By: Trevor Williams, WSU Athletics Communication Student Assistant
When longtime Washington State basketball coach George Raveling was inducted as a direct elect into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, a sense of wonderment overcame the Cougar coach.
“I thought, ‘Why me?’” Raveling said. “It’s something that I never dreamed of or thought was possible. Then, as time moved on, I started to think of all the people that contributed towards me getting this award.”
While Raveling’s coaching career extended beyond his 11 years in Pullman, the time he spent at Washington State played a pivotal role in his Hall of Fame selection.
“I look back on it, and it was a huge gamble that Dr. Terrell and Ray Nagel took when they hired me – for a variety of reasons,” Raveling said. “I had no head coaching experience, I was going to be the first African-American coach in the Pac-8, and I was coming from the East.”
Still, there was something special about Raveling that helped WSU President Dr. Glenn Terrell and Athletic Director Ray Nagel roll the dice on the young man from the East Coast – and Cougar fans then and now, are glad they did.
The city of Pullman and the rolling hills of the Palouse often leave a certain impact on the lives of the people who live there – even if for a short time. Raveling’s time in Eastern Washington was anything but a blip on the radar, and even after coaching in basketball-rich environments like Iowa and Los Angeles, there’s a certain energy that Pullman created for Raveling and his teams.
“Whether it was the city of Pullman, the citizens, the university, the administration, the players, or the students – especially the students – everybody chipped in,” Raveling said. “Everyone was a contributor to our success. We all came together and we made it happen. I don’t know if we could’ve done it without any one of those entities.”
Long before there was a ZZU CRU, the student body was making a difference, Raveling said.
“The one thing I think about when I look back at Washington State is the amazing emotional engagement that took place between the team, myself, and the students,” he said. “At that time, no one in the league had as passionate of a student body as we did. People today probably wouldn’t believe it, but there was a time when students would camp out to get seats for the game.”
In fact, Cougar fans provided Raveling the most poignant moment of his coaching career. After WSU beat UCLA in 1980, Beasley Coliseum was rocking and the students and fans weren’t going anywhere.
“We beat UCLA at home for the first time in ages,” Raveling said. “When the game was over, we were up in the locker room and Sam Jankovich came and said, ‘George you’ve got to come back out on the floor.’ I said, ‘For what?’ He said, ‘Everybody is still in their seats – they’re calling for you. You’ve got to go back out. They aren’t going to leave until you go back out.’”
The previous Cougar win over UCLA was in 1966, and Cougar fans knew the importance of the moment, and the importance of their head coach.
“So I was coming down the tunnel and I could hear the crowd chanting, ‘We want George, we want George,’” Raveling said. “By the time I hit the bottom of the tunnel, I had tears in my eyes and the place was packed. When I came out, they erupted, and it was the most emotional moment of my coaching career.”
Raveling carried that memory away from Pullman when his time at WSU came to an end, and it sticks with him to this day as a symbol of the strength of a small-town community.
“Things like that made Washington State so special,” Raveling said. “We were kind of the stepchild of the league at that time and everybody made fun of us, and this was one time when the stepchild stepped up and made everybody proud.”
Over the course of his Cougar career, Raveling’s players made the fans proud. He was a recruiting savant for WSU, sweeping the United States like a magnet attracted to top basketball talent.
“I took the approach of an insurance salesman when recruiting,” Raveling said. “I’d talk to as many ‘clients’ as possible, knowing somewhere in the U.S. there are 10 kids who will come to school at Washington State and who are good enough to help us win. I just had to figure out who those 10 were and get them to Pullman. We just cast a wide net and hoped that the salmon would bite.”
Salmon did bite. In fact, they sometimes even sought out the hook – like James Donaldson, a seven-foot two-inch Cougar great - who wrote Raveling a letter asking to be recruited.
“He really recruited us, we didn’t recruit him,” Raveling said.
At the time, Raveling had a scholarship available and decided to take a chance on Donaldson, just as many had taken a chance on him.
“Donaldson was an amazing success story for us,” Raveling said.
Behind each great success story in basketball is usually a tremendous coach, and Cougar greats like Donaldson, Craig Ehlo, Don Collins, and Steve Puidokas can attest to Raveling’s coaching prowess. So can Bryan Pollard, a forward from Detroit who lifted the Cougars over UCLA in dramatic fashion during the 1983 season.
Pollard, a six-foot four-inch guard played like he was six-foot nine-inches tall, according to Raveling. After a vicious dunk earlier in the game, which slightly deformed the rim, Pollard gave WSU the winning basket with a tip-in at the buzzer, securing a 70-68 win over the Bruins. Pollard was awarded the rim and the net after the game.
“I had this technique called inside out, where you start inside and move out into the lane to get your offensive position,” Raveling said. “We used to work on that every day in practice. The next day, when Bryan came in the office, he said, ‘Hey, Coach. All those days you made us work on inside out rebounding – it paid off. Look at the film and see how I got open for that tip-in.’”
When sitting and talking with Raveling, each story helps paint a better picture of what happened in Pullman during his tenure. In his mind, a community came together to build something special.
“The years at Washington State served as the foundation for all things that came after that, whether it was in coaching, my personal life, or family life,” Raveling said. “It was the first time that I really truly understood what it meant to lead, what it meant to coach, and what it meant to share and provide for others.”
“In a horse race, I would’ve been a long shot,” Raveling said, regarding his humble beginnings in Pullman.
Now, that long shot – one of the Cougars’ all-time favorite long shots – will be where he belongs; in the Hall of Fame.
