Coaches say Dan Monson, fired by Long Beach State but still in NCAA tournament, is living the dream

Long Beach State men’s basketball head coach Dan Monson just lost his job. He says has a mortgage payment and a car payment coming up next week that he’s worried about.

This week, though, he couldn’t be more elated. “It’s been a life-changing week, in a good way.”

That’s because the 62-year-old Monson, after being fired at his job after 17 years as head coach of the Long Beach State men’s basketball team, pulled off the unimaginable: he turned his struggling team into conference champions and sent them to an NCAA Tournament bid in his final gasp at the job.

His fellow head coaches at Day 1 of tournament play in Salt Lake City could not have been more impressed at the way Monson turned a rough situation into the ride of a lifetime.

“There’s not too many guys that can go out the way that they would dream they could go out,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “Dan gets to do that. I think we should all be happy for him on that.”

“I‘m thrilled for him,” McNeese State coach Will Wade said. “I like anybody that can rise up and go against the grain a little bit. That’s a good thing.”

“Hey, I think it’s a story worthy of a Disney show or something, man, the way it’s playing out,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few said.

Monson, though, went a bit more specific with his reference: “Did you see the Seinfeld when George was trying to get fired and couldn’t lose his job, still going to work every day?”

“That’s me,” he said. “I’m a Seinfeld episode going on right now in real life.”

A unique story

Long Beach State competes in the Big West Conference, made up of 10 California schools and the University of Hawaii. They were having an OK season, but lost its last five games of the season to finish at 18-14 before the conference tournament began last week. Monson texted his athletic director, Bobby Smitheran, to set up a meeting. There, according to reporting from The Athletic, he offered to resign at the end of the season if the program wanted — but Smitheran wanted a change even sooner.

In the end, the compromise was that Monson could finish out the year, but the team would announce his departure immediately.

It’s probably a move Smitheran regrets.

“I don’t see any reason to have cut the cord when they did. They could have just waited ‘til after the conference tournament. What were they going to do? Get a jump-start? They should have let it play out and whatever happened, happened,” Wade said about the situation. “This doesn’t look good, I wouldn’t assume, for what they’re doing.”

But for the optics of the situation to change, the players would have to change their play, too.

When Monson told his team about his departure last Monday, he was floored by his team’s response. Some of his players started crying, and the group asked for a 30-minute meeting among themselves to gather their thoughts. Then, they asked to do a film session — because they wanted to win the Big West.

“As a coach, you’re always disciplining your kids, you’re always holding them accountable, pushing them. You don’t really know how they’re taking it until they tell you they love you or they show you,” Monson said. “Those guys showed me they loved me that day. I’ll never forget it.”

And then: Monson held the film session that every coach dreams of.

“Just look at this first defensive clip, guys. We close out short here. The guy is wide open, we don’t get a contest,” Monson told them. “These are the kind of plays that get a coach fired.”

They cracked up in laughter. He had a good point.

“Truly I don’t believe it was his fault. We were the guys out there. We’re the ones guarding and putting the ball in the basket,” Long Beach junior guard Jadon Jones said. “I know it’s a business and they have to make business decisions. But to do it before the tournament, it hurt. It felt like we had let him down. They had completely given up on us. They didn’t believe we were even going to compete. We knew that we had to prove them wrong.”

The run would require three wins in three days. Thursday, UC Riverside went down, then on Friday, No. 2 seed UC Irvine did. On Saturday, No. 1 UC Davis fell in a four-point squeaker. The dead man was walking.

A unique outlook

What’s impressed most, though, is Monson’s attitude about the whole thing. It would be easy to turn this — a nearly unprecedented level of vindication for a coach, heck, for anyone who’s ever lost a job — into negative feelings towards that wronged him. His players for not playing better, sooner. His athletic director for pushing him out the door.

To be clear, he’s “not thanking them for firing me by any means,” he says.

“But I think life is life. Some of it is good and some of it’s bad. How you pivot through it defines who you are,” Monson said. “I’m hoping that people look at me and say, ‘Hey, he had a great job. What are we feeling sorry for him for?’

“I had 17 years driving that car. It was a great ride. I knew the car was leased. I mean, they wanted the keys back,” he continued. “It’s not insured this week, but I still get to drive it. I’m going to try to keep it on the road, the road to the Final Four. I’m going to try to keep it on there.”

It will be a tough road. Long Beach — mascot: “The Beach” — will be taking on the No. 2 seed Arizona Wildcats in Salt Lake City’s first game on Thursday, scheduled for noon MT. The Pac-12 regular season champions have a 25-8 record, the Pac-12 player of the year (Caleb Love), a potential NBA draft pick (Pelle Larsson), and top-10 rankings in the country in both offense and defense.

Monson’s 15th seed are 19.5-point underdogs. Should they somehow win, a matchup with Dayton or Nevada would come on Saturday.

But he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself. “As I tell my players, I’m not worried about anything but tomorrow. We’re trying to stay in the moment,” he said. “Staying in the moment has been pretty good to us this week.”