Goodenbour Says Goodbye to Acker
It’s been several months since I’ve had a good old-fashioned adrenaline rush from this reporting business, and that’s expected, I suppose, from the summer months around here. It’s angering, since summer used to be my favorite season and now it’s turned into a giant nap.
So, as you can imagine, it was both pleasantly and excruciatingly harrowing for a good couple of hours Friday to try to track down a real person who would confirm or deny that apparently former Chico State women’s basketball coach Molly Goodenbour is bolting for UC Irvine.
It hasn’t been officially announced yet, but the fact that Bob Olson at UC Irvine OK’d the release of the news means that Monday, the Anteaters and Goodenbour will have a shiny new agreement to sign and a press statement to release. But we media types are impatient people, a hellish mix when sometimes the only thing you can hope for is a return phone call. Luckily, I got that call from Olson.
Crazy blood-pumping aside, what does this mean for the Wildcats? We won’t really know until Monday, but obviously the search for a new coach has a spot near the top of the docket. Is Brian Fogel sticking around? The assistant did apply for the men’s head job, losing out to Clink, and this would make sense since he’s already here and it is a head job.
The Goodenbour news doesn’t exactly surprise me, because you’ve got to figure that it’s going to be difficult to hang onto a coach of that caliber if you’re a Division II school. It’s just the way it works. There are a lot of exceptional coaches at Chico State, to be sure, and that some of the best have stuck around because of dedication to the town/university is admittedly a point of frequent wonder to me. What will get lost in all of this, I’m sure, is that while it’s clear now that Chico State was a stepping stone for Goodenbour, the Wildcats benefited from it just as much, if not more, than she did.
A lot will be made of the controversy that happened while she was here, but it was more than a year ago. What Goodenbour’s legacy should be, in my opinion, is that of a transitional coach who recruited a boatload of talent, left her impression on what Division II basketball could be like in the CCAA and left that talent and vision behind.