Greg Hansen: Rincon boys hoops coach Rich Utter continues to defy the odds

Most important, do not offend the basketball gods by asking Rincon/University High School coach Rich Utter about his greatest seasons 30 minutes before Tuesday’s Class 6A playoff game against Mesa Red Mountain.

“You’re gonna win this game,” I told Utter, inadvertently breaking the jinx code.

“I don’t need that type of pressure,” he said with a half-smile.

Almost predictably, Red Mountain shot 61% and beat Utter’s Rangers 63-45, ending a remarkable 20-win season.

Time will ease the Rangers’ pain. In a few days they’ll remember those 20 victories — the school’s best season since 2009 — more than producing a season-ending clunker against Red Mountain.

What Rincon’s return to relevance signified is that the Rangers are not on the path fellow TUSD basketball rivals Santa Rita and Catalina have sadly taken. Those two enrollment-challenged schools, built along with Rincon during Tucson’s population boom of the 1950s and ’60s, went a combined 1-35 this year and have employed a total of seven coaches in six years.

If you had taken a vote of “Who’s next to fade from prominence?” in the changing culture of TUSD sports, many eyes would have turned to the Rincon/University basketball program.

The difference is Utter. He has won 493 career games, none of them at a powerhouse, open-enrollment, gifted suburban school. In fact, Utter has won 491 of them at Rincon, second in Tucson boys basketball history to Sahuaro’s iconic Dick McConnell, who won 774.

Utter does more with less. He learned about “less” in his first year as a head coach, 1980, at Valley Union High School, a tiny rural school in Elfrida, a 3-point jumper from the Mexican border near Douglas.

“We won two games that year in Elfrida,” Utter remembers. He offers no explanation but raises his eyebrows for emphasis.

Utter is only the fourth coach in 64 years of Rincon/University boys basketball, one of the most prestigious coaching chains in Tucson sports history. His predecessors — Dick King, 1959-69; Bill Mehle, 1970-81; and Roland LaVetter, 1982-89 — have all been inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame, as was Utter, Class of 2016.

What strikes me whenever I walk into the antiquated Rincon gymnasium is that there is no display of success on the walls. No sense of history. If you walk into the gyms at Salpointe or Sahuaro or CDO or Catalina Foothills, it takes 15 minutes just to read the many championship plaques hanging on the walls.

It’s not a school without a strong sports history. The Rangers won a state baseball championship in 1962, the school’s third year. It soon won a state basketball championship, in 1965, and was probably Tucson’s top basketball program from 1965-80, until McConnell’s career at Sahuaro fully bloomed.

Many more Rincon state titles followed, especially in boys swimming (five), boys tennis (six), boys golf (three) and a couple in volleyball and boys soccer.

But as Tucson’s population shifted to the suburbs over the last 25 years, Rincon’s sports success ebbed. It hasn’t won a state championship since 2009, and rarely has been close.

The constant for the last 33 years has been Utter, who grew up in New York and graduated from Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania before moving to Tucson to earn a graduate degree at the UA. His mentor? LaVetter, who, along with McConnell, is one of the two most recognized high school basketball coaches in Tucson history.

Here’s my point: Sahuaro named its basketball gym after McConnell, and Pueblo named its basketball gym after LaVetter. Both are TUSD schools, so it’s not against the rules for Rincon to name its gym after Rich Utter.

When he wins career game No. 500 next season, it should be automatic.

As you visit the many high school campuses in Tucson you are struck by the history. There is Mary Hines Gym at Catalina, named after that school’s pioneering girls volleyball coach. There is Vern Friedli Field at Amphitheater, named for its unforgettable football coach. There’s a Sean Elliott Gym at Cholla and a Norm Patton Gym at Marana.

A few years ago, Rincon named its baseball field after Gary Grabosch, who coached the Rangers for 23 years, winning the 1971 state championship and going 263-188.

This is Utter’s 34th year as Rincon’s head coach. He is 491-398. He has fought the good fight at a school not blessed with an abundance of sports talent from the neighborhood, reaching the state championship game in 2006, doing more with less.

But when you ask Utter about his team’s 20-win season he changes the subject. He became a grandfather for the first time last week. His son (and assistant coach) Chris Utter, a key figure on that 2006 state-championship-game club, named his son and Rich’s grandson “Trey.”

How fitting. It is a basketball family, after all, one whose name should be on the wall of the Rincon gymnasium as soon as possible.