Overview:
Shantay Legans played for Cal and Fresno State after averaging 24 points per game for Dos Pueblos High School in 1999 to win his second Santa Barbara County Player of the Year Award
Shantay Legans got a visit with the spirit of Christmas Past last week.
Last Monday’s basketball game at UC Santa Barbara brought the University of Portland coach back to the crossroads of his at-risk youth.
The poignancy hit home when the Thunderdome began to reverberate with the kids from the local Boys & Girls Clubs who were admitted free of charge.
It brought Legans back to a childhood in which a pair of coaches — Sal Rodriguez of the Goleta club and Ray Lopes from UCSB — guided him onto a better path.
“A lot of the father figures in my life were coaches,” Legans said.
He was only 6 when his basketball promise was first chronicled.
A journalist researching a story about Santa Barbara’s homeless shelters noticed young Shantay chucking a basketball through a makeshift hoop.
“Look at him,” Legans’ mother told the reporter. “He’s always cheerful.”
Basketball was fast becoming his happy place in a very unstable world.
His mother had moved them into Transition House after getting released from jail on drug charges.
His father joined them at the shelter after spending three years in prison for pushing heroin. He would soon leave their lives for good.
“Shantay’s gone from Los Angeles with his grandmother to Oxnard, Ventura and Lompoc with us,” Susan Legans told the reporter. “We’ve lived here and there in greasy spoon motels.
“He hasn’t had a chance to make friends, to stay in one place for an extended period of time.”
Shantay, however, beamed with every shot that nestled through the hoop that day.
“He thinks life is wonderful,” Susan said through a hopeful smile.
Life did turn out wonderful, her son would later say, thanks to a dutiful mother who won her sobriety and the people she so avidly sought to mentor him.
They included, most impactfully, the Rodriguez and Lopes families.
“I put them through so much, and they stuck by my side,” Shantay told Noozhawk.
And it made him want to follow in their footsteps “as a teacher and as a coach.”
Coach Class
ESPN ranked Legans as one of college basketball’s top “age 40-and-under coaches” in 2021 after he guided Eastern Washington to the NCAA tournament and a near-upset of third-seeded Kansas.
Portland hired him after that season to reboot its long-moribund program.
He often sought the advice of Ben Howland, another one of Rodriguez’s disciples from the Goleta Boys & Girls Club who would later coach UCLA to three Final Fours.
“The University of Portland got a home run in this hire in terms of work ethic, in terms of knowledge, in terms of teaching and motivating,” Howland said. “Most of all, Shantay is a great example of what ministers want as a mentor for young people and young athletes.
“It’s a phenomenal story, what he’s accomplished in his life so far.”
Legans’ odyssey from Santa Barbara’s Transition House to Portland’s Chiles Center covered some rough road.
His difficult upbringing, he once admitted, left “a chip on my shoulder.”
“I’ve done some crazy things, I’ve done some dumb things,” he said. “I had the worst attitude.”
Legans confessed to being kicked out of three of the Boys & Girls Clubs in the Greater Santa Barbara area.
“Eastside, Westside, all over town … even Carpinteria,” he said.
The club in Old Town Goleta was his last chance.
Rodriguez, the club’s director at the time, vividly remembers the first time Legans’ grandfather dropped him off.
“Shantay was in the third grade, probably,” he said. “He was handling the ball and talking all this smack and stuff … and even in third grade he was pretty good.
“His granddad picked him up later that evening and I told him, ‘Hey, this kid is going to be a good basketball player.’
“He said, ‘How do you know?’ And I said, ‘Believe me, I know.’”
Others only saw the bad in Shantay. Several asked Rodriguez to ban him from the club, just like the others had.
“They’re saying, ‘This kid is a bad influence on my kid,’” Rodriguez said. “All I told them was, ‘Kids like Shantay are what we’re here for.’”
“Sal loved me for all my faults,” Legans explained. “He saw the good stuff, too.”
All in the Family
Rodriguez and his wife, Amie, included Legans in family events with their children, Bo and Pam. They even brought him along on trips to such places as the Grand Canyon.
“He spent a lot of time at my house, and he and my son are good friends,” Rodriguez said. “He was a good kid, really.
“I had to protect him … His mouth would get him into trouble sometimes.”
Susan Legans signed up her son with the Big Brothers & Big Sisters of America at about the same time he joined the Goleta Boys & Girls Club.
The organization asked then-UCSB head coach Jerry Pimm if any Gaucho player or coach would volunteer as Shantay’s big brother.
“This little guy needs a mentor,” Pimm asked after one Gaucho practice. “Anyone?”
Nobody spoke up.
But Lopes couldn’t get the fatherless little boy out of his head in the hours that followed.
“We were a young family,” he said. “We just had our daughter. She was a little baby.
“I went home and talked with my wife about it.”
Ray and Pierette Lopes, who would eventually have three children, decided to take on Shantay as their godson.
Lopes approached Pimm the next morning and said, “I’ll do it … I’ll be there for that kid.”
Shantay was disappointed at first.
“I was bummed because he wasn’t a player,” he explained.
Lopes won him over by teaching him how to fish and play golf. He also invited him to UCSB’s practices and games.
“He was always there for me,” Legans said.
“He became like a son to us … We loved him,” Lopes said. “He was a good kid.
“He had a hard life. He had his mom, but they were just getting by.”
Smack Attack
The Gauchos were cracking the top 25 in the national polls at the time. They would get their first NCAA Division I tournament victory the following year at the 1990 Regional in Knoxville, Tennessee.
But Lopes and his wife made sure to attend a few of Legans’ games, as well.
“This little rascal could play,” Lopes said. “He could really play.
“He had a mouth on him, now. He was a talker on the floor. But he had the game to back it up.”
Rodriguez built a Goleta youth all-star team around Legans and entered it in tournaments throughout the West.
“We’re beating this team from inner-city L.A., and Shantay is talking smack the whole time,” Rodriguez recalled. “One of our players — Danny Grace — finally comes up and says, ‘Coach, please tell Shantay to shut up because these guys are going to beat us up afterward.’”
Rodriguez eventually got Legans’ mother involved.
“I told her, ‘Shantay is out of control … If you don’t come to the rest of the tournaments, I’m not taking him with me,’” he said.
“And so she went to every single tournament.”
Her strong parental influence — and that of Rodriguez and Lopes — soon had an effect on the precocious youngster.
“I calmed down when I realized that it wasn’t the way to act,” Legans said.
He ranked as one of the nation’s top point guards while playing for Dos Pueblos High School.
The 5-foot-10 lefthander twice won Santa Barbara County Player of the Year honors.
He averaged 24 points per game as a senior in 1999 and also led the Chargers in assists and steals.
Legans was invited to play in a national all-star game after his graduation. He turned it down, however, in favor of a Santa Barbara-Ventura event that benefited the area’s Boys & Girls Clubs.
“I promised Sal Rodriguez a long time ago that I would play in this game,” he explained at the time. “Also, I think it will be more fun to play in this one with my friends.”
Old College Try
He earned a basketball scholarship to UC Berkeley and averaged 10.4 points and 4.4 assists per game over the course of three seasons.
Legans led the Golden Bears to two NCAA tournaments. They advanced to the second round in 2002, only to be knocked out by Howland’s third-seeded Pittsburgh team.
“He kicked my butt,” Legans said with a laugh. “I’m still mad at him for that.”
But he was always fiercely loyal to his mentors.
He announced that he was transferring to Fresno State for his senior year after Lopes was hired as the Bulldogs’ head coach.
“People told me it would be stupid if you go, but I didn’t care,” Legans said. “My dream was to play for him.”
He averaged 15 points and 5.6 assists at Fresno while earning a bachelor’s degree in African American studies.
He figured that his future was in social work, helping the kind of at-risk kids that he’d once been. But basketball remained his passion.
“Shantay doesn’t think he’s some NBA stud or the greatest point guard to come down the pike,” Susan Legans told a reporter in 2002.
“But he thinks he could have a future as a player or coach, probably overseas.”
He played in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands before returning to his roots.
“I hired him at the Goleta club for a part-time job,” Rodriguez said. “And when I started coaching at Laguna Blanca, I asked him to be my assistant.
“He had a real knack for it. He was in charge of the defense and I let him do all the substitutions.
“And we did great. We had two really good seasons.”
He also got Legans a paying job at the corporate office for CKE Restaurants.
But after a few years, in 2009 at age 28, he approached Rodriguez to talk about a career change.
“I want to coach,” he told him.
Assist Man
His old mentor began making calls. Eastern Washington coach Kirk Earlywine agreed to “an interview with no promises.”
“Shantay broke up with his girlfriend — she didn’t want to go — got into his car and drove to Cheney, Washington,” Rodriguez said.
“No job, he just wanted to talk to the coach.”
Earlywine offered him a meager $16,000 a year … and Legans thought he’d hit the jackpot.
“All I could think about was coaching,” he said.
Legans’ job was put into jeopardy two years later when Eastern Washington replaced Earlywine with Jim Hayford.
He impressed the new coach, however, by writing a detailed scouting report on each returning player.
“I really wanted to stay, so I got on it right away,” Legans said.
Hayford was so impressed that he kept him on staff.
He also recommended Legans to be his replacement when he took the head job at Seattle University in 2017.
“Shantay has a unique ability to win almost anyone over at hello,” Hayford said. “I could turn over a recruiting contact to him and nobody was going to beat Shantay.
“Once that recruit met Shantay, they loved him.”
So did Tatjana Sparavalo, a former women’s basketball player at Eastern Washington.
They were married in 2014 and now have two children. Her influence on Legans became as profound as his mother’s.
“In certain senses, she reminds me of her and does things like my mom,” he said. “My mom had no fear — ever — and neither does my wife.
“Before I even thought I could be a great basketball coach, my mom put the faith in me that I could be.”
The Mother Lode
Susan Legans died at age 70 just a few days before Legans’ Eastern Washington team won the 2021 Big Sky Conference championship.
“She’s the type who would have hid her death from me, just so I wouldn’t be distracted,” Legans said. “Sometimes I listen to a voice mail from my mom … and it gets tough.
“When we won the championship, I listened to an old voice mail.”
His four-year record of 75-49 at Eastern Washington equated to the best winning percentage (.581) in school history.
Legans faced a more difficult task when Portland, a member of the tough West Coast Conference, hired him in 2021.
The Pilots had won just one WCC game in the previous three seasons combined. They had only one winning season in a decade.
Portland went 19-15 overall and 7-7 in the WCC in his first year at the helm.
The Pilots — with victories this season over such Big West Conference schools as UC Davis, Cal State Fullerton and Long Beach State — left Santa Barbara with a 7-6 record after their Dec. 22 loss to the Gauchos.
Their other defeats have come to the likes of Stanford and Oregon. He’s coveted every challenge.
“It’s always going to be tough,” Legans said. “If you don’t have a chip on your shoulder, that means you’re ready to get beaten up.”
He’s taken that approach since childhood.
“They bounced around a lot when he was a kid,” Rodriguez explained. “At one time, they were living in a shelter.
“It made it really hard on him, hanging out with middle-class and upper-class kids who lived in beautiful homes with two parents.
“He’d see them and it would make him wonder. He talks about that.”
Legans brought up the subject several years ago when Rodriguez asked him to speak at a fundraiser for the Goleta Boys & Girls Club.
He talked about the angry kid from the one-room apartment and one-parent family who grew up at that very same club to become a leader of men.
“He must’ve gone on for half an hour, telling that story,” Rodriguez said. “When we started asking for donations, the hands went up.
“We raised a lot of money that night.”
The trash talk had given way to the sweet talk long ago.
