As a UCLA fan, saying that Saturday night's Final Four game was a disappointment would be an understatement. Watching the Bruins get crushed by Florida in the Final Four for the second year in a row and seeing UCLA continue to stall at 99 NCAA team titles yet again was more than just difficult to tolerate.
Still, while my West Coast team has continued to struggle, things have been brightening here in Morningside Heights.
Two weekends ago the Columbia fencing team, a perennial national power, finished in third place at the NCAA Championships after having taken both Ivy titles in February. The bronze trophy earned at the NCAAs was the highest result for Columbia since 1992-93 and while that is certainly the biggest highlight for the athletics program this year, it has been the Lions' other teams that have made the 2006-07 season one of the most successful in recent memory.
The year started off with a bang thanks to the first Ivy championship in history for the women's soccer team. A close loss in the NCAA tournament to Connecticut ended the season, but the foundation for future success was set under long-time coach Kevin McCarthy. Football also triumphed this season with the program's first .500 season in a decade as first-year head coach Norries Wilson and his staff used their personnel's strengths to end the year with two straight Ivy victories.
Transitioning into winter sports, Columbia continued its success most notably with the wrestling team. The Lions earned their first ever top-25 national ranking midway through the season and upset a ranked Penn team early in the campaign in Philadelphia. And despite a slow start to the Ivy season in men's basketball, Columbia finished at 7-7 in the Ancient Eight thanks to a three-game winning streak at the end of the season.
For a program that has struggled in the past, how did the success of this past year come about? The answer is actually quite simple-coaching. Excluding Wilson, since this was his debut season at the helm of the Lions, all of Columbia's most successful coaches have been given the necessary time to build their programs-a rarity in collegiate athletics these days.
The pressures of immediate success from students, alumni, and members of athletic departments around the nation usually result in mass firings when a coach cannot produce within the first few seasons. Not every program will be lucky enough to get a Ben Howland or John Thompson III where, in only three seasons, they can take their teams to the pinnacle of college basketball. That does not mean, however, that coaches who do not produce positive results instantly aren't leading their teams in the right direction, a fact that has not escaped Columbia's administration.
What fans and athletic departments forget most of the time is that it takes more than just a year or two to institute new strategies, recruit players that fit the new system, and assess the talent left over from the previous regime. Despite two BCS appearances in his first two seasons at Notre Dame, there are already Web sites calling for Charlie Weis to be fired-a claim that sounds ridiculous, but is in fact all too common these days.
I applaud Columbia for realizing this and not falling into the all-too-common trap of appeasing the masses when it is not in the best interest of the program as a whole. Keeping the trust of your coaches not only helps improve the entire program in the short term, but when coaches do move on in the future, the new hires can feel confident that they will be given ample time to implement the changes they see fit.
For all the years of disappointment and mediocrity in Columbia's athletic history, understanding that coaches need time to fix is, at least in my book, the best remedy to overcoming past failures.