Bob Huggins doesn't get too nostalgic. He is sentimental about playing Saturday's game at the Rock-N-Roll Shootout in Cleveland only because he will have a chance to visit with friends, family members, former players and longtime supporters from Northeast Ohio.

        The fact the University of Cincinnati will be facing Akron — the school Huggins coached from 1984-89 — for the first time since he was hired at UC will not mean anything special, the Bearcats coach said.

        “I don't look back much,” Huggins said. “I start looking backward, and all of a sudden I get clipped. I'm not into that.”

        He was an assistant coach for Chuck Machock at Central Florida for one season before inheriting an Akron team that had gone 8-19 in 1983-84, was on NCAA probation and had not been to the NCAA Tournament since 1975.

        Huggins' first Zips squad went 12-14, then won more than 20 games for each of the next four seasons.

        Akron has not won 20 since 1988-89, Huggins' last season. It has not been to the NCAA Tournament since 1986, under Huggins. The only National Invitation Tournament berths in school history were in 1987 and '89, under Huggins.

        Average attendance at Akron's James A. Rhodes Arena was 3,780 in Huggins' final season and has not been that high since.

        “He approached everything at Akron the same way that he does at Cincy,” said Walsh University football coach Jim Dennison, who was Akron's football coach when Huggins arrived and the athletic director when Huggins left. “He wants to win a national championship and he wants to be in the (NCAA) playoffs every year.

        “When he first started talking about those things at Akron, people just looked around. "What's this guy talking about?I truly believe that had he stayed at Akron, he'd have probably done the same thing there that he's done at Cincinnati. He's that good.”

        Huggins' Akron teams averaged 19.4 victories.

        In the 12 years that followed, Akron averaged 12.2 victories with six seasons of winning records and six of losing records. This year's team is 3-7.

        “We went from being a bottom-dweller to being (Ohio Valley) conference champions, which is what you set out to do,” Huggins said. “In the leagues like we were in, if you don't win your conference tournament, you don't get in the NCAA Tournament. We had Michigan on the ropes (in the 1986 NCAA). We kind of fumbled some balls around or it would've been a lot closer.”

        The Wolverines won 70-64. Huggins' starting center was a football player (Russell Holmes), and he had a walk-on shooting guard (Mike Dowdell). Two other football players were backup forwards.

        Huggins' teams lost first-round NIT games at Illinois State (79-72) in 1987 and at Ohio State (81-70) in 1989. He recruited All-American Eric McLaughlin, Akron's No.3 all-time scorer who attended Huggins' father's camp when he was young; Shawn Roberts, the school's No.12 all-time scorer; and Marcel Boyce, who's No.24.

        “Look at those three names and they're all through the record books,” Huggins said.

        But Huggins always will remain bothered by a move by the school's administration that held back his basketball program. Akron wanted its football team to jump from I-AA to I-A. It fired Dennison, a close friend of Huggins', and brought in former Moeller High School and Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust.

        When the football team became a I-A independent, the Ohio Valley Conference would not allow Akron to remain in the league in other sports. The Zips were independents for Huggins' last two seasons.

        “Who would want to play without having a league to play for?” Huggins said. “We weren't getting in the (NCAA) Tournament. We were playing to get in the NIT no matter what we did. Sure it was frustrating.”

        Dennison was associate athletic director for one year, then became the A.D. He eventually led Akron into the Mid-American Conference in 1992. By then, Huggins was gone.

        “You have to do that in a progression,” Dennison said. “What happened is they brought Gerry in and wanted to leap right over the MAC and just go to the big-time I-A, a very, very difficult thing to do if you don't have a lot of resources. It just set Bob's basketball program back in no-man's land.”

        Huggins and Faust never got along.

        “The whole thing that happened in football was not good for the basketball program,” Dennison said. “There wasn't enough long-range planning. ... There was a lot of sentiment either for or against Gerry, and I was caught in the middle of it. So was Bob.”

        Akron is in its seventh season under coach Dan Hipsher, who led the Zips to the 1998 MAC East Division title. Akron has lost in the first round of the conference tournament four consecutive years.

        “Bob was able to really sell the scrappy, overachieving team to the fans here, which was viewed well when it was going on and even more fondly since,” Akron Beacon Journal columnist Terry Pluto said. “I still hear from people who wish he had stayed a little longer because he had the program on the verge of doing something special.”

Bearcats relaxed, ready to roll Motor City could be showcase for Guidugli Huggins turned Akron around

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