After transferring from UW, Zags' Dickau makes it big
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SPOKANE - In the early-morning hours at the Charlotte Y. Martin Centre on the Gonzaga University campus, the basketball is bouncing, thunk, thunk, thunk.
Dan Dickau is happy here, happy to be in the gym early, happy at Gonzaga, happy to be in the NCAA tournament again. No, what he really is, is back in high school once more, back at Prairie in southwestern Washington, doing high school things, feeling the camaraderie of youth, in touch with the game early in the morning and late at night.
"After basketball games, they'd all go to someone's house," recalls his high school coach, Eric Hjort. "Have pizza and stay overnight. Then come to practice Saturday morning together.
"I think Dan is able to experience that a little at Gonzaga."
University of Washington basketball fans with broad minds are happy for Dickau, pleased that he has found what he was looking for when he abruptly left the program two years ago and later announced he was transferring to Gonzaga.
Those with narrower outlooks can't but wonder what happened, why one of the best recruits in the eight-year regime of Bob Bender left the basketball program, for another school in the state, no less.
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He has gone to Gonzaga and become the player the best forecasts had him becoming. Dickau enters Friday's game against Virginia in the NCAA South Regional averaging 18.3 points and 6.5 assists, shooting 47 percent on three-pointers and 86 percent on free throws.
Those around Dickau, and Dickau himself, have always taken the high road in discussing his transfer. No knocks on Washington, only that he needed a change. Only that it just wasn't working out as he had hoped.
Even today, Dickau, his father Randy and Hjort take pains to note the grace with which Bender runs his program. Almost every sentence on the subject ends with " ... not that Washington wasn't," or " ... not that Washington didn't."
Still, the act of transferring is the act of divorcing, and the Huskies - who recruited Dickau first and hardest, knew about him before everybody else - suffer darts if only by refraction.
"I don't like to see kids transfer," Hjort says. "You make a commitment, and you need to stay."
Nevertheless, at the Final Four in St. Petersburg, Fla., two years ago, Gonzaga Coach Mark Few got a call saying Dickau had decided to leave Washington and was seriously considering Gonzaga.
Few is friends with Bender. His immediate reaction: "Whoa, we're not doing anything here. I don't want this ruining a friendship, and if it does, maybe he needs to go somewhere else. I was very apprehensive."
Few didn't know how far the move had progressed. Dickau would call former Prairie teammate Zach Gourde at Gonzaga. More often, he would spend time on the phone with one of his closest friends, ex-Gonzaga guard Richie Frahm, whom he had known since grade school.
"I had a deep faith in God, knowing He's got plans for me," Dickau says. "I just felt he was pushing me into the belief that I wasn't in the right place for me. The more I'd pray about it and think about it, the more Gonzaga would be on my mind.
"I'd wake up in the morning and Gonzaga was on my mind. And then later in the day, I'd get a phone call from Richie or Zach."
Dickau's conclusion: "I think I need to do this."
Why?
It appears a collection of forces pushed Dickau out of Washington. He was a small-town guy living in a big city. When he wanted to get to the gym from the apartment he shared with teammate Michael Johnson, "Sometimes it would take 20 minutes to get down there."
Some of his classes were huge, and, "Sometimes in those classes, you don't bother going. I found myself doing that quite a few times."
He kept getting snapshots of what the Gonzaga program was like. He kept hearing about a family atmosphere, just as he had loved in high school.
"I think he appreciates that here, when practice ends, all the guys will go out to dinner or a movie or somewhere, instead of just dispersing and getting back together tomorrow at 3 o'clock," Few says. "(But) I know he still thinks the world of Bob. We talk about that all the time."
Those tight with the Gonzaga team say it doesn't just show up in the NCAA regionals and become everybody's cuddly underdog. It has a closely defined way of doing things that matched Dickau's passion.
Says Dickau's father, "Observing the Gonzaga practices, they are a machine. The tremendous amount of one-on-one work that Dan wanted, he got that in abundance at Gonzaga. Don't push down Washington's program or the coaches there. We really respect them and the people there. Dan was looking for something that would allow him to get even better, or somebody who had a commitment to taking him to the next level."
Faces changed around Dickau, as they inevitably do in college basketball. By the time he got to Washington, the assistant coach who had recruited him, Ray Giacoletti, was gone.
As a freshman three years ago in the NCAA tournament, Dickau played 17 minutes against Xavier. He developed a broken foot in the offseason, and with his gym rat's mentality, rushed his return and reinjured it after 13 games of his sophomore season. Maybe that gave him too much time to think.
At the same time, along came freshman Senque Carey playing the point, making people forget Dickau was injured. The emergence of Carey has been popularly cited as one of the reasons Dickau left, but it may not have been fundamental to his decision.
"That was just a small part of it," Dickau said on the day UW announced his departure. "I could have seen us playing together."
If Dickau were ever inclined to feel fated toward Gonzaga, he found one more reason. At Washington, he wore No. 12, it says in the UW press guides, to honor the player he always calls "the greatest point guard ever."
John Stockton is a Gonzaga grad who still works out on campus in the late summer.
"I didn't even think about asking for 12, I'd just flip it around and take 21," Dickau says. "The first time I saw him, I said, 'Hey, I'm Dan Dickau.' He looked me dead in the eye and said, 'I'm John Stockton.' I thought, 'You don't have to tell me, I've watched you the last 10 or 12 years.'"
Dickau has been everything the Gonzaga coaches expected, only more. One day last year, assistant Leon Rice walked up the steps from the arena and asked Few, "You know who the best shooter in our program is?"
"No way Dan Dickau can outshoot Richie Frahm," Few says.
But Dickau has proved him wrong.
Dickau spends so much time in the gym, Few wonders if he's overdoing it. But Gonzaga's No. 2 career scorer, Jim McPhee, did that when Few arrived a decade ago and it's de rigueur among the Zags.
"All our kids have a key and a code to the locker room," Few says. "They can work their games anytime. That's something we feel pretty strongly about."
Dickau has grown out his hair from his close-cropped UW days, and recently it has highlights, the result of a night with old high school friends and a bottle of bleach.
Facially, he still has that vacant-eyed, lost-little-boy look, a face that could pass for 16. Funny, that's how Dan Dickau feels again.