Jun 2, 2016 4 min read

CALIFORNIA – If you’re familiar with the history of the California University men’s basketball program, then you had to notice the similarities, and I’m not talking about their West Virginia accents.

When Cal announced the hiring of Kent McBride Thursday, one had the feeling the Vulcans were trying to follow an old hiring blueprint – one that worked exceptionally well the first time it was utilized.

The job of men’s basketball head coach at Cal has been vacant only three times in three decades. The first was in 1986, after Tim Loomis left to become an assistant coach at Penn State. That’s when, only 17 days before the start of the season, Cal hired Jim Boone, a native of West Virginia with ties to the now-defunct West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, to be the Vulcans’ coach and pump life into a program that had won only seven games the previous season.

Boone, a native of Winfield, W.Va., played and coached in the WVIAC. He built Cal into a national power, taking the Vulcans to two NCAA Final Fours and winning four PSAC championships in 10 seasons. It was the best 10-year run in California basketball history. During that time, the Vulcans often played in front of capacity crowds at Hamer Hall.

McBride is a native of Mullens, W.Va. He played in the WVIAC at Concord and was an assistant coach at West Virginia Wesleyan and Glenville State before spending the last five years as Concord’s head coach. McBride, like Boone in 1986, takes over a Cal program that is coming off a seven-win season.

Whether McBride has the same kind of success at Cal as Boone, and if the basketball crowds will ever come close to filling the Convocation Center, is anybody’s guess. But after listening to McBride talk about his vision for Cal basketball, you see and hear the similarities to Boone. McBride, like Boone, is passionate about his job and he has a plan for success. And he wants to be in California.

“When you look at Cal, you have to look (for) the potential and put it into the perspective of what it can be. … The potential here and what level you can reach is what excites me, and that’s why this was a no-brainer move,” McBride said.

The process in hiring McBride was long and convoluted. There was a search, five candidates were brought to campus for interviews, then the search started over with a different search committee. McBride, however, was at the top of Cal’s short list from the start. And one of the people who he was chosen over was Boone. Now the head coach at Delta State, Boone was one of the original applicants.

Maybe Cal has hired a younger version of Boone who will return the Vulcans to their glory days.

McBride had been on the job only a few hours when the school held a news conference announcing his hiring. So you can excuse him for calling Cal’s league the “Pennsylvania Conference” instead of the PSAC – there was a Division III league called the Pennsylvania Conference – and its division the “Pennsylvania West” instead of the PSAC West. He did know the Vulcans had been to the Division II Elite Eight under coach Bill Brown, who announced in February that he was retiring after 20 seasons at Cal.

“I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the guy who has 365 career wins. That’s a lot of wins,” McBride said. “Coach Brown established a program and carried on a program that is not only known in the Pennsylvania Conference and our Atlantic Region but known across the country. The tradition and history he helped create, I hope to get right behind it, continue it and improve it slowly and surely.”

To be correct, it was Boone who established Cal as a PSAC and national power. Brown succeeded Boone and kept the program humming at an elite level for many years, overcoming his own health limitations in the process.

The draw of Cal, even after a rare down season, was enough to lure McBride away from his alma mater, his wife’s alma mater and a program he had taken to the NCAA Division II tournament last season.

Maybe this native West Virginian will return Cal to the national tournament, just like a young and energetic coach did decades ago.

Sports editor Chris Dugan can be reached at dugan@observer-reporter.com.