Santa Clara’s Herb Sendek is one of four new coaches in the WCC this season. (AP)

In addition to his winning track record, ties to the West Coast and history of breathing life into struggling programs, San Francisco coach Kyle Smith possesses one other quality that makes him an ideal fit for his new job.

He isn’t afraid to come to a league notorious for chewing up and spitting out promising head coaches.

The allure of moving closer to friends and family in California was only part of the reason Smith left Columbia last spring after six years as the Ivy League school’s head coach. Smith also truly believes he can bust up the West Coast Conference’s long-established power structure and elevate San Francisco into a contender just like he once helped Randy Bennett do at Saint Mary’s.

When Smith joined Bennett’s staff as an assistant in 2001, they inherited a 2-27 team whose players seldom wore their school-issued gear on campus out of fear of ridicule. Only a few short years later, Bennett and Smith built the Gaels into a perennial conference title contender and worthy rival to Gonzaga despite a massive deficit in resources.

“I’ve never been in a position to worry about a job being too tough,” Smith said. “I’ve never been a position where I could pick and choose. I’ve gone to places where there have been big challenges and big hurdles and tried to climb that ladder. I’m hoping to do the same at San Francisco.”

Achieving that goal will not be easy in a league unlike any other in college basketball, one with a gulf separating its top teams and also-rans.

Nobody besides Gonzaga or Saint Mary’s has won so much as a share of the WCC title since 2002. Nobody besides Gonzaga, Saint Mary’s or BYU has reached the WCC tournament title game since 2008. Only once since BYU entered the league in 2011 has another team besides the WCC’s marquee three even managed to finish third or higher in the standings.

The WCC’s basketball hierarchy has become an endless source of frustration for schools outside the top tier. Those seven programs have cycled through an astonishing 22 coaches in the past decade in their quest to do more than merely compete for third or fourth place in their primary revenue-producing sport.

Of the 22 men who have coached Santa Clara, San Francisco, LMU, Pepperdine, Portland, Pacific or San Diego during the past 10 years, not one has left on their own volition for another head coaching job. Those who get fired typically emerge either relieved to no longer endure the stress of fighting uphill every day or sympathetic to their former athletic directors’ desire to make a change.

“The coaching changes across the league are born out of frustration,” said former Portland coach Eric Reveno, now an assistant at Georgia Tech. “You’re trying to do something to break up the stranglehold the big three have on the league, but what do you do? You can’t change your location. You can’t change your student body profile. There’s so much you can’t change, so you change your head coach.”

The gap between the WCC’s haves and have-nots originated around the turn of the century when Gonzaga evolved from small-conference lightweight, to giant-slaying mid-major, to national brand. The Zags toppled Minnesota, Stanford and Florida to reach the Elite Eight in 1999 and followed that up with Sweet 16 runs the next two seasons, garnering more attention and accolades each year.

Whereas most small-conference success stories often eventually fizzle, a massive financial investment in basketball helped Gonzaga remain a consistent national presence. Having witnessed an unprecedented surge in applications and donations coinciding with the basketball team’s success, Gonzaga administrators began pumping money into the program at a rate previously unfathomable in the WCC.

They opened the $25 million, 6,000-seat McCarthey Center in 2004 to replace their outdated high school-sized gymnasium. They began chartering direct flights for road games and recruiting trips by 2007. They broke ground this year on a state-of-the-art practice facility that will include a court modeled after the one at the McCarthey Center, a basketball-only strength-and-conditioning area and sections devoted to nutrition, academic support services and a hall of fame.

Those resources make it easier for longtime coach Mark Few to justify staying somewhere he’s happy despite frequent overtures from power-conference programs. There’s nowhere else Few can compete for Final Fours and conference titles while still carving out time for fly-fishing, mountain biking and attending his kids’ Little League games.

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