If you you think the O's are in a bad way, their tribulations of the past nine years are a drop in the bucket in comparison to the losing ways of my alma mater's basketball team throughout the school's history. The University of Richmond, then a member of the less-than-stellar Southern Conference (the Southern's two minutes of glory were in the late fifties when Jerry West's West Virginia Mountaineers were still members, and the powerhouse Davidson teams of the late sixties that put Lefty Dreisell on the road to the University of Maryland), had put together a total of two winning seasons between 1945 and 1970. That's two. Over twenty-five-plus years. And by 'winning', we mean 15 and 14 games, not 20.

It didn't help that their home court was a converted trolley car storage facility located five miles off-campus, though the distant home did seem to keep the pressure off the coaches. Out of sight, out of mind, and all that. (Actually, one of the more surreal moments in my sporting life occurred there, because the ABA Virginia Squires played five home games at that same trolley car barn in their inaugural season. As unseasoned a sportsman as I was at that point in my life, I understood the bizarre concept of watching Charlie Scott, Rick Barry, Mel Daniels, and Dan Issel doing battle in a dingy, dusty 4000-seat old place so nondescript that it carried the generic sobriquet 'The Arena'.)

That changed with the opening of the Richmond Coliseum in 1971. Fans actually began showing up at games, and the newspaper actually covered them. What they witnessed was a hapless group of unskilled athletes whose 'star' was a slow, scrappy point guard named Mike Annastacio who didn't have anyone to pass the ball to. Lew Mills, the amicable balding alumnus-coach, was in the prime of carrying on the long-standing losing tradition he had helped establish during his own three-year run as a starter some twenty years prior.

Then the stakes went even higher as the University opened a glistening new 10,000 seat arena on campus, the Robins Center. Students attended the games in numbers for probably the first time ever, and they didn't like what they saw. By the end of that first season, Mills was booed on a regular basis. By the end of the next season, Lew was out, the first basketball coach the university had fired in thirty years. (Lew went on to success as the athletic director of then-small time crosstown urban Virginia Commonwealth University.) Carl Sloane, his replacement, had been successful at George Washington. He did bring in a much higher level of athlete, but in taking on some troubled kids from junior college programs and the like, he exposed the faculty and alumni to a level of thuggery they had not experienced in their athletes. Two grand larceny and three assault arrests later, the Carl Sloane Era came to a halting end after three seasons and one winning season.

Where to turn to next? Why, to the Flavors of the Month, of course. Bill Foster had revived Duke's moribund program that had totally fallen off the wagon under Bucky Waters, so of course schools like Richmond looked to the assistants as potential answers to their many questions. Lou Goetz was his name, and a running game was his claim to fame. Though Foster raved about Goetz' innovative and aggressive offense, there was one problem. Richmond didn't have any Mike Gminskis or Jim Spanarkels or Eugene Banks.

Most any coach will tell you the worst thing you can do with non-athletic personnel is run with the ball. But the Spiders did, running into one turnover and ill-fated shot after another, and, being too small on the boards, were vulnerable to cherry-picking on the other end. The Goetz era was ugly...11 wins the first year, 9 the second.

At the cusp of the final season of his three-year deal, Goetz stepped down, citing burnout. What could Richmond do in September? They ended up shrugging their shoulders and promoted Goetz's top assistant, long-time New Jersey high school coach Dick Tarrant. Tarrant had been Goetz's high school coach, but was running a scouting service in the Northeast when Goetz tapped him as an assistant. Tarrant was already in his fifties; the parade had passed him by long ago. But the university had little choice but to write off the coming season and begin a new coaching search.

But a funny thing happened.

The school had scheduled an opener with Wake Forest that season, assuming that in Goetz's third year they would be ready to take on such a formidable foe. The Demon Deacons came in ranked #18 in the pre-season polls. A packed house watched with the expectation of at least seeing a ranked team, a rare occurrence in Richmond at that time. The Spiders, playing heady basketball, beat the Deacons in a close game. But as it turned out, this wasn't really an upset as much as a harbinger.

The Spiders won 18 games that season, and Tarrant's 'interim' label was removed. They made the NIT, and two seasons later, they made the unthought-of promised land, the NCAA's, for the first time, beating Charles Barkley's Auburn Tigers in the first round, the first of several giant-killer performances on the big stage. They even reached the Sweet Sixteen one season by defeating defending national champ Indiana and a powerhouse Georgia Tech club. The Dick Tarrant Years, with its 9 postseason berths in 12 seasons, were the most luminous the program had ever experienced, or probably will ever experience, because a younger coach would have moved on to greener pastures, as happened with their other successful coach, John Beilein.

What does this have to do with the Orioles?

Plenty, maybe. Hopefully.

Dave Trembley reminds me a lot of Tarrant, a baseball lifer who has been overlooked for various reasons, but whose managing pedigree shows up from the day he gets the job. There's something about leadership and savvy that can show itself very early in the process. I never saw it in Ray Miller, and certainly never saw it in Maz, (who might have been the worst manager I ever saw this side of Maury Wills) and Sammy, though a great guy, just didn't seem to have the aura, either. But I think Trembley does.

Could Trembley be the O's Tarrant, thrust into greatness by the hand of fate?

I hope we have a chance to find out, because I think he might be.