Why Scott Rueck Says He’s Having The Time Of His Life Coaching This Oregon State Team
750 The Game Staff
Scott Rueck and Oregon State women’s basketball are putting together a memorable season in Corvallis.
Ranked No. 11 in the AP Poll, the Beavers (20-3, 10-3 Pac-12) host No. 9 UCLA on Friday night, then host No. 10 USC on Sunday as the unrelenting conference schedule swings back through Gill Coliseum.
Off the floor, Rueck is a proud father and family man, recently celebrating his son Cole, a golfer at Boise State, who won last week’s Genesis Invitational Collegiate Showcase at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles.
Rueck joined John Canzano (Afternoons 3-6 p.m.) and talked about Cole’s big win, and also his team’s strong season ahead of a challenging weekend of games and the looming Pac-12 Tournament in March.
“This team has a kind of a throwback humility,” Rueck said on 750 The Game. “I’m just having the time of my life. I have been in heaven with this team this year. They are an absolute joy to work with every day. And it is that, it’s their humility, they love the game, they love each other, they love competing, and they love finding a way to win. They love people so they love inspiring people with the way that they perform, and they take pride in that, and they’ve been incredibly coachable every day. They want to be coached. And that’s rare. It’s hard to want to be coached. They want to look at their mistakes and they want to fix them. And now they’re holding each other accountable. They’ve kind of developed that trust in each other to kind of get on each other when there’s mistakes made, and that means that everything is always advancing forward. And it comes out of that humility. It comes out of great leadership.”
Canzano interviewed Beavers sophomore Raegan Beers earlier in the week fresh of Beers’ second Pac-12 Player of the Week honor, and Rueck cited Beers’ leadership as a key factor in developing the attitude of the program.
“You look at Rae and what she brings to the program every day, not only one of the best centers in the country or forward, whatever you want to call her, she just has this joy and this presence that oozes out of her that’s infectious, that just makes every room better,” Rueck said. “And you heard that humility on your show in the other day. And that’s just who she is every day. That amazing, star-quality person that puts other people first, all the time.”
Oregon State is coming off a road sweep of then-No. 20 Utah and then-No. 4 Colorado. Now they return home for another pair of ranked opponents, as UCLA and USC are inside the top-ten.
“We’ve created a great opportunity for a big game, and here comes another ranked opponent, we’ll have four straight here,” said Rueck, who went on to break down Friday night’s opponent, No. 9 UCLA, who beat OSU in the first matchup on Jan. 7th in Pauley Pavilion 65-54.
“It’s probably the best guard trio in the country, on the perimeter,” Rueck said of the Bruins. “They got the number-one recruit from a year ago, now a sophomore in Lauren Betts, who was number-one, (Raegan Beers) was number-three ranked, and they’re both from the Denver area. And so they’ve been a rival forever, since they started playing the game.
“It’s just a really good team, that we were not quite good enough to beat the first time around. We made too many mistakes. So we’re excited for that challenge. Can we correct some of those errors that we made the first time against a team that has weapons at every position and plays so fast and so hard as well. It’s just going to be a great battle.”
Listen to the full interview with Scott Rueck on John Canzano’s Bald Faced Truth at the podcast below.
John Canzano delivers the Bald Faced Truth afternoons 3-6 p.m. exclusively in Portland on 750 The Game.
