SALT LAKE CITY — Just before the start of the season in January, Greg Marsden was asked about Utah’s gymnastics team not winning a national championship in 20 years. He didn’t get defensive, which was always one of his strong traits.
“Have we won a championship lately? No. Have we had teams that could do that?” he said. “Yes.”
He paused a moment before saying, “So I guess at that point you have to blame the coaching.”
Not to mention the allergy season, the lunar tides and the price of Rice in China.
Marsden is to blame for Utah’s “failures” like Fleming’s is to blame for the deplorable conditions of rare steak.
If Marsden messed this up, please keep the leftovers.
The longtime coach announced Monday he is retiring as co-coach of the Utes, 10-time national champions. His team nearly pulled off a shocking win last Saturday, finishing second to Florida. That despite senior captain Tory Wilson being out with an injury.
Instead of shrinking, the Utes did what Marsden’s teams usually did. They got feisty. One season their media guide and promotional ads featured a team comprised of street-tough women wearing tattered tights and hand grips. That’s how Marsden always approached it: scrappiness with attitude.
That’s why this year was a perfect time to retire. He left the crowd calling for more. Marsden’s 1,048 wins and seven national Coach of the Year awards made him arguably the best college gymnastics coach in history. He left with the speedometer on 90.
“There is no one reason I chose to leave now. It just felt right,” he said in a news release. “I still love coming to the gym every day and working with these elite student-athletes, coaches and staff, but I feel the other elements of the job are best suited for someone younger.”
Yeah, second place is such a bad place to finish.
His teams have placed in the top five 29 times, in the top two 19 times. He coached 367 All-Americans and 25 individual national champions, including this year’s uneven bar winner, Georgia Dabritz. That’s impressive. But almost as important is that his team brought Utah its first Pac-12 championship, a factor that can’t be overlooked at a school trying to establish relevance in a new conference.
Hired in 1975 as a graduate assistant, his athletes wore dowdy sweats and Farrah Fawcett hair, but they could have been wearing dungarees for all he cared. That first season his team finished 10th nationally. Meanwhile, he was plowing new ground in athletics. With Title IX gaining momentum, universities were looking for viable programs to balance the number of male athletes.
Utah didn’t just want a token program; it wanted a showcase. Marsden didn’t just want a paycheck; he wanted trophies and degrees for his athletes. So he attacked with a vengeance, eventually drawing elite gymnasts. But he also hinted that other schools often got the can’t-miss prospects. He got potential greats and made them All-Americans.
His wife Megan, who has coached with him for 31 of his 40 seasons, will remain as co-coach with former assistant Tom Farden. She, most of all, knows about details, such as his tendency to go to bed around midnight but get up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. and start fussing about details. She was the steady hand, he the high-strung perfectionist.
“I was probably less nervous when I started, because I was just a goofy graduate student and thought I’d be doing this for a year or two and then I’d be out. So I really didn’t care much then,” he said in 2006. “Now my career’s on the line.”
Oh, and didn’t you hear?
Comfort food is on its way out.
So he called it quits, a day after the nationals concluded. It was a regular Jim Brown moment, retirement at the top of his game.
No matter what the 64-year-old Marsden says about the team needing younger coaches.
Turning Utah into the nation’s best-attended program was entirely his fault. What else could he do but quit before he got fired … another 40 years down the road.
Email: rock@desnews.com; Twitter: @therockmonster; Blog: Rockmonster Unplugged