Portland Magazine
Athletics
April 16, 2020
How UP hired women’s basketball coach Michael Meek and turned a program around in one year
By Corey Brock
On a cold and foggy Tuesday night in February of 2019, Pilots’ athletic director Scott Leykam pointed his car southwest for McMinnville and Linfield University, where their women’s basketball team was taking on George Fox University. While Leykam was going to see a basketball game, what he really was going to see was a basketball coach.
With the Pilots’ women’s basketball team in the bottom half of the WCC standings, Leykam’s gut told him it might be time for a coaching change. So he drove to Linfield that evening; to look in on the visiting coach, George Fox’s Michael Meek.
Leykam went incognito, not wanting to be spotted, and not wanting anyone to connect the dots while he still had a sitting head coach. It was an investigative mission.
“I had my ball hat on, a hoodie, and jeans…and my popcorn,” Leykam recalled 15 months later. “In the first half, I sat across from him (Meek), and they were ahead 38-17 in the first quarter. I thought, ‘38 points in 10 minutes? That could work.’”
In the second half of that game, Leykam moved up behind the George Fox bench for a closer look at Meek—and perhaps even a listen. What he saw and heard impressed him even more than those 38 points.
“He was teaching. Every time they [players] came off the court, there was eye contact. They were all completely responsive. In the second half, even when the game started to tighten up, the teaching did not become negative,” Leykam said.
“Those kids believed in themselves and…their belief never wavered.”
On his drive home that night, alone with his thoughts, Leykam had one of those light-bulb moments.
“This is what I want,” Leykam thought to himself. “I want kids to believe in what they are being taught. His style of play and the way he taught the game had me 100 percent convinced.”
Exactly one month to the day later, the Pilots officially moved on from head coach Cheryl Sorenson.
“I was very grateful for all Cheryl had done during her time at UP, but felt we needed to be more competitive,” Leykam said.
The head coaching job was officially open, though Leykam already had a guy in mind. While some coaching searches can go on and on—flirting and flirtation, dead ends, candidates finding a job elsewhere—the Pilots settled on a new head coach just 15 days after they began looking for one, hiring Meek to head the program.
Long before the Pilots stormed through the WCC tournament, winning 22 games, their first title since 1994 and claiming the school’s first NCAA bid since 1997, they first had to find a coach. This is the story of how the school settled on Meek.
A few hours after the decision to look for a new coach, Leykam reached out to three current players and summoned them to his office. He chose a freshman (Haylee Andrews), sophomore (Maddie Muhlheim), and a junior (Kate Andersen), one player from each class, by design.
At 4 p.m. that afternoon, the players arrived, cramming themselves on a couch in Leykam’s office.
“I had decided if and when we made a move, those would be the three [players] I was going to lean on. What I want from student athletes in that scenario was this; ‘What’s not going well, what’s important to you, what do you need?’” Leykam said.
The players stayed for 90 minutes, and the conversation revealed a few things for Leykam to think about.
“They wanted a teacher, someone they could connect with. They were all incredibly thoughtful,” he said. “I had my thoughts…but I’m not the one in the locker room, in the huddle. They wanted to play fast. They wanted someone positive.”
Anderson, starting guard and now a graduating senior, said, “We wanted someone who poured themselves into the team and cared for us…more than just as players.”
What they wanted, unbeknownst to them at the time, was a coach like Meek. He won five state titles at Southridge High in Beaverton and also went 230-85 in nine seasons at George Fox, taking the Bruins to two Division III national title games (2012, 2015). Before he decided to hire Sorenson, Leykam interviewed Meek at the tail end of the search process. He was impressed, but…
“When I interviewed Mike five years ago, he was impressive, but still at the point where he was in Scott Rueck’s shadow. He’d been there three or four years, and they were winning, but you weren’t sure if that was from Scott, from Mike, or a combo of both,” Leykam said.
Rueck had a .766 winning percentage at George Fox, winning a national title in 2009, before moving down the road to build what is now one of the top Division I programs in the nation at Oregon State.
As the Pilots struggled, Leykam occasionally caught himself thinking of his first conversation with Meek, while checking the box scores to see how he was doing. There was one constant.
“In year numbers three and four, as we started to struggle, I was looking at what he was doing at George Fox,” Leykam said. “And all he was doing was winning ballgames, with his players and his style.”
Before he left the office after talking to the team members that night on March 12, Leykam grabbed his phone and fired off a text message to Meek.
“You’re always worried about being the jilted AD. Will he listen to me this time after I didn’t hire him?” Leykam thought to himself. “There were a few hours of silence after that. That didn’t seem…good.”
Meek finally got back in touch with Leykam that night, and the two set a time to meet the following morning at a Starbucks in Beaverton. The two talked for two hours.
“He had already watched some of our games and knew that we had to get better,” Leykam said.
During the process, Leykam reached out to two coaches—the University of Oregon head coach, Kelly Graves, and his assistant, Mark Campbell, for their thoughts on Meek. Leykam spoke with former Pilots coach Jim Sollars, who despite retiring after the 2014, has remained well connected within the coaching fraternity.
Two days later, Leykam and Meek were back at that same Starbucks in Beaverton. The two dug a little deeper this time, drilling into coaching philosophy, the academic component of University of Portland, what Meek believed in, and how it would translate to the school.
Three days later, on March 18, Meek arrived on campus for an official interview. At this point, Leykam was sold on Meek. He sensed that the feeling was mutual. Meek had lunch that afternoon with Andrews and Andersen. There were plenty of sweaty palms at the table.
“I think Mike was just as nervous as we were,” Andersen said. “He was a really nice guy, and you could tell he cares for people a lot.”
Finally, Leykam offered Meek the job. He agreed—but with one caveat.
“Mike didn't want anything to get out until he had the chance to tell his George Fox kids,” Leykam said. “That told me a lot about his character.”
“I loved my time at George Fox,” Meek said. “It was a really hard place for me to leave.”
Once he was hired, Meek dove into video analysis to see just what he had inherited. The Pilots would enter the 2019-2020 season without their top two scorers, who had both graduated.
“I think the hardest part at the beginning was I didn’t really know what to compare it against,” Meek said. “I know we lost a lot of scoring and rebounding. I thought we’d be in for some challenges in that regard.”
But Meek noticed something else.
“I was so pleasantly happy with the character of our players…and how willing they were to be coached,” Meek said. “And they were great with each other as teammates.”
One of Meek’s first challenges was getting freshman forward Alex Fowler to commit to the program. Fowler had come to The Bluff on a recruiting visit during the 2018-19 season but had not yet made a college decision. Fowler, who is from the same hometown in Australia as Andrews, did end up committing to UP. She went on to lead the team and the West Coast Conference in scoring, at 18 points a game.
“Alex was one who we had to find a way to get a commitment from,” said Meek.
Leykam made it a point to stop by the team’s first practice in the fall—and was floored by what he saw.
“I went out the first day of practice, and he was just teaching. I mean, it was vintage Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, teaching dribbling, defensive stance. The student athletes were eating it up,” Leykam said.
“He even went over how to make a lay-in,” Andersen said. “That went on for weeks. It’s so basic, but it does matter.”
Leykam was excited by Meek’s plans to be fast, to be athletic. They were going to press—a lot, even if that style of play was a little unconventional. They would play hard, making life hell on their opponents for 40 minutes every game.
“We wanted to commit to pouring themselves into their effort … and I think because of that, we made a significant jump defensively,” Meek said. “We press on every made possession, and we are probably more aggressive than some teams.”
It worked.
The Pilots beat Utah State on the road to open the season after being down 18-6. Later, they defeated a very good Fresno State, a team that went on to win 25 games, by 11 points. They had a big early lead in a game at No. 17 Gonzaga in December but lost late.
“There was such great growth with this team,” Meek said. “They never let defeats get them too down, and they never got too high after wins. They always did a good job regrouping each and every game. And over time, there became a confidence level that there wasn’t a team in the league we couldn’t play with.”
The Pilots won four of the last five games of the regular season, losing at home to Gonzaga on Feb. 29. Picked to finish last before the season, the Pilots finished fourth in the conference and got first- and second-round byes into the quarterfinals of the WCC tournament. Once they got to Las Vegas, the Pilots soared.
They topped Pacific 76-69 in the quarterfinals, setting up a third game against Gonzaga in the semifinals. Gonzaga came out hot, racing to a 29-9 lead. But the Pilots eventually found their footing. And with three seconds left, Andrews—on her 20th birthday, no less—dropped in a running floater to give the Pilots to a 70-69 win and a spot in the WCC title game.
“It’s kind of funny, earlier in the season we weren’t finishing games…we were still trying to learn how to finish games,” Meek said.
In the title game against San Diego, a team the Pilots had lost to twice in the regular season, the teams traded leads throughout the game. In overtime, the ball ended up in Andrews’ hands again late. Her lay-in with 58 seconds gave Portland a 64-63 lead. The Pilots survived a three-point attempt by San Diego in the waning seconds before the buzzer sounded.
The Pilots were WCC champions for the first time since 1994 and, best of all, they were going dancing in the NCAA tournament.
“It still feels so surreal,” Leykam said. “I remember hugging a bunch of people. I also remember seeing the University president jumping up and down. We had parents on the floor celebrating, the kids were making snow angels out of confetti. I think we would have stayed there and celebrated all night.”
A few days later, after returning to campus, Meek was in the athletic office and ran into Leykam. That’s when news broke that the NCAA tournament would be canceled due to the COVID-19 virus. To be sure, this was a devastating blow to the Pilots, though Meek made sure to convey to his team that it didn’t diminish what they had achieved.
“I was disappointed for our players, and our senior (Andersen) who had such a great year,” Meek said. “I felt like we didn’t get proper closure … but at the same time, it would be selfish not to feel a lot of gratitude for how great a season it was.
“This was such a phenomenal group.”
Corey Brock is a Vancouver-based writer.
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