Michael Meek’s playing career was over. He was biding his time as a volunteer assistant for the junior varsity men’s basketball team at Eastern Oregon University, his alma mater, when he received an offer to coach the freshman girls at La Grande High School. The position was paid. So Meek signed up.

On Saturday, more than 25 years after accepting that first job, Meek will coach the University of Portland women in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

Are you a Ducks fan? A Beaver? In a year that neither of the state’s tentpole universities could wedge their way into March Madness in either the men’s or women’s brackets, it’s worth throwing your support behind the Pilots.

They play Oklahoma at 6 p.m. Saturday. The 12th-seeded West Coast Conference tournament champions against a Sooners team that boasts one of the country’s best offenses. I wouldn’t count them out. If you knew anything about Meek, you wouldn’t either.

After getting his start in La Grande, Meek won five high school state championships at Southridge and then, as Scott Rueck’s successor, led George Fox to two Division III championship game appearances in nine seasons.

The guy has won everywhere and he’s doing it again at UP. The Pilots have posted three 20-win seasons and qualified for the NCAA Tournament twice in the four years since Meek, who grew up in Puyallup, Washington, brought his disruptive brand of defense to The Bluff.

Ask him what the key to all that success is, like I did this week, and he’ll heap the credit on the players.

“They’ve learned how to be committed to each other and that, to me, is what ultimately helps win,” he said, sitting on the baseline bleachers following one of the Pilots’ final practices before heading to Los Angeles.

But that doesn’t entirely explain how in his first season in 2019-20, Meek turned around a program that had won just 13 games the previous season and, with much of the roster intact, finished fourth in the WCC.

They then swept through the conference tournament, beating three teams they had gone 0-6 against in the regular season. “We trusted him to help us get better,” said Haylee Andrews, who was a three-time all-WCC player for the Pilots before suffering a season-ending injury in January.

Meek’s first Pilots team won the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament and prepared for its first appearance since 1997.

Then the pandemic hit. The Pilots, like everyone everywhere, had to stay home. No tournament. No March magic.

With players from that team still on the roster, this year’s run feels like a poignant echo.

“Just having the core of players that have stuck together and are getting a chance to play,” Meek said. “That by far is the coolest part of it.”

Meek may have been hired in 2019, but he actually interviewed for the job five years earlier.

He met with Scott Leykam in 2014, and though he was impressive in that interview, Leykam was already moving toward promoting longtime assistant Cheryl Sorenson.

“At that time I thought it would be a great opportunity,” Meek said.

The next season, Meek took a George Fox team picked to finish fourth in its conference to the national championship game. “It was one of my favorite years ever in coaching,” he said.

Leykam told me this week that when he reached out to Meek again in 2019, the Division III coach with the sterling track record was an obvious first choice. Life is really about timing.

Meek might be a somewhat unlikely figure to be leading the Pilots. He is the first to acknowledge how difficult it is to make the jump from the high school ranks to college. And from Division III to a conference like the WCC.

It’s even more difficult without bouncing around the country and uprooting your family. Meek did it without ever leaving his house.

He and his wife, Lisa, have lived in the same Beaverton home for 22 years, with Meek commuting to Newberg when he was hired at George Fox and now to University Park. Since closing escrow, he has won 213 games in high school, 230 more at George Fox, and 78 and counting at UP. His daughters were born. The oldest, McKelle, is a junior guard for the Pilots.

Along the way, Meek developed his own distinctive brand of defense. The Pilots press as much as any team you’ll see. They mix up zone and man-to-man defense, sometimes in the middle of possessions.

“None of our defense is just sit back,” Meek said.

The court is 94 feet long. Meek’s teams will make you earn each step of it.

If you want a reason to believe they have a chance of beating the Sooners, who rank second in the nation with 84.5 points per game, it would be that.

Their defensive pressure makes them a uniquely challenging team to prepare for.

“You really don’t see fullcourt pressing much or getting up in teams’ faces,” Andrews said.

The Sooners will see it on Saturday at Pauley Pavilion. It’s the famed home of UCLA, with sidelines that for decades belonged to John Wooden. It is a building where the greatest of the greats have coached. And after this weekend, a former coach of the La Grande freshman team.