ky., but the events of the past weekend didn't hurt. Outsized in nearly every game it played, UC Davis won against a succession of full-scholarship opponents by demonstrating a kind of team-oriented style that is almost antithetical to the star-making machinery that surrounds sports in general and basketball in particular.

"That has been a characteristic of the teams in the time I've been here," said senior forward Chris Vlasic. "There hasn't been a guy who goes out and scores 20 points a night, or a guy who grabs 15 rebounds a night. We all know our roles, and we try to fulfill those to the best of our ability."

In the 83-77 championship game, the Aggies placed five scorers in double figures but none with more than 18 points, a theme utterly consistent with their 31-2 season. Through their nonconference schedule and their winning run through the Northern California Athletic Conference, Davis had six players who averaged at least eight points per game. Williams himself identified junior guard Dante Ross as a star, yet Ross' regular-season scoring average was a mere 12.2 points -- and he led the team.

"If a kid wants to score 20 a game, he's not going to come here," Williams said. "If a kid wants to be 'the man,' he's not going to come here. You ask our guys why they're successful, and they talk about the little things."

Defense. Rebounding. Low turnover ratios. The extra pass that results in a high-percentage shot. These are concepts rooted in work and virtually unrecognized in a box score, and selling them to athletes who have been reared in an atmosphere of individual glory is a difficult task on any level.

But that goes a way toward explaining why Williams and Davis have been such a fit over the past eight years, a span in which Williams has recorded five 20-win seasons, including the last four in a row.

One of the few remaining nonscholarship basketball programs in Division II, Davis has retained an approach to athletics in general that sets it out of the mainstream of most major universities, and certainly most like-sized schools in California. Williams' program receives no UC funding, relying instead upon student referenda and its own money-generating and money-raising ability.

The average cost to attend Davis for a year is roughly $12,500. Thus, the players Williams has recruited to his team are those who both qualify academically to attend the university and have the financial means to do so.

In other words, they play because they want to. And their willingness to embrace Williams' team approach owes at least partly to the fact that, by and large, these were athletes not widely pursued by scholarship programs.

"I've heard the coaches (Williams and his assistants) talk about how they'll go on a recruiting trip and they'll like 10 guys, and out of the 10, they'll maybe be able to get two (admitted) into Davis," Vlasic said. "I think the coach knows what type of player he wants to coach, and who will fit into the system he has here."

Williams, who has coached at the high school, community college and Division III levels in addition to Division I (Pepperdine) and Davis, takes the team notion to extremes. He appoints no team captain, on the theory that if he did so, other players would shrink from the responsibility of policing teammates. This season, 12 Aggies averaged at least 10 minutes per game, a depth of experience that was unmatched in the tournament and noted with pleasure by CBS commentator Dean Smith, the former North Carolina coach.

"This team had tremendous leadership," Williams said, "and I firmly believe that if it doesn't come from them, it isn't going to be worth much. You can lead only those who want to be led."

With the Aggies of 1997-98, Williams enjoyed such a group -- and one of the great unknowns of his possible move to Santa Barbara is whether the kind of selfless play exhibited by Davis this season could possibly be carried over to a higher-pressure, full-scholarship, Big West Conference Division I program.

But that's what happens when a team starts winning: The world at some point sits up and takes notice, and somebody somewhere decides to offer the coach a new job. Bob Williams seemed to sense as much two weeks ago -- even if he had little idea just how loud the explosion would be.