Difficult circumstances brought down Dickerson
When former Tulane basketball head coach Dave Dickerson resigned March 31, there was a feeling that both he and the university were ready to move on. There was no tearful press conference; Dickerson tendered his resignation through a statement released by the athletic department. The man who guided the team through Hurricane Katrina left inconspicuously, without a single Conference USA championship or NCAA tournament berth to his credit.
It wasn’t as if the move was unexpected. When asked by the Times-Picayune several weeks ago if he wanted to continue coaching at Tulane, Dickerson’s answer sounded more noncommittal than a Brett Favre press conference.
“That’s a tough question; that’s a very difficult question,” Dickerson said. “I don’t want to accept this year as a competitor. I don’t want to accept this year, but I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer your question, really.”
His departure followed the former head coach’s worst season in his five years at the school: an 8-22 record and a first-round exit from the C-USA tournament. While injuries to key players on the team certainly hurt this year’s postseason chances, Dickerson — as the head coach — should receive his fair share of responsibility for the lack of success the program has experienced during the past half-decade.
He failed to recruit a big man throughout his Tulane tenure, a problem this year that was perhaps most apparent in the Green Wave’s early-season contest against Georgetown when 6-foot-11 Hoya center Greg Monroe dominated the post and no player taller than 6-7 stood in his way. His slow-tempo offense was ill-suited for a team as athletic as Tulane, limiting occasions that the group could quickly push the ball up the court against their slower opponents. Perhaps his most glaring failure was his lack of success against local opponents. The University of New Orleans, led by head coach Joe Pasternack, defeated the Green Wave four times in the past five seasons.
Dickerson, however, may not have been prepared for the challenges that would be presented to him at an academic-centric school like Tulane after previously serving as an assistant coach at Maryland, which won a national championship in 2002.
“Tulane is one of the best institutions I’ve ever worked at as far as the perception of the university and academics,” Dickerson said prior to his resignation. “Being a competitor, I would love to be at Tulane and have the opportunity to win Conference USA and get this team into postseason play. That was my goal when I took the job. But no one has ever given me a manual on how to deal with what I’ve had to deal with since I’ve been here at Tulane.”
Besides recruiting players under more rigid academic standards, Dickerson waited years for a promised new $13-million practice facility that still has yet to materialize. He also took part in the same trials that everyone in Green Wave athletics dealt with in the aftermath of Katrina. It might not be a stretch to say that with support lacking, win-loss records falling and attendance dropping, Dickerson left out of a sense that the cards were hopelessly stacked against him.
“Nobody in the country, no one took a job under as adverse circumstances and had been under those circumstances in the last five years in the history of college basketball probably,” Dickerson said following his final season. “I took this job in the cloud of the 2003 review on whether or not we should be Division I. That set us back a lot, not as basketball, but as athletics. And then four months after, Hurricane Katrina rolled around and we spent our first eight games — our first semester — on someone else’s campus. And now we go through the economic situation. So what other coach has had to deal with a tougher situation than I have?”
Tulane recently embarked on a head coaching search, and after two consecutive coaching hires out of the pool of assistant coaches at powerhouse basketball programs, Athletic Director Rick Dickson looked to hire a coach with previous head coaching experience on his resume. His challenge was to convince the incoming hire that the university has rededicated itself to its athletic program. It’s clear, however, that they did not buy the sales pitch.
Before the hiring of Ed Conroy, three rumored candidates publicly denied interest in the position, despite Dickson’s guarantee that the new practice facility would be built upon the new coach’s arrival. One thing is certain: If Tulane athletics continues to merely maintain the status quo, there will be a lot more coaches spinning the same tale as Dave Dickerson’s.