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Another series of articles on the Brandon University basketball situation
BU Back to Square 1
BY DAVID LARKINS
Three factors combined to convince Barnaby Craddock that his time in Brandon was done.

The now former head coach of the Brandon University Bobcats men’s basketball team was officially introduced as the new head man for the Fraser Valley Cascades Wednesday, one day after a Brandon Sun story first reported the move to bring Craddock to the Abbotsford, B.C., campus was imminent. In fact, the announcement came earlier than originally planned when news leaked that Craddock had been offered the position.

But Craddock said Wednesday that the financial commitment from UCFV, a heightened workload that was being placed on him by BU and a chance to work closer to his native Vancouver all conspired to make his decision.

“Of course (the job) piqued my interested and at the time I had just been given a full teaching load at BU, which was more teaching than I done the previous two years, so that wasn’t making me any happier,” he said.

“But the chance to get back to B.C. was tempting ... eventually they upped their (offer). They made me an offer that became enough to get me out there and combined with the family and the location.”

Still, that decision wasn’t easy.

“I feel pretty strongly about all the guys on this team, so it was a bit heartbreaking. But hopefully over the long run I’ll know it was the right decision,” he said.

Craddock informed many of his players on Tuesday of his decision and — this is what Bobcat fans want to know — said he has no intention of taking any of his recruits or current players away from the BU program.

“I think there’s zero per cent chance of that,” he said. “The guys are all vocal in coming back to the program.”

Winnipeg high school all-stars Kyle Vince and Kevin Oliver committed months ago and Craddock says he still expects them to honour that commitment. Also expected in camp in September is former Manitoba Bisons point guard Tarik Tokar and Toronto product Martin Lawrence, an athletic 6-foot-7 big who played senior men’s basketball in the city last year but is more than capable of making the jump to the university game.

So with presumably a solid returning core that led the team to within three points of a national championship, the BU job should be a coveted one by out-of-work or upwardly mobile coaches in Canada. But with the Bobcats again searching for their third men’s head coach in the past four years, the BU job is suddenly appearing like a stepping stone for coaches, rather than a place to settle.

“There are challenges at Brandon than are different than many other schools,” BU director of athletics Rick Nickelchok said, citing the fact that coaches are faculty members and required to teach as well as coach and then go through a tenure process that he called “difficult.”

“It means they must go through a difficult tenure process to secure the security in their jobs and that is something that most schools don’t have to worry about.”

Speculation on who will be in line to make the move to Brandon has already started, but Craddock covets assistant coach Mike Raimbault to take over where he left off. Raimbault is among a few young coaches who have been linked to the position already.

“There is still some good news. It’s not that all of a sudden we’re lost in this process,” Nickelchok said. “There is continuity ... We still have Mike in the program and he’s going to stay in the program and Mike has come highly recommended by Barnaby in the past.”

Craddock echoed Nickelchok’s sentiments.

“Selfishly I’d like to see that be Mike Raimbault, to be honest with you,” Craddock said. “He’s a local guy that this would be his dream job. He’s from Brandon and he’d like to be here long-term, so I’d like to think that somehow this will work out for Mike and you might have a coach that’s here for a long, extended period of time.”

In an ironic twist, the Cascades will make their first-ever appearance in Brandon on Jan. 4, 2008, making Craddock’s homecoming the first game of the new year for both teams.

One of Craddock’s close friends joked with him that the reunion won’t exactly come with a ticker tape parade.

“... As for the Jan. 4 game, (women’s volleyball head coach) Lee Carter told me that he was going to jump out of the crowd and throw a tomato at me, so I’m a little scared to be honest with you on that,” he said.

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AD could be next
BY DAVID LARKINS
By the end of this week, Brandon University could be out a men’s basketball coach as well as an athletic director.

Multiple sources requesting anonymity have confirmed to the Brandon Sun that BU director of athletics Rick Nickelchok has been interviewed for the vacant AD position at Acadia University.

Nickelchok’s interest in Acadia was first published in a Brandon Sun article on Wednesday that broke the story of the University College of Fraser Valley’s hiring of BU men’s basketball coach Barnaby Craddock. Nickelchok, whose contract at BU is set to expire next summer, would not confirm that he applied for the Acadia position but seemed to intimate that he is open to pursuing other opportunities.

“I’m in the last year of my contract and I have to go through a tenure process and I think at this stage of my contract I have a responsibility to my family to explore what options are available to me,” he said. “That’s where I am right now.”

A highly-placed source in Canadian Interuniversity Sport told the Sun that Nickelchok was a person Acadia was impressed with, but that AU alumnus Brian Heaney — a basketball analyst on TSN — is a front-runner for the job based on his national clout and connection to the school.

Nickelchok also denied he was trying to leverage tenure status out of BU by going after other positions.

“I think there’s a process in the collective agreement,” he said. “I don’t see any possibility of not following that process ... The university can’t not go through that process. I have to do what I need to do to look after my own personal best interests.”

Nickelchok reiterated his desire to stay in the city where he has lived since August, 2003.

“Yes, definitely,” he said.

An announcement from Acadia is expected either late this week or early next week.

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Bobcats left high and dry

Barnaby Craddock will be back coaching in the Brandon University gymnasium after all.

You’ll just have to circle Jan. 4, 2008 on your calendar in order to see it.

That’s the day the Fraser Valley Cascades will make their first-ever trip to Brandon for a men’s basketball game that will now, ironically, feature Craddock coaching on the opposite bench he’s worked for the past two seasons.

Craddock is leaving BU in favour of heading closer to his hometown. We’ve heard this tune before, roughly two months before Craddock took the job vacated in 2005 by an off-to-greener-pastures Les Berry, who bolted back to his native Nova Scotia.

We’ll resist the desire to rehash the words from the story that ran in the May 12, 2005 edition, but the similarities are clear.

Craddock said it was a difficult decision to leave the team he led to the national championship game and one that he agonized over for a number of days. That would seem to be true given the fact UCFV reportedly had to sweeten its offer to finally convince Craddock to make the leap.

And while Berry and Craddock both headed home — or at least closer to home — for cherished opportunities, BU has been the one left to wonder “what now?”

BU director of athletics Rick Nickelchok — perhaps himself not long for the Wheat City after purportedly interviewing for a job at Acadia — acknowledged in today’s edition of the Sun that the challenges are greater for BU to have a coach stick around because of the teaching workload and difficulty of obtaining tenure.

The workload was a factor in Craddock’s departure; The tenure a factor in Berry’s exodus.

And obviously those issues are pretty prevalent considering Craddock was willing to pass up the chance to coach a potential national contender again in favour of joining a school in more disarray than Brandon.

You see, UCFV is the school that — in order to jive with Canada West conference regulations — dismissed the two men handling the coaching duties because one of them, Pat Lee, was not a full-time, on-campus coach and then, according to Lee, didn’t have the class to inform him to his face that his services were not going to be retained.

The school is also lacking a full-time athletic director and — did we mention — Craddock will take over a sophomore program in the toughest division in the conference that missed the playoffs with a 6-17 record last season.

As was written in that opinion piece way back in May of 2005, you can’t hate a man for taking a rare chance to be somewhere he always wanted to be. But as was the case in 2005, so too it is in 2007 when a number of people are left angered by once again being left in the dust by a coach who used BU as a springboard to bigger and better things.

Animosity towards Craddock, however, is misguided considering the above. He is an emotional coach who took the wins in stride and the losses to heart. And he undoubtedly struggled to leave behind a group of players he truly loved and went to the wall with.

The university wanted to keep Craddock, but its idea of enticing him was apparently to heap a larger off-court workload on him. If you love him, you’ve got a funny way of showing it.

Memo to BU’s decision-makers: Rooting down in Brandon isn’t exactly what everyone in this country has in mind for themselves. Sometimes you have to actually make the situation a little more likable. Craddock is not the coach of the Brandon men’s basketball team because a better offer came along.

Followers of this team over the years have been spoiled because they had a coach who was committed to staying, had a family and set up shop in town for the long haul.

Now that three coaches have done the job since Jerry Hemmings, perhaps it’s becoming clear that coaching basketball in Brandon isn’t the crown jewel of jobs in Canadian university sports after all: An environment ripe with politicking, less job security and more labour.

Whether we’re writing this exact same story next year, or the year after, is likely dependent on whether or not the school realizes it too has extra work to do.
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