Bakersfield College’s new basketball coach was fired as commissioner of the Southwestern Athletic Conference in 2001 for allegedly mismanaging funds.

Rudy Washington, a former Division I coach at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, was recently hired as BC’s head basketball coach to replace outgoing coach Brent Davis.

Davis took an assistant coaching position at San Jose State University under another former BC coach, George Nessman.

When asked about what qualities made BC hire Washington as its head coach, Vice President of Student Services Bill Cordero said, “Rudy Washington is a former community college and Division I coach. He has strong coaching skills and excellent contacts in two-year and four-year schools.”

According to an Associated Press article, the SWAC alleged Washington overpaid himself $78,750 and failed to document more than $99,000 in expenses.

When asked about the matter, Cordero said, ” That is not proven to be true … It appears from the information I have that the courts upheld a right to the SWAC to dismiss him for lack of managerial accountability and for lacking of fulfilling his duties.”

When asked where his information was coming from Cordero said, “This is documents provided to me from him (Washington).”

In a telephone interview with The Rip, Washington said he had an associate commissioner, DeLane Rosemond, an attorney, in charge of payroll. “I had absolutely nothing to do with payroll.”

“My payment was supposed to come once a month. We had an outside service that was dealing with this. The rest of the employees had a twice a month payroll.”

Washington said that his associate commissioner submitted him to the payroll service as an employee who got paid twice a month, rather than once a month.

“The payroll service assumed that I was getting paid twice a month,” said Washington.

“I had moved my office from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Birmingham, Alabama.”

He said the automated deposits went to his home in New Orleans, where his wife was still working.

“We carried a pretty large balance because we just sold our home in Los Angeles, so any range up and down in the checking account wasn’t really noticed.”

Washington said when the associate commissioner realized the problem after a review of the payroll and told him about it, Washington took all the steps to correct the problem, paying back all the money. “In fact, I paid so much money, I overpaid $25,000,” he said.

“There was never proven any wrongdoing.”

Washington said he thinks there were other things leading up to him being fired, such as the suspension of the Prairie View and Southern bands (universities in his conference) from playing after they got into a “huge ruckus.”

“That created a huge uproar,” he said.

Washington said that as coach at BC he would like to get the basketball program back to “its winning ways.”

“I like to work with the kids individually and play an uptempo style, play a pressure defense, much like what Milwaukee-Wisconsin did this year,” said Washington.

“Bakersfield is a very, very good sports town … The potential is off the charts.”

Washington’s total record over six seasons at Drake was 63-102, according to athletics director Dave Blank, in a phone interview. He was at Drake from 1990-1996. Washington’s best record at Drake was 14-14 during the ’92-’93 season. His worst record was 6-21 during the ’91-’92 season.

Officials from the SWAC and former assistant commissioner DeHale Rosemond could not be reached before press time.

– Staff writer Barry Lipson contributed to this story.