By Mark Simon
D3hoops.com

They are gearing up for one of the most exciting regular season weekends in the history of NESCAC men’s basketball.

No. 3 Williams has the toughest draw, having to face both No. 9 Trinity (Conn.) and No. 1 Amherst, but gets both at home on Friday and Saturday night at Chandler Gym, where it has won 48 in a row, two shy of the school record. No. 1 Amherst and Trinity don’t have to play each other, but each has to play twice on the road in a two-day stretch.

“It’s going to be very intense,” said Williams coach Dave Paulsen. “A fun weekend to watch, but I don’t know how much fun I’m going to have.”

Unranked Middlebury (9-4) lost at Williams by 33, but can be a major player in the weekend as well since Amherst and Trinity bus to Vermont, with both worried about their other games this weekend.

There are other twists to this weekend’s rivalries. Trinity was the last team to win at Williams, doing so in 1998, but the day afterwards Williams beat an unbeaten Amherst team. Middlebury won’t get overlooked. It has beaten Amherst during the regular season the last two times that the Lord Jeffs won the league title.

Adam Harper shoots 50% from the floor and averages 11.0 points per game.

This season doesn’t resemble those others though, especially for Amherst, which is No. 1 for the first time in any men’s sport.

“Fans were saying at the beginning of the season ‘How are you going to make up for losing the great class that carried us for four seasons?’,” coach Dave Hixon said. “Everyone wanted an answer. I just told them that we were going to be different.

That has been the operative word for Amherst this season. No longer is the squad as offensively reliant on someone like 2003 NESCAC Player of the Year Steve Zieja. Starting with the win over Williams on Jan. 10, five different players have led Amherst in scoring in its last five games. The Amherst/Williams rematch will be aired Saturday afternoon on D3hoopsNet.

Amherst’s dominance comes with a different look in its frontcourt to complement third-year backcourt starters Adam Harper and John Donovan. Andrew Schiel has taken over the team’s scoring lead at 14.8 points per game, Hixon said one significant improvement has been in the play of first-year starting forward Tim Jones, a reserve for three seasons who came up huge against Williams with 12 points, seven rebounds, six assists, five steals, and three blocked shots.

“We play two different games now,” said Hixon, whose team has won every game this season by double figures. “We have a power game inside with our starting group, which is traditional for us the last four years. But when we go up in size with our bench, we actually play smaller — four men out and one man inside. It’s not the Princeton offense. We actually took it from an NAIA team out west, but it has a lot of backdoor cuts and it’s very wide open. Defenses get used to our power sets and the next thing they know, we’re sprinting in our cuts and kicking the ball outside for 3s. Usually you try to mix up your defenses, but this season, it’s the other way around.”

Williams point guard Michael Crotty had 12 assists in last year's title game.

Things have been different for Williams too, which has had to deal with massive amounts of media attention, including a New York Times cover story and multiple mentions on ESPN by Dick Vitale after the Ephs beat defending Patriot League champ Holy Cross on Dec. 4. As a result, most people know of Williams’ top two — forward Ben Coffin (who needs five points to reach 1,000) and point guard Michael Crotty (15.0 points per game, 110 assists). The key for them will be bench play. Last season, Paulsen said the team sometimes got better, when it went to its bench, and he’s looking for more performances like the one he got against Middlebury last week when Casey Gibbons scored 21 points in a 104-71 romp since followed by a win against Hamilton.

“We’re still trying to establish this year’s team identity,” said Paulsen, who put his team through what he described as a second training camp recently, since earlier in the season it played so many games that it went 24 days without a practice. “We’re still a work in progress. This year, we’re more skill and less power.”

Jessee Farrell, looking to dish.

Identity or no, Williams and Amherst are the known commodities, especially in comparison to Trinity. Longtime head coach Stan Ogrodnik says things have come together a year earlier than expected for the Bantams. We wrote earlier this season about point guard Jesse Farrell and his amazing 10-to-1 assist to turnover ratio (which has since dipped to “only” 99-to-24) and sophomore forward Tyler Rhoten (22.6 points per game).

This will be the first real test for this group and it will be interesting for all to see how they respond against both Williams and Middlebury. Trinity has won a couple of very tight games already, last Saturday, including an overtime squeaker against Colby, a game that even Ogrodnik admitted it probably didn’t deserve to win. Fortunately for the Bantams, they won nonetheless. Since the NESCAC plays just one conference game against each team, each game is crucial for tournament seeding.

“We still haven’t played our best basketball yet,” said Ogrodnik. “Everybody is working hard to improve. I really like the chemistry and unselfishness of this team people are sacrificing their own stats for the welfare of the team.”

As for the pressure packed games the next couple days, Ogrodnik summed it up succinctly.

“Just another weekend in the NESCAC,” he said with a laugh.

That’s one thing that’s not different.

SUPERIOR NOT INFERIOR: The most improved basketball programs in the nation may be those at UW-Superior.

The men’s and women’s programs went a combined 6-43 last season, including 1-31 in the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Were it not for a halfcourt shot at the buzzer by UW-Eau Claire, both would be at .500 right now. Entering the weekend, the men are 8-8, 3-5 in the WIAC with a recent quality win over UW-Stevens Point. The women are 7-9, 2-6, with one point losses to Eau Clare and UW-Platteville.

“We’re a program that’s building,” said Yellow Jackets women’s coach Sandy Eilertson, whose team hasn’t won more than seven games since the 1994-95 season and hasn’t finished over .500 since 1983-84 (they also snapped a road losing streak that dated back to 1998-99 and a WIAC skid that dated to 1999-2000). “Some people say rebuilding, but we think we’re building. We had three juniors (two-time team MVP Lindsey Andersen, Stephanie Janigo and Kati Galovich) who have been starting since they were freshmen, two junior college transfers, and a couple of freshmen who are going to be the future of this program.”

The buzzer-beating loss to Eau Claire on Dec. 9 didn’t have an immediate effect on the team, eventually turning into a positive. Since then, the Yellow Jackets have played everyone a little bit tougher.

“We’ve had a lot of close games since then,” said eighth-year coach Eilertson, who graduated in 1987 as the program’s all-time leading scorer. “We’ve played well against the top-notch teams. We’re more poised at the end of games because we know we’re a lot better. We’re now taken seriously as an opponent. That’s a big thing for us.”

The men’s team is being taken very seriously after the program experienced a big drop-off the past two seasons from recent successes.

“Everything that could go wrong did,” said head coach Jeff Kaminsky, “from not getting players in, to injuries, to losing a lot of close games.”

This season, things started off the same, but the turning point may have been blowing a six-point lead in the final 22 seconds of regulation against Division II Bemidji State. Since then the Yellow Jackets are 6-4, and things are starting to go right to the point where it can beat a team like Stevens Point despite shooting 11-for-25 from the foul line. Kaminsky estimates the team has lost a couple of games this season due to poor free throw shooting (55.7%), but that karma may have changed after the Yellow Jackets recently beat St. Scholastica by a point on a foul shot at the buzzer.

All-WIAC selection Cody Kastern leads the team in scoring at 13.8 points per game and 8.6 rebounds, just ahead of transfer guards Laron Reed (Morton) and Marc Rothschadl (Minnesota-Duluth), who Kaminsky says are as good as any backcourt combination in the league.

“We have seven new players in our top 10 and that isn’t usually a formula for success in this league,” said Kaminsky, whose program only had four winning seasons in 45 years when he took over in 1994. “We haven’t even been healthy all year. We feel that as we get accustomed to each other, this will be one of the best teams we’ve ever had."

INDEPENDENT’S DAY: We mentioned last week the difficulties for independent programs in scheduling opponents at this time of year, citing the Thomas More women’s basketball team as an example. Another is the University of Dallas, which began a 12-game road trip with five consecutive wins in five states — Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Missouri. That enabled the women's team to head into this weekend’s contest at defending national champion Trinity (Texas) with a respectable 8-8 mark.

Two remaining lengthy road trips will span the nation, with Dallas heading to New York and California for games with Brooklyn, Polytechnic, Chapman, and Colorado College.

That’s a lot to handle for first-year coach Chris Hill, a former assistant coach with the men’s team, whose squad consists of two seniors and 11 new players, nine of whom are freshmen. Hill, at 25, is one of the nation’s youngest head coaches.

“I get to find out if I’m cut out for coaching,” said Hill, the son of ex-NBA and collegiate coach Bob Hill. “We’re coming together at the right time. Our freshmen aren’t playing like freshmen.”

That may be because of the leadership from the likes of seniors Marie Olson and Julieann Alvarez. Olson has been consistently racking up double doubles, while Alvarez has been the team’s inspirational leader, playing with a torn ACL.

“Those two keep the mood light,” said Hill. “I attribute our great team chemisty to the two of them. I’ve never seen a team that wanted to learn and try so much. They never take a night off.”

Independents got a boost from a piece of legislation passed at the recent NCAA convention, permitting Division III independent institutions to hold a postseason championship tournament similar to a conference tournament, one that wouldn’t count towards a school’s 25 games. Since there are independents from Maine to California, however, the details need to be worked out.

THE SHARPSHOOTER: Franklin senior Justin Castelli has been careful not to look at his stats, particularly his numbers from 3-point range.

“I don’t want to jinx myself,” said Castelli, who made 28 of his first 41 trifecta attempts this season and stands at 35-for-59 (59.3%) on 3-pointers through 15 games “I still feel good with my shot. It feels better than it ever has.”

Castelli is ranked 11th in the nation in overall field goal percentage, checking in at 62.6% in the last NCAA statistical report. He would be ranked first in 3-point shooting, but his 35 made baskets are two shy of the 2.5 per game needed to qualify.

Franklin is 10-6, 2-3 in the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference following back-to-back losses, but ranked as the top 3-point shooting team in the country at 45.5%.

Castelli is originally from Indianapolis, so he knows a thing or two about good 3-point shooters from watching the likes of Reggie Miller and state native Larry Bird. He picked John Paxson as being most similar to him style-wise.

“The main thing is confidence,” said Castelli. “The last two years, I lacked it. I wanted to leave my last year on a good note.”

TREY-MENDOUS: Good things come in threes, as Greensboro senior point guard Trey Williams knows. Williams, who at 5-9 is the smallest player on what could be the biggest Division III team in the country (Greensboro has six players 6-7 or bigger), had an amazing run of clutch shooting last Saturday in a win against Averett. First he tied the game with a 3-pointer at the regulation buzzer. Then he hit another buzzer beater in overtime to tie the score and force a second extra session, one in which he scored six of the Pride’s eight points in a 98-94 win.

Williams, whose real name is Nathaniel Williams III (hence the nickname), then helped Greensboro into first place in the USA South with 18 points in a win against Ferrum. The big men have forced defenses to play tough inside, and top scorer Marcellus Morgan usually draws the best perimeter defender. This gives Williams, a Winston-Salem native, a chance to shine, as he has recently.

“I get underestimated because I’m the short one,” Williams, who wears No. 3, said. “Saturday taught me anything is possible if you just keep believing.”

GAME OF THE YEAR: If you haven’t read the details in Notables, do yourself a favor and check out how St. Olaf rallied from eight points down in the final 25 seconds on the road to beat Hamline in overtime on Jan. 19.

If there was ever a game that illustrated the importance of competing to the final buzzer, this was it. The Oles tied the score on two 3-pointers and a basket, helped by a Hamline turnover and a missed 1-and-1.

“This was one of those nights where it worked out exactly how we diagrammed it,” Oles coach Dan Kosmoski said. “It was crazy. It was a fun game. You don’t get a lot of games like those. It ran the emotional scale from the bottom to the top. You need wins like this to build confidence. It was just another one of those exciting games in the MIAC. It was definitely the strangest one of the day.”

Unfortunately for the Oles, there was no carryover effect. St. Olaf lost two nights later to surging MIAC foe Concordia-Moorhead.

RESEARCH QUESTION: Another item came across our desk recently that posed a question. McDaniel’s women’s team scored 103 points against Muhlenberg last week without making a 3-point shot. Has any men’s or women’s team scored more without hitting a 3-pointer since the shot was introduced? Teams that have played against the Grinnell system and its offshoots should check their box scores.