By Mark Simon
D3hoops.com
When the season started — in fact, when the week started in some cases — not all of the 59 teams in the Division III men's basketball tournament were on the radar. We picked a few to focus on this week, as the NCAA Tournament tips off. Yesterday we wrote about women's teams in the same vein.
They’re here because they listened and learned
Mass-Boston head men’s coach and athletic director Charlie Titus stepped away from coaching last season to become the school’s vice chancellor of student affairs.
He didn’t miss the long road trips or the lack of sleep after losses, which had been more frequent in recent years. “But I missed being in the gym, being able to teach basketball,” said Titus, now in his 30th season as head coach.
He returned to the sidelines this season, one in which everything has come together for the Beacons from the first day of practice. This didn’t have a look of a team coming off back-to-back seasons of five and eight wins and that hadn’t had a winning record in eight seasons.
“This team started out very confident,” Titus said. “On Oct. 15, it was a cocky group. My hope was that it wouldn’t prevent us from growing. Most of these kids grew up playing playground basketball. We had to get these guys to settle into running a continuity-based offense. It was difficult for them to break some of their bad habits.”
Those difficulties surfaced early when the team lost to Fitchburg State and Suffolk and now instead of a cocky group, Titus and his staff had a receptive one. They were willing to listen and do what was necessary for long-term success. They learned to develop a continuity-based offense that would take time off the shot clock if the fast break didn’t lead to an advantage. They started to win close games (of the team’s 18 triumphs, five came in overtime).
“It’s one thing to be talented,” Titus likes to say. “It’s another to be gifted, and to play a team game.”
The Beacons were also buoyed by a significant addition during semester break. Titus had recruited 6-9 forward Rodney Bennett a few years ago, but Bennett elected to go to barbering school instead (he’s a licensed barber), then decided last summer that he did want to go to college. He spent his first semester getting eligible, then joined the team in time to appear in 15 games. He averages 10.8 points, 6.9 rebounds, and 2.8 blocks. The team is 10-5 with him and beat first-place Little East foe Keene State twice with his help, including once in the conference tournament finals.
“We have a presence in the middle,” Titus said. “People have to play us differently now.”
The Beacons already had a pretty good backcourt with Titus’ son, A.J., a sophomore at point guard (he was the Most Outstanding Player in the Little East Conference Tournament), 6-footer Amigo Paniagua at shooting guard and junior swingman Tony Barros (right) on the wing. The latter, much like his cousin, ex-NBA guard Dana Barros, is a sharpshooter, who averaged 20 points per game and also has tallied 100 steals on the defensive end. Paniagua averages 17.5 and, despite his size, gets 7.7 rebounds per contest.
“If you have two kids like that, youre going to win a lot of games,” Titus said referring to Barros and Paniagua. “Tony is a big-time shooter. His stroke is pure. He leads the confidence parade. If he misses 20 in a row, he needs the ball because he knows he’s going to hit the 21st. He’s been more patient this year. Amigo is a guy who rebounds, scores and defends. He looks for what we need and he gets it done for us.”
Players like that have made the season a lot more enjoyable for Titus, who got a nice boost to his staff when Lance Tucker, who had previously been head boys’ basketball coach at Massachusetts state power Brookline High, joined on as an assistant. There’s a basketball fever running through the commuter campus and it seems to have infected everyone. One of Titus’ players remarked how he now feels the responsibility of playing for a whole school, rather than just themselves, a different feeling than he’d experienced in previous years. That’s the kind of thing that Titus likes to hear.
“Winning definitely heals a lot,” Titus said.
They’re here because they were resilient, and a little lucky
DePauw’s Austin Brown spoke of understanding the importance of getting the teams transition game going, which in the case of the SCAC title game against Centre meant doing so, at the very end of the game, within a split second. With the game tied, Stephen Schott batted away a lobbed inbounds pass towards the DePauw basket in the final two seconds, the ball caromed over to Brown. The junior forward, who was 6-for-10 from the field to that point grabbed it, and chucked it from midcourt.
“When I let it go, I looked and said ‘wow, this is right on target.’ I don’t want to say that I knew it was good, but I knew it had as good a chance as any. The second half, I was just in a zone. The basket was huge.”
It was huge enough for the ball to fall through, for a game-winning 60-footer that no one will ever forget. It was only Brown’s eighth 3-pointer of the season and he joked that he’s retiring the halfcourt shot from his repertoire.
Some will say that the Tigers were lucky, and they were. Brown prefers to think that his team was resilient. That was one of the words that the team used to describe itself when the season began. The problem was that during the early part of the season, the team didn’t play well. It started 5-9, 1-3, but finished strong enough to think it had a chance to win a tournament being held at the league’s No. 8 seed, Rhodes, in Memphis.
“We knew when the tournament started that we were just as good as anybody in the league,” Brown said. “We had a lot of high expectations coming into the season because we had a lot of experience returning. At the beginning of the year, things didn’t work out like we wanted. We never got a streak going or got confident in what we were doing. We lost some close games and they took their toll. But we knew if we stepped it up on defense, we had a chance. There were times that we could have folded, but we didn’t.”
DePauw is 15-13, though four of its defeats came in overtime (including two to Centre), and the Tigers have won five in a row. They visit WIAC champ UW-Whitewater on Friday and the winner of that game faces the victor of Illinois Wesleyan/Carroll the next day in what should be a very entertaining regional, even if there are no halfcourt shots.
“Our coach told us that there aren’t many teams playing as well as we are right now,” Brown said. “I’m really excited to see what we can do.”
They’re here because they always get here some way or other
The Buena Vista men have made the NCAA Tournament five seasons running, but this year’s appearance looked like a big-time longshot as recently as a month ago.
The Beavers opened the season 0-3, slipped to 2-7 at Christmas break, and after four straight Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference defeats, were 4-11 after falling in overtime to Dubuque on January 21. Some struggles were expected as Buena Vista had lost 90% of its scoring from the previous season, but this was the worst that Bryan Van Haaften’s teams had struggled in any of his 10 seasons as head coach.
“If you had seen us at Christmas,” Van Haaften said, “you would have said we’re not very good. If you had watched our first game (a 22-point loss at fellow NCAA participant UW-La Crosse) … shoot, they’re probably shocked we’re in the tournament.”
Buena Vista has been touched on in this space before and Van Haaften even remarked to his team: “Let’s write our own story” when things looked bleakest.
The first few chapters may have been a tough read, but the rest of the tale is one heck of a page-turner. Van Haaften adjusted his lineup to add a little more size and the team adjusted from its usual means of thinking it needed to score 80 points a game, as the Beavers usually did. Buena Vista focused more on defense and team play. In the past, the team was reliant on star talent, but this year’s squad was rather young and didn’t have a player that stood high above the rest.
Freshmen Andre Wagner (the team’s sixth man) and forward Brian Fogelman (left) lead the team in scoring but barely top 10 points per game. Another freshman, Matt Wittry, starts at point guard and has an assist/turnover rate of better than 2-to-1. The big key has been Jesse Schmidt’s transition from football to hoops, as his play late in the season gave the squad a big lift.
“We’ve had a team concept that is as good as it’s ever been since I’ve been here,” Van Haaften said.
A 22-point win over Coe and a six-point win against Simpson started the team in the right direction, and then wins at Simpson and Luther, keyed by strong defensive efforts set up a dramatic finish. The Beavers entered their conference tournament as the No. 3 seed, but barely survived their first-round opener with Luther, winning by two when the Norse missed on four shots to tie or take the lead in the final 2:20, including a potential game-winning three-pointer in the final seconds.
That was the first of three cliffhanger scenarios that the principal characters would survive. In the semis, at Wartburg, the visiting Beavers clung to a two-point lead in the final moments and held their breath as another game-winning 3 sailed through the air just before the buzzer. It missed, allowing Buena to move on to the championship at Coe, where a similar situation unfolded. The Beavers, who dominated much of the game only to see a sizable lead slip away, survived not one, but two missed trifecta attempts in the final seconds to win the title game 69-66. It was the team’s 11th win in its last 13 games and has them sitting at 15-13 heading into a first-round clash with Augustana.
“All our guys were saying on Saturday that we have (written a nice story),” Van Haaften said. “Now, we know we’re going to be facing a Top 10 team, but we’re going to enjoy the experience. And I think things look pretty good here for the future.”
They’re here because it’s part of a pattern
In the last eight seasons, the regular-season champ in the Lake Michigan Conference has only won the league tournament once. Things always seem to break just right for someone else, and in this year’s case, that happened to be Wisconsin Lutheran.
Paced by 5-9 guard Lewis Jiles, who returned after missing three games with an ankle injury, the Warriors went from a 7-14 mark to .500 and became league champions in the process after finishing third in the regular season. They are 7-1 since Jiles came back to the lineup.
“We went through a large part of the season playing good basketball, but not well enough to win,” said coach Skip Noon, whose team is at Hope for its first-round game, in its first NCAA Tournament appearance. “We’re playing with a lot of energy and confidence now. Seven games ago, if you told me we’d be at .500, I’m not sure I would have believed that.”
The Warriors record may be a little deceptive in that they played a rather challenging non-conference schedule. They lost by two to 20-win Whitworth, by nine to unbeaten Lawrence, by 13 to WIAC champ UW-Whitewater, and 15 to Washington U. Perhaps the reward for that came at season’s end when the No. 3 tournament seed, with the help of some upsets, got to host three straight games.
“I always believe that if you can do your best stuff against those teams, you’ll be good later in the year,” Noon said, noting that the one benefit of those games was that it got a lot of inexperienced players a chance to play top competition.
It helped 6-7 forward Brian Hagel, who dominated the glass in the LMC Tournament, grabbing 35 rebounds in three games after averaging six caroms per contest the rest of the season. It helped slasher Stean Spath, who was 12-for-20 from the field in that same stretch and had 16 points in the championship game win over Edgewood. And, it helped Jiles, who led the team in scoring in all three games and paced the team at 14.8 points per game through the season.
“Lewis is a fierce player,” Noon said. “He’s a very good defender with great hands. He’s also a scorer. He’s shooting the ball very well and right now, that’s helping us a lot.”
They’re here because their ‘flash of brilliance’ came at the right time
Plattsburgh State men’s coach Tom Curle joked that the reason the school hadn’t won a SUNYAC title outright in 30 years was probably because “They were recruiting guys like me. They had to recruit guys who were better than me.”
Curle’s alma mater went from being the No. 6 seed to league champs in a postseason tournament that lived up to its wide-open billing. The Cardinals upset Brockport, Oswego and SUNYIT in succession. It is the school’s first NCAA Tournament appearance since 1995. They’ll face Hamilton, a school that has beaten them eight prior times, including Plattsburgh’s last NCAA outing.
“We had shown flashes of brilliance, but we had been up and down,” said Curle, whose team was 8-8 in regular-season play and was inconsistent enough to beat second place Oswego twice in three meetings, but lost to ninth-place Fredonia State and 10th-place Oneonta State. “(SUNYIT coach) Tom Murphy said that if we ran the same tournament again, another team would’ve won it. It came down to who got hot. I guess this happened to be our week.”
The funny thing about Curle’s initial remark is that it was a player similar to the head coach — one who sat the bench patiently for three seasons before moving into a starting role- who made the biggest jump in the big spot. Senior 6-7 forward Brian Hatch, who averages 6.5 points per game, scored a career-best 21 in the SUNYAC championship game.
“Brian is a great Division III story,” Curle said. “He worked and worked and worked and got himself to become a bona fide player. This year, he was rewarded.”
Curle, in his third season after previously coaching at SUNYIT, Division II Post University (Conn.) and in the junior college ranks, has had significant transfers come in to give the squad a significant upgrade. Anthony Williams transferred in from Morgan State after sitting out for nearly two years to help raise his newborn child. He was the team’s second-leading scorer this season as a sophomore and scored 26 points in helping the Cardinals overcome a 10-point deficit in the final five minutes of the semifinals. Travis Gorham, the team’s top rebounder (9.0 per game) is a transfer from Curle’s former school, Post. The team’s leading scorer and best defender, 6-6 forward Kris Gibbs-Smith (18.4 points, 6.4 rebounds), came to the program in 2003 after two years at Division II Mansfield.
“The definitive word with us is team,” Curle said. “People might say that we had more talent the last two seasons, but in terms of each player making sacrifices, this is the best team. We went into the tournament expecting to win it. Now, I told them that they’re champions and we should approach the NCAA with that in mind.”
