Cal Basketball: Ex-Bear Shantay Legans Builds a Coaching Career at Eastern Washington

Former Cal point guard was Big Sky Conference Coach of the Year in 2019-20

It’s been a big year for Shantay Legans, the former Cal point guard who just completed his third season as head coach at Eastern Washington University.

He led the Eagles to their first-ever outright Big Sky Conference regular-season title then earned conference coach of the year honors.

And this week, ESPN ranked the 38-year-old at No. 11 on its list of the top 40 college basketball coaches under the age of 40. He is 59-41 in his three seasons at Eastern Washington, including 41-17 in Big Sky play.

All that is absent from his brief head-coaching resume is a trip to the NCAA tournament, and that was jerked away by the coronavirus.

Legans, who grew up in Santa Barbara, came to Cal in the fall of 1999 in a recruiting class that also featured Joe Shipp, Brian Wethers and Nick Vander Laan. His older teammates included Sean Lampley and Dennis Gates, who is now the head coach at Cleveland State. 

Legans had 13 points and seven assists off the bench in his college debut against TCU at the Top of the World Classic in Fairbanks, Alaska, then was part of a memorable afternoon at Haas Pavilion later that season when Arizona State’s Eddie House tied Lew Alcindor’s conference record by scoring 61 points.

Legans says he scored 33 points in the game, but the box score shows it actually was 28 — still his career-high.

Legans started 79 games in three years for the Bears, helping coach Ben Braun’s squads to the NCAA tournament his sophomore and junior seasons. He transferred to Fresno State for his senior year in order to play for new Bulldogs coach Ray Lopes, with whom Legans had a long-time relationship in the “Big Brothers” program.

But Legans has only good memories of his time at Berkeley, as he reflects in the video below.

This was Legans’ 11th season at EWU, after spending eight years as an assistant coach. He is now married with two small children and loves his life.

Eastern Washington is located in Cheney, Washington, a town of just over 10,000 full-time resident that’s located about 17 miles south of Spokane.

I asked Legans to compare Cheney with Berkeley, and it's absolutely no surprise that the differences are greater than weather and population.

Legans also discussed EWU’s 112-77 loss to powerhouse Gonzaga, the first meeting between the two neighboring schools in eight years.

Other than the Gonzaga game, the season went pretty nicely for EWU. Led by Big Sky MVP Mason Peatling, the Eagles rebounded from a 2-2 start in conference play to win 16 games, their most ever in the Big Sky.

The season ended abruptly, with the cancellation of the Big Sky tournament. The conference announced that EWU would represent the league in the NCAA tournament, but that prospect was quickly gone when the emerging COVID-19 pandemic caused an across-the-board shutdown of sports in America.

In the video below, Legans talks about that disappointing end to the season.

We also discussed his expectations for returning to school and having a season in 2020-21. The Big Sky, which features schools from eight states, already has announced it will allow each school to make its own determination about when to resume sports.

Life in Cheney sounds somewhat different than our experiences in the Bay Area, but in many aspects the coronavirus is impacting them in the same way.