Overview:
The Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table will enshrine Ben Howland and six others into its Hall of Fame during its 58th annual banquet on Monday, September 14
Mother knew best for the young and restless Ben Howland.
Mary Howland’s life-changing move was to get her bouncing little boy out of the house and bouncing a basketball.
“I was a wild and out-of-control little kid, and she needed a break,” Howland once confessed. “She took me to the Goleta Boys Club for the first time when I was about 8 or 9.
“That turned out to be a pretty great thing for me.”
Countless hours of basketball at the Goleta gym led to 40 years of coaching greatness that took hold at UC Santa Barbara and reached its apex at UCLA with three straight NCAA Final Fours.
“It was just a dream come true to be coaching, especially to start out at UCSB,” Howland told Noozhawk.
He is one in a Magnificent Seven who will be inducted into the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table Hall of Fame on Sept. 14.
The Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table’s 58th annual banquet will begin at 5:30 p.m. at Hatch Hall, located inside the Direct Relief building in Goleta.
Other inductees include baseball and football player Artie Holland (San Marcos High School); basketball players Shantay Legans (Dos Pueblos High) and Jordyn Lilly (Bishop Diego High); water polo star Jenna Phreaner (San Marcos High); water polo and swim coach Danelle Little Muhr (Dos Pueblos High); and groundskeeper Javier Acosta (Santa Barbara High), this year’s special achievement recipient.
The festivities will take place just a few blocks off the three-mile route that Howland biked or walked every day to the Goleta Boys & Girls Club.
“I’m really proud of this,” he said of the induction. “Having grown up here, representing Santa Barbara was special for me ever since I was a kid.”
My Pal Sal
Howland — like Legans two decades later — had a great basketball mentor in Boys & Girls Club director Sal Rodriguez, a former player at San Marcos High and Fresno State.
“I met him for the first time when he just got back from Vietnam,” he said. “George Chelini hired him to run the Goleta Boys Club.
“He really did a great job of putting together so many different activities for the kids.
“He’s a great person and role model … always unselfish, giving himself up for others.”
Rodriguez’s coaching gave them a love for basketball that often come back to haunt the club director.
He wound up having to swing by the gym on Sundays, when it was supposedly closed, to chase Howland and his pals out of the building.
“Ben would sneak into the gym all the time, he and Arnie Beck and Tom DeMarcus and those guys,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t see that kind of kid much anymore.”
It became a game of “cat-and-mouse,” he added, after he put chains on the gymnasium door.
“We’d climb up onto the roof and through a window,” Howland said. “That’s how much we loved to play.
“It meant everything to us to get in there and play basketball.”
He figures that he still holds one Goleta Boys Club Tomahawk League record: Most shots in a game.
“In 32 minutes of running time, with one minute of stopped time in the end of each half, I once attempted 48 shots,” Howland declared proudly. “I think I made 15 of them.”
Rodriguez verified Howland’s record, although with one correction: “It was 49 shots, actually.”
Howland’s reputation as a steely tough player and coach was forged at the club.
“There was a guy there back then by the name of Pablo Lino who would just hammer you in dodge ball,” Howland said. “So you learn about toughness — the toughness of being able to take a Pablo Lino ball off the head and keep playing … and not go home crying.”
Back to the Future
By the eighth grade, he was telling everyone that he was going to become the best college basketball coach in history.
“He was saying this all the time,” DeMarcus recalled. “We’d tell him, ‘You’ve got to be kidding … C’mon Ben … just shut up, will you?’”
Howland attended the old Fairview Elementary School and Goleta Valley Junior High School before entering Dos Pueblos High as a ninth-grader.
His father, the Rev. Bob Howland, moved Mary and their four kids out of town the next year when he accepted the pastorship of a Presbyterian church in Cerritos.
Howland returned to town in 1975, however, to play for Santa Barbara City College in what turned out to be a reunion of Boys Club playmates.
“Jay Hillock was the assistant coach there — he was a guy I’d known since I was 8 years old — and he recruited me to play for Ed De Lacy,” Howland said.
“Jay was also the guy who gave me my first job in Division I basketball at Gonzaga.”
The Vaqueros went 62-6 during Howland’s two seasons on the team. They advanced to the 1977 State JC Championship Game at Fresno’s Selland Arena before losing a 78-75 heartbreaker to Cypress.
The roster was stacked with four of his former Dos Pueblos schoolmates —DeMarcus, Beck, Dan Pagliotti and Greg Henderson — along with Robbie Robinson and former Santa Barbara High star Eddie White.
Every one of those Vaqueros continued on to play for NCAA Division I programs.
“A big part of why the Boys Club was so important and such a great thing for me was the fellowship of having made so many close friends there,” Howland said. “Guys like Chuck Melendez and Tom DeMarcus are two of my closest friends.
“Greg Henderson was the best man at my wedding.”
He reunited with another Boys Club gym rat, San Marcos High graduate Mark Mattos, after transferring to Weber State in 1977.
Hillock, who took over as Gonzaga’s head coach, brought Howland aboard as a graduate assistant in 1981.
He soon had him defending future NBA Hall of Famer John Stockton, tooth and nail, during the team’s workouts.
Going to the Gauchos
De Lacy, who took over as UCSB’s head coach in 1978, brought him back to town in 1982 as a full-time Gaucho assistant.
But Howland figured he was out of a job the following year when Jerry Pimm replaced De Lacy.
“I lived in the hotel lobby at the Final Four in Albuquerque that year, looking for a job,” Howland recalled. “I got an offer from Eastern Washington out of it.”
Pimm trumped that offer, however, when he recognized the feisty guard.
“He once helped beat one of my Utah teams when (the Utes) played at Weber,” Pimm said. “I was anxious to talk to him and see if he was still the competitive, hard-working, tough-minded guy that I remembered.
“And he was. Ben was very driven to be successful.”
Pimm sent Howland on the road to sell recruits on his new Gaucho program.
“The NCAA didn’t restrict you so much in how many days you could be out there,” Howland said. “I used to drive to L.A. every weekend for this league at Dominguez High called the Slam ‘N’ Jam.
“During the summer, I’d be gone for six straight weeks.”
He channeled a steady stream of talent to UCSB that included Brian Shaw, Carrick DeHart, Eric McArthur, Mike Doyle, Gary Gray, Lucius Davis, Idris Jones, Michael Meyer and Paul Johnson.
The Gauchos went 16-13 during the 1986-1987 season to halt a string of 10 straight losing seasons.
They also advanced to the league tournament semifinals that year before losing a 70-69 thriller to San Jose Staté.
“I can remember Ben coming up to me after we’d lost,” said Bill Mahoney, the Gauchos’ longtime director of media relations. “He told me, ‘It only gets better from here.’”
It did at that. UCSB won an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament the following year. The Gauchos returned to March Madness in 1990 and beat Houston in their tournament opener
They also earned National Invitation Tournament berths in 1989, 1992 and 1993.
“We had that thing rolling, and so did the Big West Conference as a multiple-bid league,” Howland said. “We were getting 6,000 people every night … It was a really tough ticket back then.
“That was a pretty special time in the history of UCSB and Santa Barbara, and it was truly great to have been a part of it.”
Getting Drilled
Pimm plugged his energy into his practices, just as Hillock had at Gonzaga.
He once handed him a blocking bag after Howland complained about the team’s lack of toughness.
“I told him, ‘As they go up for a rebound or a shot, bang them around with the bag until they get used to it — and you can get after them a bit verbally, too,’” Pimm recalled.
The next thing he knew, Howland was knocking Gauchos to the floor, left and right.
“Ben was yelling, ‘C’mon! Get up you wussies!’” Pimm said. “‘You can’t hit the floor with just one foot! Bend your knees apart!’
“He was preaching and yelling … and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh! I’ve opened a can of worms!’”
The Gauchos toughened up enough during the 1987-1988 season to beat North Carolina State, Gary Payton’s Oregon State team, and nationally ranked UNLV twice.
UCSB cracked the NCAA Top 25 the next season after winning 15 of its first 16 games.
An overtime defeat at Fresno State, however, capped a tough three-week stretch in which the Gauchos lost four of six games.
“Kevin Stevenson, a guy who’d played at Santa Barbara City College, hit the game-winner for Fresno,” Mahoney recalled. “I can remember Ben and another coach, Stan Stewart, coming to my hotel room afterward with a case of beer.
“He had me do my Mike Tyson impression because it would crack him up.
“After a really tough loss, he just needed something to laugh about.”
Movie Rebuff
Mahoney and I once invited Howland to join us for a movie on the eve of a crucial 1993 game at San Jose Staté. We thought the distraction might calm his frayed nerves.
But the film — Falling Down, which starred 1968 UCSB grad Michael Douglas — only heightened his anxiety.
Howland began to roam the theater, just as the enraged Douglas character was rampaging the streets of Los Angeles on the screen.
“Ben kept getting up and down,” Mahoney recalled. “He was sitting with us to start, but then he went to the lobby and came back to sit in a different seat.”
I thought he was just annoyed with the way I was chewing my popcorn. But his mind was on basketball, not snacks or the cinema.
“He got up like three or four times and then left the theater altogether,” Mahoney said.
Howland was passed over for head coaching jobs at UC Irvine and Loyola Marymount before Northern Arizona gave him a shot in 1994.
He was so typically thorough in his preparation that he got Mahoney and Jim Romeo, UCSB’s director of athletics at the time, to give him a mock job interview.
“The first time he went through it, he wasn’t even sure how he should cross his legs,” Mahoney recalled. “The answers coming out of his mouth were exactly what you’d want to hear during an interview, but he was kind of antsy and squirming.
“He just didn’t have the right body language.
“But Ben is smart and Ben learns. By the time he left the room, he had it figured out.”
Howland figured out how to get Northern Arizona to the NIT in 1997 and to the NCAA tournament in 1998.
He rebuilt another program at Pittsburgh, which was once described as “the graveyard of basketball coaches” by Mike DeCourcy of The Sporting News.
Howland won consensus National Coach of the Year honors in 2002 after leading the Panthers to the Sweet 16 with a school-record 29 wins. Pitt made the Sweet 16 again in 2003 while winning 28 games.
UCLA came calling after that season ended.
Westwood Bound
“That UCLA news conference was a special moment for me because both my mom and dad were there,” Howland said. “And I was coming back home.”
His father died just a few months later. His mom died two years ago at age 91.
Howland won 233 games in 10 seasons at UCLA — second only to the 620 victories that John Wooden racked up during his 27 seasons with the Bruins.
He also took UCLA to seven NCAA tournaments and three consecutive Final Fours, from 2006 to 2008. No other coach has accomplished that since.
“The highlight for me was just being in so many great places,” he said. “But obviously going to three straight Final Fours was pretty special.”
Howland became only the 11th coach to take four different schools to the NCAA tournament when he led Mississippi State into the 2019 March Madness.
He had the Bulldogs primed for a long tournament run in 2020 after they’d won 11 of their last 15 regular-season games.
The COVID-19 pandemic, however, prompted NCAA officials to cancel the postseason just as Mississippi State was to play its Southeastern Conference tournament opener.
Howland’s eyes filled with tears as he broke the news to his players at the team hotel.
“It will always haunt me to not know what was going to happen with that team,” he said.
Howland, now 69, coached two more seasons at Mississippi State before moving back to Santa Barbara for good. He retired with a record of 533-306 to rank 63rd for all-time coaching wins.
He and his wife, Kim, live on the Mesa, not far from their two children.
Daughter Meredith lives in Santa Clarita and works as an oncology nurse.
Son Adam serves as a Santa Barbara County deputy district attorney. He and his wife, Brittney, have given Howland five grandchildren: Benjamin, Elijah, Asher, Abraham and Ariela.
“Ben II just started at DP,” Howland said. “They’re all really good students … super-bright and really good kids.
“Seeing your kids become parents and watching their kids grow up is the best part of life.”
The bouncing he does now are with grandkids on the knee.
