By KEVIN JAKAHI
By KEVIN JAKAHI
Hawaii Tribune-Herald
The NCAA lifted the postseason ban on Friday for the University of Hawaii men’s basketball team, which won the Big West Championship last season.
The Rainbow Warriors (14-14, 8-7 BWC) play at Long Beach State in their regular-season finale on Saturday.
The Big West tournament starts on Thursday, March 9 at the Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif., with UH either the fourth or fifth seed.
“The University of Hawaii, Manoa, will not have to serve a men’s basketball postseason ban, according to a reconsidered decision issued by the Division I Committee on Infractions. The university’s probationary period was also reduced from three years to two, and the men’s basketball scholarship penalty was changed from two scholarship reductions to one over each of the two years,” an NCAA statement said.
It’s been reported that UH will have the full 13 scholarships for 2017-18 because the team withheld scholarships this season and last season.
The NCAA also announced that UH’s probationary period has been reduced from three years to two and will now end in December 2017.
Those three factors — postseason ban clearance, full scholarship amounts, and probation reduction — should help the Rainbow Warriors in recruiting.
After last season, two junior starters — Stefan Jankovic and Aaron Valdes — left UH to turn pro while two other starters, Roderick Bobbitt and Quincy Smith, were seniors.
The only starter who returned was Mike Thomas, a senior forward, who is redshirting this season.
Last season in his first year, UH coach Eran Ganot led Hawaii to a historic season as the Rainbow Warriors claimed both the Big West regular season and tournament titles and recorded the most wins in school history (28).
He not only led UH to its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2002 but also guided the team to an opening-round upset win over California for the program’s first-ever win in the Big Dance.
With eight players gone from last season’s 13-man roster, Ganot brought in 11 new players, including six freshmen and a key senior UCLA transfer in Noah Allen, who leads the team with 15.3 points per game.
“We are glad to be able to finally put this episode behind us,” UH athletic director David Matlin said in a statement. “We have been fully committed to uncovering and correcting any wrong-doing from the very first day we self-reported our initial concern. And throughout this entire investigation, we have cooperated fully, including openly acknowledging the mistakes that were made.”
The NCAA’s initial set of sanctions, on Dec. 22, 2015, targeted violations committed by the staff of former coach Gib Arnold beginning in 2011.
UH fired Arnold prior to the 2014-15 season, which was headed by acting coach Benjy Taylor, and appealed its penalties in 2016. The school argued more lenient penalties should be applied because they were excessive and that most of the violations occurred under a previous NCAA penalty structure.
The NCAA put out a scathing description on the work environment at UH. In the statement it read:
“This case also provides a cautionary tale regarding the interaction between coaching staffs and institutional compliance offices. The relationship between the former head men’s basketball coach and the director of compliance at this institution was tense to the point of being nearly dysfunctional. Communication between the two was poor and overshadowed by an ongoing personality conflict. Had they worked more collaboratively in their dealings, at least some of the violations in this case would likely not have occurred.
“The former head coach and director of compliance rarely spoke to each other and conducted most of their business by email or through assistant coaches. During one team meeting, the former head coach told the student-athletes that the director of compliance was an enemy who could not be trusted.
“Due to her strained relationship with the former head coach, the director of compliance at times distanced herself from the men’s basketball program. During the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons she did not conduct any ‘spot checks’ of practices, she never checked on activities of prospective student-athletes during their official paid visits, and she admitted to being ‘a little lax’ on documenting on-campus evaluations of prospective student-athletes. In the same way that the former head coach exhibited animus toward her, she was at times openly hostile toward him. She once told former assistant coach 2 that she would ‘not lift a finger’ to help the former head coach. She reported an NCAA rules violation regarding the men’s basketball program to the conference office without informing any member of the men’s basketball staff.”
To read the NCAA report, view http://hawaiiathletics.com/documents/2017/3/3//Remanded_COI_Decision_Public.pdf?id=5284