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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2007 > March
March 2007
The Vols take Dayton — and its lobster— by storm
If you went to Jay’s Seafood Restaurant Monday night, you couldn’t get lobster — one of the staples of the well-known eatery in the Oregon District.
The Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team ate there Sunday night and as one Jay’s waitress put it the next night: “They ate us out of lobster. They couldn’t get enough of it.”
Vols fans flocked to the restaurant — and several others in town including the Pine Club, always a draw with the out of town tournament crowd — Monday night, too.
Something like 5,000, mostly orange clad Vols fans came here for the NCAA Tournament Regional and watched their team roar through Marist on Sunday afternoon and then Ole Miss, 98-62, Tuesday night to advance to the women’s Final Four for the 17th time in 26 years.
Because the Vols travel in such numbers and because Dayton supports college basketball like few other cities, the tournament drew a two-day crowd of 17,228, tops of any site in this year’s NCAA women’s tournament.
People will remembers several things from the three games here:
(1.) The way Tennessee’s Candace Parker stated her case on the court as the greatest college player in the women’s game today. Her two-game totals — 40 points, 23 rebounds, six blocked shots, five steals and four assists in just 54 minutes — are a big reason the Vols, in the words of Ole Miss coach Carol Ross “look every bit as good as any Tennessee championship team I’ve seen.”
(2.) The scrappiness of Ross’ Ole Miss team that was led by the most charming player in the regional, Armintie Price.
(3.) The Cinderella presence of the under-sized, 13th seeded Marist team that had knocked off Ohio State and Middle Tennessee to get here. The Red Foxes players and coaches truly embraced the moment for all it was worth.
(4.) The imposing presence of Oklahoma’s 6-foot-4 sophomore Courtney Paris , who had 31 points and 20 rebounds in the Sooners’ surprising loss to Ole Miss.
(5.) The sauna-like conditions in UD Arena, which has no air conditioning. With unseasonably warm temperatures outside, the court thermometer hit 90 degrees on Sunday and even Tuesday night the place was muggy, though not as bad as two days earlier.
The conditions left lots of folks in the college game talking, especially Oklahoma coach Sherri Coale, who told writers:
“I know at this level I’ve never coached a game in that type of circumstance. Never.”
Two Sooners players were so dehydrated that they took well over an hour to complete a random drug test.
“We came in for the shoot around, and it was hot. We talked about it and chose to take the stance that we didn’t want to call attention to it,” Coale said.
“You sit here after you lose and think of 50 different things you could have done. I’m not convinced that a conversation about the heat in the gym could have changed what happened to us today, but you never know.”
(6.) The thing I’ll remember most from this tournament is the way Tennessee fans, players and coaches stood and applauded Price as she was pulled from the game with 2:24 left.
It was the 5-foot-9 senior’s last college game and she had played courageously against the bigger Tennessee team, scoring 30 points, getting four rebounds and adding two steals and two assists.
She ends up one of just five players in the history of women’s college basketball to score over 2,000 points, grab 1,000 rebounds and have 300 assists and 300 steals.
“We talked about that even before Carol took her out — that we have to stand and applaud her because she is one of the best players in the game,” Tennessee coach Pat Summitt said. “If she isn’t an All American, then something is wrong. I just have a great respect for her, our whole team does.”
Ross saluted the Vols response:
“Anybody that enjoys women’s basketball is going to appreciate Armintie Price and how she plays. She plays so hard and gives so much.
“Still, for Tennessee to do that, it was a class act.”
TweetA Royal Blue Day for Dunbar
COLUMBUS — Up in the Value City Arena stands late in Saturday’s Division II state title game, a group of Dunbar fans — worried that their team was down by six points to an Upper Sandusky squad led by no-flinch gunslinger Jon Diebler — began yelling for Wolverines’ head coach Pete Pullen to shed his suit coat.
“We were yelling for him to take that coat off,” smiled Dunbar assistant football coach Alfred Powell. “When he gets rid of that coat, we know it’s time to go to work.”
Later Pullen would yank off the coat — in frustration — after yet another chintzy foul was called on his team, but his best go-to-work ploy came during a time out with five minutes left and his team down 72-78.
Rather than X-and-O strategy, he rallied his troops with a stirring talk about showing heart in the final exhausting minutes to come.
The Wolverines — paced in those final minutes by 6-foot-9 Aaron Pogue, 6-foot-10 junior Josh Benson and the mostly unheralded Keith Rakestraw and Daquan Walker — outlasted the 48 point Diebler and his Upper Sandusky mates for a gut-wrenching 87-85 victory.
It was the Wolverines second state title in a row, a feat matched by Dayton schools only twice before — Roth exactly 25 years ago and Stivers — which won three straight — nearly 80 years ago.
This was the third straight trip to state for Dunbar which — ironically —was ousted two years ago by this very same Upper Sandusky.
The success of the Dunbar program in Pullen’s three years at the helm shows that he’s now one of the best coaches in the state. He and his assistants also showed they certainly were the best dressed staff on the state tournament stage.
Decked out all in white for Thursday’s semi-final, they looked far sharper Saturday in their royal blue pinstripe suits.
“At first we were gonna go with killer black,” whispered Pullen.
Royal blue was the right choice though. Might as well dress like who you are and this Wolverine bunch is royalty in a lot of ways.
You won’t find two more personable, decent kids than Dunbar point guard Norris Cole II, the team’s leading scorer and salutatorian of his graduating class, who is headed to Walsh University next year and Benson, who has given a verbal commitment to the University of Dayton.
Then there were the guys like Walker and Rakestraw who stepped up big time Saturday. Walker had 15 points, Rakestraw 16.
Rakestraw was so down after Thursday’s game he called back to Dayton to talk to his father, Keith Sr.
“He was a little down,” his dad said. “He felt he hadn’t played to his potential and asked me, ‘Dad, what do I do?’ I told him to keep his head up, get ready fir the championship game and then go out and have fun.”
Another player who had coming-out party Saturday was 6-foot-8 junior Anthony Oden, the younger brother of Greg Oden, the 7-foot center who has led Ohio State to the Final Four.
His entire life he’s been in Greg’s shadow, but Saturday in just 14 minutes, Anthony pulled down 11 rebounds and had eight points.
The star, though, was Pogue, who rallied Dunbar after that time out at the 5:00 mark. In 87 seconds, he grabbed three rebounds, took a Diebler charge and scored six straight points to pull Dunbar into a 78-78 tie.
Much of the game, Pogue had been exiled to the bench in foul trouble. At least two of the calls seemed to come from refs who look at the massive center and see only one side — the other side.
Although Pogue wanted back in the game in the third quarter, he had four fouls and Pullen held him out until crunch time. “I was afraid they’d find him in the bleachers three rows up and call a foul on him,” the coach joked.
Afterward Pullen sang Pogue’s praises:
“In the fourth quarter, you saw why this young man is so valuable to this team. No one thought we’d be back to state.”
In reference to the Wolverines’ Daequan Cook, who graduated after last season and is now part of the Atlanta-bound Ohio State squad, Pullen said: “Everyone said, ‘No Daequan — No ring,’ But the truth is, the one constant that got us here (to state) three years in a row is this young man (Pogue). He’s been here all three — no one realizes that.
“This is kind of a public plea. I can’t see why he was honorable mention All-Ohio. He should be first or second team.”
Pullen’s voice started to break: “You see how much I care about this young man.”
Pullen seems to really like this team and what — at 24-4 — it did.
The only minus came when someone mentioned to him afterward that his team had had 29 turnovers against Upper Sandusky.
“Twenty nine turnovers?” he whispered incredulously. “My wife’s gonna chew me out.”
TweetTroy Smith for a price; Cook, UD woes
Here are three thoughts:
(1.) There’s an older guy in Dayton who owns a football he’s had autographed by every Ohio State and Notre Dame player who’s ever won a Heisman Trophy. One day he plans to give that cherished ball to a grand child.
Getting the first 12 autographs — from the likes of OSU’s Eddie George and Archie Griffin to Notre Dame’s Paul Hornung and Johnny Lujack — were fun.
And free.
The name from the last guy — Ohio State quarterback Troy Smith, who won the award in December — was not.
The man had to go to a Beavercreek sports shop where Smith was appearing recently. After standing in line 45 minutes, it cost him $150 to have a pretty much non-communicative Smith scribble his name — or some semblance of it — on the ball. The quarterback seem uninterested about the collection of names he was joining, nor did he care much about the history of the ball.
“That’s too many of today’s athletes,” he said. “It’s all about the money.”
He had a far more delightful experience getting Eddie George’s autograph.
During the off-season after George won the Heisman, the guy went over to Columbus — to the Woody Hayes Athletic Complex — walked in and a Bucks’ player led him back to the team lounge, where he started chatting with two athletes he later found out were Robert Smith and Terry Glenn. They told him George was lifting weights and would return soon.
Smith and Glenn treated him like a king and when George appeared, he not only gladly signed the ball, but had Glenn take a picture of him and the guy holding the ball.
That’s an encounter the guy said he’ll never forget.
He can’t say the same about meeting Smith..
(2.) Daequan Cook’s star has dimmed lately at Ohio State. He had just three points in the NCAA Tournament win over Xavier last Sunday and Thursday night he didn’t play at all in the Bucks’ big second-half rally to edge Tennessee in the final seconds.
Cook was a slasher in high school — driving to the basket, making things happen — but now much of his time has been spent launching long-range from the wings. And he’s not been making enough of those shots. More problematic have been some defensive lapses.
Maybe that’s just a glitch in what’s otherwise been an impressive enough freshman season.
But I think it puts to rest any thought at all of him going to the NBA next season.
He needs to hone his game and up his profile in college for at least another season.
(3.) Tubby Smith — and for that matter Brian Gregory — can be glad they’re in the college basketball world and not coaching cricket for a team like Pakistan.
Smith — the under-fire Kentucky coach who abandoned ship for Minnesota this week — only had to put up with a demanding, disgruntled Big Blue Nation fan base that dubbed him “10-loss Tubby” and jammed internet chat rooms and radio talk shows with their gripes about him.
Although Smith won the national title in 1998 — his first year at the Wildcats’ helm — his team has failed to make the Sweet 16 in three of the past four seasons and had slipped behind Florida and Vanderbilt in the SEC.
The Wildcats — who went 22-12 this season and fell in the second round of the NCAA Tournament to Kansas — have lost six straight to Florida and four in row to Vandy. They’ve had 25 losses over the past two years and have gone nine straight without a Final Four appearance.
Gregory, the Dayton Flyers coach the past four seasons, isn’t feeling near the heat that Smith did, but there is a growing dissatisfaction with UD’s absence from postseason tournaments the past three years.
In the past week I’ve had a half dozen people of all stripes call or come up to me and begin voicing their discontent with Flyers’ basketball and Gregory in particular. They’re especially miffed that UD is going to raise prices when they think the team is not getting better.
Next year will be pivotal, but I’m concerned a lot of over-blown expectation is being heaped on Trotwood Madison’s Chris Wright as the the program’s saviour. He’s good, but he’ll be a freshman. And though he’s one of the greatest high-fliers the Flyers have ever brought in, he still needs work on his outside shot.
Now back to that Pakistani coach Bob Woolmer, who was strangled to death in his Kingston, Jamaica hotel room this past week after Pakistan lost two matches in a row — the last to a weak Irish team on St. Patrick’s Day — at the Cricket World Cup.
All the Pakistani players have been fingerprinted, though police aren’t sure if it was one of them gamblers or angry fans.
TweetRubbin’ the Baby Oil and A Gun to the Head
He said his wife has a thin line of dark hair that runs from her breast bone, down across her stomach to her belly button:
“Oooh Lordy, when she gets out that baby oil and starts rubbin’ it all around and that line of hair gets a standin’ up and glistenin’, well she’s got me. ‘Whatever you want, Baby!’ I’ll sign my paycheck over ton that woman right then.”
That was the Buffalo cabby — a hefty black guy with a down-home, grits-and-greens inflection to his words — who gave me and two colleagues a ride back from the Anchor Bar to our hotel during last week’s NCAA Tournament games there.
As he piloted us through the Buffalo darkness, he talked about everything from his wife to his last vacation trip to Florida: “I told my brother-in-law’s wife, ‘You sure you want him going to Miami? Over there to that South Beach? All the womens there are wearin’ just ‘bout nothin’.”
On a dreary night, this guy was a sheer delight. And that got me thinking about some of the other cab rides I’ve had through the years.
In over three decades of sportswriting — along with the travelling I’ve done with my wife over the years (no baby oil stories here, at least not for you all) — I’ve ridden with thousands of cabbies and have had the whole spectrum of experiences.
At the past Super Bowl in Miami, I rode with a Haitian cab driver to the duplex of a guy who’d been murdered in a tough inner-city Miami neighborhood. Bengals wide receiver Chad Johnson — who grew up in the area — had been interviewed by the police about the shooting and I wanted to describe the scene.
The cabbie didn’t especially like waiting around for me for some 45 minutes as I worked my way around the house, down an alley and then from door to door.
On the way back to Miami Beach, he explained: A few years ago, he and another guy — the numbers runner for a local bolita game — had been kidnapped by four young thugs. They wanted money the other guy didn’t have.
The whole time they held a gun to the cabbie’s head and told him they were going to kill him. Eventually they let him go, but they torched the other guy’s car. And about two weeks after that, the other guy was shot to death.
Over the years I’ve had cabbies of almost every nationality, temperament and driving skill, you can think of.
Some of the very best and very worst cab rides I’ve had were right here in Dayton. I rode from the airport once with a cabbie who smelled worse than road kill — not a first here — but this guy had a loaded .38 on his front passenger seat. Another guy had a 13-inch TV set up on his passenger seat and continued watching the movie he had been been so engrossed in, only now he was driving 70 m.p.h. along I-70 and then I-75 into town.
One of the best local drivers here is guy from Pakistan named Johar. He just became a U.S. citizen two months ago and every time we ride together I find out more about his family and some of his dreams.
In 1991 in Havana, I had a cabbie — Ernesto — who drove me every day for my stories, several of which were about dissent in Cuba. Those were stories Cuban authorities — who control the media and often imprison those who don’t preach the party line — did not want told and Ernesto was putting himself in greatly jeopardy chauffeuring me around,. Mostly we went at night.
When I left I gave him my suitcase full of clothes, my shoes everything I had. The stuff he couldn’t wear, he could sell on the black market. A couple of months later he was jailed and I’ve never heard from him again.
After the 2004 Olympics, the Greek cabbie taking my pal Jimmy Lawton — one of London’s best sportswriters — and myself around Athens, drove his cab onto a ferry for a two-hour ride to one of the nearby islands.
It would be an all-day affair and he ended up going to dinner with us, drinking bottles of wine with us and we nearly missed the last ferry back to Athens. On the ride back home — the cab meter had been running all day, but still hadn’t hit $100 — he had me talk to his wife on his cell phone to explain his absence. I think my words — in English and a little thick — didn’t help.
As for my all-time best can experience — that came in Miami many years ago.
I was headed to the airport — and a fight in Atlantic City — from my home on Majorca Avenue in Coral Gables. Like always, I was late and in a rush.
The aging Cuban cabbie pulled up, blew the horn a couple of times and finally I rushed out. I had suitcases in each hand and under my arm, my tattered but treasured copy of The Fireside Book of Boxing.
An anthology of fistic prose, picture and poems, it has work from Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon and scores more.
No book means more to me.
Boxing is my favorite sport and the book was given to me by one of my all-time good friends — Jerry White — who had been the lightweight champ of New Jersey in the 1930s.
Later he ran the Magic City Gym, Miami’s first integrated fight club, and a hangout for colorful types like Evil Eye Finkel, Sam the Mumbler, Raincoat Rabinowitz, Big Bill Ivan, the Great White Hope of 1934 and Tip Toe Tannenbaum, the house dick at a local hotel.
Later in life, Jerry was a fixture at the fabled Fifth Street Gym — home of the Dundee Brothers, Chris and Angelo, and, of course, Muhammad Ali. Sometimes Jerry trained fighters there, mostly he told stories to me.
Jerry was 83 when he gave me his Fireside copy. Inside he signed it “To my friend Tom….Wishing you the best. ..Jerry White.
That day I rushed out to cab, I laid the book on the car roof, threw my bags in the back seat with me and we took off.
It wasn’t until I got to the airport that I remembered I’d forgotten to grab the book off the roof. It was long gone and I was heartsick.
I tried to explain my plight to the old Cuban man, but he spoke almost no English and my Spanish was limited,
“I look,” he said as he drove off.
I was sure the book was lost, but a week later when I returned home, there, propped against my front door and protected by a plastic bag was my boxing book. The cover was as little more wrecked and a black tire print was imbedded on a back page, but that was it.
The old Cuban man had found it for me.
Today that book — filled with great stories, given by a great friend and now saved by another special man — means more to me than amongst any possession I have.
TweetWSU: “Finally we were about on empty.”
BUFFAL0 — Wright State was too small, way too thin off the bench and, at the start, too nervous.
As coach Brad Brownell said after the Raiders’ 79-58 loss to Pittsburgh Thursday night in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at HSBC Arena:
“On the national stage, it’s a shame we didn’t show what we had and what we can do. We’re better than we played tonight.”
So what happened?
Part of it was some early stage fright, but most of it was Pitt.
“We were probably a little gun-shy early,” Brownell said. “The bright lights got us a little.”
Senior Drew Burleson agreed: “We started out a little in awe. It was kind of the deer in the headlights syndrome.”
Yet for all those initial nerves — part of the reason the Panthers opened the game with a 13-0 run in the first three minutes — Wright State did tie it up 22-22 and 25-25 before fading to a 43-30 halftime deficit.
That was because Wright State didn’t have the manpower or size to stay with Pitt one surge after another. For the most part, the Raiders used a seven-man rotation — and only had 10 players over all — and that’s just not enough bodies.
“I was proud of the fact we bounced back, but it took a lot of of us to do that.” Brownell said. “Then they dealt us another blow and we just had to expend so much energy. …Finally we were about on empty.”
Including 7-foot center Aaron Gray, Pitt has five players 6-foot-8 or taller. WSU’s tallest guy is 6-foot-8 Jordan Pleiman..
“The size differential is the reason Pitt out-rebounded Wright State 44-30, why it blocked seven Raiders’ shots and altered at least a dozen more. No wonder WSU shot just 33 percent from the floor.
“Their height bothered us in a lot of ways,” Brownell said. “It was hard to get any baskets around the hoop. How many times did we take the ball to the basket and get into a tangle of their arms? And if you can’t go inside, you don’t have a lot to hang your hat on.”
For the Raiders to be able to hold their own with a team like the 27-7 Panthers, they must get bigger. And next year they will. Joining Pleiman will be four other players 6-foot-8 or taller.
That said, replacing senior point guard DaShaun Wood — the Horizon League Player of the Year — will be difficult, at best. Although held pretty much in check Thursday night thanks in part to the defense of Pitt guard Antonio Graves — who limited him to four- for-12 shooting — Wood still finished with 13 points, seven assists and four steals to more than compensate for four turnovers
“Our seniors were really outstanding all year,” Brownell said of the four players — Wood, Burleson and back-ups Tyrone Scott and Reinaldo Smith — that the 23-10 team will lose. “I’m really pleased that these guys could leave a legacy of a (Horizon League) championship.”
One of the recipients of the legacy — sophomore Will Graham — had a little trouble seeing it as he sat in the glum dressing room afterward:
“Coach has always told us we’re only as good as our last game. And right now that last game is a loss. None of us feels very good. We didn’t want to go out like this.”
Maybe they would not have had they not been too small, way too thin off the bench and, at the start, too nervous.
TweetDoes Size Matter?
BUFFALO — Here’s the difference between Pitt and Wright State, who meet here tonight in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at HSBC Arena.
Asked Wednesday about what it’s like to play an under-sized team like Wright State, Pitt’s 7-foot center Aaron Gray said quite seriously:
“We can go small, too. When I go out, Levon moves to the 5 (position) and Sam comes in.”
That would be 6-foot-10 Levon Kendall and 6-foot-6 Sam Young.
That may be small for Pittsburgh — which has five players 6-foot-8 or taller — but it’s still bigger than anything Wright State can muster. The tallest Raider is 6-foot-8 Jordan Pleiman, followed by a pair of 6-foot-6 players, Scottie Wilson and Drew Burleson.
“If you look at our line-up, there are not too many people in the country as big as we are,” said Panthers coach Jamie Dixon. “With both a 7-foot guy and a 6-foot-10 guy out there to start, generally we’re bigger than everybody at the jump ball.”
To simulate the Panthers during practice this week, WSU had Wilson play the role of Gray — though he’s six inches and 55 pounds smaller. Portraying Kendall was Will Graham, who fell seven inches and 45 pounds short.
Before his team went onto the HSBC Arena court Wednesday evening to put on a 40-minute work-out for the few fans that remained — the Raiders were the last of eight teams to hit the floor, and Duke, the three-time national champs, had been the rock stars of this day and drew most of the crowd — WSU coach Brad Brownell was asked about psychology:
Had he used some kind of ploy to convince his players they’re not really that small?
“You don’ tell a fib to your players,” Brownell said. “That’s not a great way to start because your players will walk out onto the court, look up at those guys and then look straight back at you and say, ‘We’re not prepared for this!’
“It’s better to be honest and tell them what you’re up against. Kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, so you’ve just got to put together the best game plan you can for them.
“I don’t know if we’ve figured that out yet, but we don’t play until after nine (tonight). So we have time to work on it.”
To a man, the Raiders believe Brownell will do just that. “He’s done that for us all year,” DaShaun Wood said. “He always comes up with something.”
And we’re not just talking about the end of the season run in which Wright State won 11 of the last 12 games and 18 of its final 21.
Brownell said go back to the the beginning of the season when the Raiders struggled and everyone had to struggle forward :
“When we practiced with seven and eight guys the first month that was tough because it was hard for us to get better. There’d be times I’m looking down there at the post group and the perimeter guys and there was Coach (Marty) McGillan with one guy. Talk about individual skill development!
“We didn’t have the bodies. We were hurt that badly that we practiced with coaches. I mean this is unbelievable — we had just seven guys so I actually practiced this year for part of a day. But what I liked about our guys was that we never used that as an excuse. Never.”
And the Raiders aren’t looking for excuses now, even though Pitt is favored by 10 points and, as WSU guard Vaughn Duggins said. “Nobody gives us a chance. But that’s where they are wrong. We’re not here to make a good showing or have a moral victory, nothing like that. We’re here to win.”
Burleson also believes it can happen:
“The past two years, people don’t realize how much parity there is in college basketball. Every year you have upsets — 15 seeds beat two seeds, things like that. Having them do that and go to the Final Four, it gives all mid-majors hope that an upset’s always possible.
“It shows you that the big guy doesn’t always win.”
TweetStripped Bare on the Way to the NCAA Tournament
One last story from the wild scene at the Nutter Center last week after Wright State knocked off Butler to win the Horizon League invite to the NCAA Tournament:
“Me and Will (Graham) were on the court when time was winding down and we started to run toward the student section, but there was to big of a wave of them coming back at us,” said Raiders senior guard Reinaldo Smith.
“So we turned around and ran to the middle of the court and we got packed in and everybody was jumping up and down all around me and all of a sudden my jersey is coming off. People were pulling at it, trying to get it for a souvenir and at one point it was just about all the way off my head. I fought to get it back and finally got it back down and then I made a run for it and got up on the table on press row.
“Getting to the NCAA Tournament has been a lot fun…and a little rough.”
TweetA Pair of Almosts — Pitt Coach to WSU and Flyers to NIT
So for Wright State, the past now becomes the future.
Four years ago, WSU athletics director Mike Cusack narrowed his coaching search down to two guys — Paul Biancardi and Jamie Dixon — as the replacement for fired Raiders’ coach Ed Schilling.
He chose Biancardi and you know how that worked out thanks to an NCAA violations mess that eventually followed the former Ohio State assistant from his days in Columbus.
Had Cusack hired Dixon — who now will coach his No. 3 seeded Pitt Panthers against the 14th seeded Raiders in the first round of the NCAA Tournament Thursday in Buffalo — there wouldn’t have been the headaches of the past couple of seasons. But then there almost certainly would be no Brad Brownell now either.
And to be far, I think at the last minute, Dixon, then a Pitt assistant to Ben Howland, pulled his name from consideration at WSU. Maybe because he knew Cusack was leaning toward Biancardi — who came with solid credentials and no hint of trouble — or maybe because he knew Howland was leaving and he’d be a candidate to replace him. And when Skip Prosser decided to stay at Wake Forest rather than take over the Panthers, Dixon wasn’t just a contender, he was the new Pitt coach.
At the time, Cusack spoke glowingly about Dixon and what kind of head coach he knew he’d be. He was right. Just as he was right on Brownell, whom he hired during last year’s Final Four to replace Biancardi.
You can tell that Brownell — even though he’s been a head coach just five seasons, four at UNC Wilmington and now this 23-9 campaign with the Raiders — has been around the block.
As soon as he learned his team would play Pitt, Brownell said: “We’ve certainly got some game tapes on them from this season and we’ll try to get some more.”
I wondered how he already had game film on Pitt. I mean they wouldn’t have been on the WSU radar this season. That’s when Brownell showed you what he’s privately thought about his team for some time:
“We’ve been taping games the last month knowing there was a good opportunity for us to make the post season. We don’t have extensive video editing stuff like the higher level schools have, but I’m sure we have a couple of tapes up there. And we’ll get more.”
One tape should be hand delivered by the Dayton coaches. The Flyers lost by 30 to Pitt on Dec. 23. While the guys at UD probably don’t like circulating that horror film, they owe WSU big time.
When Wisconsin transfer Mickey Perry came to WSU on a visit in January, he got a call from Flyers coach Brian Gregory, who was interested in him.
Perry decided to visit Dayton and WSU assistant Billy Donlon drove him across town to the UD campus, then even faxed his transcript to Gregory so the visit would go by all NCAA guidelines. Perry chose UD, but the thing no one should forget is the class act the WSU staff showed itself to be in the situation.
So now it’s the Flyers turn, especially since they were snubbed by the NIT.
While I thought there was a slight chance they’d get in, they beat five teams in the NCAA Tournament — Creighton, Louisville, Holy Cross, Miami and George Washington — they don’t have as much of a case for being snubbed as does Akron for sure and probably St. Louis, too.
The Flyers were hurt this season by two bad losses — to SMU and Duquesne, both with RPIs over 200 — and an A-10 conference that wasn’t as strong as times in the past.
So now the March Madness in town here belongs to Wright State and, as Brownell has learned, it’s heartfelt by many:
“The genuine excitement of people , you really see it on the faces. I’ve even been with a couple of people who stopped me and I just let them talk and they started crying, it meant so much.”
While some 1,000 people came to the Nutter Center for the Selection Sunday proceedings and a chance to salute the Raiders, three of the most interesting people who showed up were Lilly Gan Rose Chen and their friend, Cindy.
They’re all Chinese women — exchange students — attending the Wright State MBA program.
From Beijing, they received Americanized names from teachers or made them up themselves. Lilly — whose Chinese name is Zong Xun — said she knows a little about basketball and mentioned Yao Ming, the towering Houston Rockets center from China.
In the States just two months, it was her first time at the Nutter enter. She and her friends came to meet the guys everyone was talking about and they did. They got the WSU players to pose for photos with them and autograph the team posters they carried.
“The last week has been pretty amazing,” said Raiders’ freshman guard Vaughn Duggins. “We’ve been treated kind of like celebrities on campus.”
TweetUD’s Hopes, Crafty Charlie, Troy’s Strippers & Second Helpings
This Saturday morning, here are some thoughts on the Dayton Flyers, the craftiness of Miami’s Charlie Coles and OSU’s Troy Smith and his strip club and second-helpings diet:
(1.) With word coming that University of Dayton backers are going to be asked again to pony up more money to watch future Flyers basketball games, some influential boosters are going to turn up the demand that UD produce an NCAA Tournament team next season.
Now the Flyers Faithful is not nearly so publicly vocal as the power base at the University of Kentucky, Indiana or even Cincinnati, but there will be some thoughts voiced behind the scenes.
Coach Brian Gregory took the Flyers to the NCAA Tournament in 2004 — his first year here — but over the next two seasons UD won just one game in the A-10 tournament and got no post season bid.
This year the Flyers hope 19-12 — with wins over NCAA-bound teams like Creighton, Louisville and Holy Cross — will get them an NIT invite.
With teams like U-Mass from the A-10 and Toledo from the Mid-American Conference — both regular season league champs or co- champs — falling in their tournaments, they now are assured NIT berths. That’s two spots taken from the Flyers in the already reduced NIT field this season.
I think UD’s chances for the NIT aren’t that good.
(2.) Since the Heisman Trophy presentation, Ohio State quarterback Troy Smith has gotten smaller while getting bigger. As he’s put on pounds, his status in the upcoming NFL draft has diminished.
He admitted he put on up to 15 pounds on the banquet circuit — some people think more — as he’s enjoyed his fame. He’s also made a splash at a couple of New York strip clubs — the 40/40 Club one night and Scores two nights later — during Heisman weekend. He’s said to have done the same back home in Cleveland.
“He will be a great pro,” Scores Girl Kendall told one of the New York tabloids. “He’s got it. He’s a natural leader. I can tell.”
This gal sounds like she’s been scouting the talent for the Cincinnati Bengals the past few drafts.
I know what Smith does is his own business, but he doesn’t seem to be minding his football business.
Regardless of what you’ve read otherwise some places, Smith hurt his draft status at the NFL Combine when he didn’t partake in any conditioning or running drills.
One OSU insider even went so far as to hint to a Northeast Ohio reporter that Smith came into the BCS title game overweight and so out of shape and that he was an even easier target for the speedy Florida defense.
After the Heisman, Smith was seen as a a solid second round choice. Now, according to Bob McGuinn of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Two scouts predicted that Smith would go either in the late third or fourth round. Another scout guessed fourth or fifth round.”
That makes today’s Columbus workout for Buckeyes players in front of some 100 NFL scouts and coaches extremely important for Smith.
As is, he’s costing himself money and it’s tough to remain a top tipper when you do that
(3.) And finally, it’s great to see Charlie Coles and his Miami RedHawks back in the Mid-American Conference title game tonight. With a win over Akron — who the RedHawks beat in late February — Coles will have his team in the NCAA Tournament.
The RedHawks made the NIT the past two seasons, but haven’t been in the NCAA Tournament since 1999.
Coles is a coach who’s not afraid to take his lumps early in the season if it toughens up his team for tournament play. That’s why rather than playing cupcakes at home, he takes his team on the road against mightier opponents.
This season the RedHawks played at Kentucky, Illinois and Xavier and hosted Michigan at Millett Hall. He also plays Dayton, Cincinnati and Wright State each year.
After the RedHawks knocked off top-seeded Toledo, 58-53, in Friday night’s MAC semi-final in Cleveland, RedHawks forward Tim Pollitz — who made 11 of 12 shots for 22 points — told reporters the reason for Miami’s surge into the finals was the hard-knocks seasoning they had gotten early in the year.
TweetWSU: “What A Beautiful Feeling.”
As the Wright State Nation rejoiced in the stands and on the Nutter Center floor Tuesday night — its 60-55 victory over Butler burning on the overhead scoreboard, the NCAA Tournament invite soon to come — here are some of the scenes, conversation snippets and first-hand observations:
All-Tournament pick Scottie Wilson shared the moment and a on-court hug with teammate Drew Burleson, then quietly added:
“What a beautiful feeling. I feel like crying, but there’s too many people around.”
Asked if he felt as though he and his teammates had finally arrived, Burleson, the fifth-year senior playing for his third coach, shook his head:
“We’ve been here all year, it’s just that nobody noticed. Hopefully that will change now.”
It already is changing. Their game was broadcast nationwide on ESPN and highlights of it kept playing on the SportsCenter cycle. They were the lead story in today’s USA Today sports page and the dot.com hoops junkies now are all over them — especially guard DaShaun Wood, the Horizon League Player of the Year and tournament MVP, and coach Brad Brownell.
As for the Raiders’ first-year coach — who left UNC-Wilmington last season thanks, in part, to a major difference of opinion with the micro-managing athletics director (whose team this year won just seven games) — he’s one of the best young talents on the college sidelines.
When a guy take’s two mid-major schools to the NCAA Tournament — in fact, gets three bids in just five years as a head coach — he’s something special.
But who would have expected this?
He took over an under-sized, under-manned team in the spring — too late to do much recruiting — and then his new players struggled mightily with the offensive scheme he was trying to teach them. The Raiders started off losing five of their first eight, six of their first 11.
In their first 16 games they suffered losses by 39 points to Bradley, 26 to LSU, 31 to Butler and 16 to Chicago State.
Over their next 16 games — which includes Tuesday night’s victory over Butler — they’ve won 14.
“We worked hard all year on building relationships,” Brownell said as he waited to cut down the nets Tuesday. “We learned to believe in each other.”
It took them until mid-December, but his players finally started trusting him and bought into his system.
Tuesday night he showed how much he believed in his team after it fell behind Butler 0-10 at the start of the game.
“You notice I didn’t call time out?” he said. “I thought we were getting good shots. We just needed one to drop.”
And he got one when he called a play for Wood, who promptly turned it into a three-pointer with 16:24 left in the half. Some 5 1/2 minutes later, Wright State led 15-12.
“Coach Brownell tells us we’re fighters,” said reserve guard Reinaldo Smith. “We’re at our best when we’re backed into a corner and have to fight our way out. It’s when we get to the center of the ring where we stumble sometimes. We like it when we have to prove ourselves.”
Raiders fans realize they have a special team here, which is one reason it looked like the running of the bulls in Pamplona, when the Nutter Center doors opened 90 minutes before tip-off. People painted, wigged, wearing Viking horns, Hawaiian leis, carrying signs, bullhorns, pon poms, you name it, came stampeding down the arena aisles for choice seats.
Over in Section 221 and partying in a big RV in the parking lot, former Raiders players from decades past gathered and reminisced and celebrated the good times now.
One guy who stood out was Jim Brown — the long-time assistant coach, one-time head coach and all-time Raiders’ loyalist. There’s not a better man who ever represented Wright State.
And then there was Terri Williams, who along with husband Steve and their three children make up a diehard WSU family. How diehard? Well, Steve is a WSU grad, their daughter goes there now, the family has had season tickets since the Nutter Center opened and the kids have been involved in the various Raiders’ youth programs.
But the real devotion showed Tuesday when Terri took off early from her job at Wright Patterson AFB and drove all the way to Athens and back to pick up son Shane, a freshman at Ohio University.
He’d come home for Saturday’s semi-final game, but his parents made him go back for classes Monday. They told him the game was televised so he could watch it from school.
“The more I thought about it, the more I knew he had to be here,” Terri said. “This was a great moment for Wright State and it should be for our family — out whole family — too.”
Wednesday morning she got up before dawn to drive him back for classes.
That special feeling engulfed the players, as well.
“This is everything I imagined and so much more,” gushed center Jordan Pleiman after the trophy had been awarded and the nets cut down
“I’m mean, its just sinking in. We’re in the Big Dance. Our name will be called on Selection Sunday. Our game will be televised. And through it all, each one of us will be living the dream every college basketball player has.”
TweetOne Dayton Flyer in the NCAA Tournament
He said Don Donoher made him a man.
And now Anthony Grant — the former Dayton Flyer and the first-year head coach of the NCAA Tournament bound Virginia Commonwealth Rams — is THE MAN in the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA).
With Brad Brownell leaving that league — fleeing UNC-Wilmington for Wright State this season — and George Mason’s Jim Larranaga becoming last year’s news, Grant has ascended to the CAA throne…and higher.
Voted the CAA Coach of the Year this season, he’s being hailed around the college basketball world as one of — if not the — best coaching hire of the college season.
He led the Rams to a 27-6 record, a league-record 16 conference victories and with Monday night’s thrilling, come -from-behind 65-59 victory over George Mason in the CAA title game, he has his team in the NCAA’s select field of 65.
Prior to VCU, Grant — a stoic, well-respected man of few words — spent 10 years at the University of Florida as an assistant coach and associate head coach for Billy Donovan.
To date, Grant has coached in 23 NCAA Tournament Games, including the Gators’ victory in last year’s title game.
And yet in an interview with me right before that game Grant — whom I’ve known since he was a teenager playing for the Shakey Rodriguez coached Miami High Stingarees in Florida — said none of those 23 games provided his most indelible NCAA Tournament memory.
“My fondest memory was going to the Elite Eight with Dayton my freshman year,” he said of the surprising 1984 run by the Donoher-coached Flyers. “And the thing is, I didn’t play.
“Every other season, I was a starter, but that first trip is where I experienced what the NCAA Tournament is all about: The camaraderie with your teammates, the life-long memories of being part of something that’s special. You just never forget that.”
Grant played 105 games for Donoher — whom he said “is like a second father to me,” — went to a pair of NCAA Tournaments and one NIT. He was the team MVP his senior season, leading UD in scoring (13) and rebounding (6).
When he left UD, he had a degree, a place in the Flyers’ record books and, he said, so much more:
“When I came to Dayton, I’d just turned 17 and I was far from home and immature. Mick Donoher made me grow up. Made me understand responsibility, commitment, sacrifice, self confidence. He made me a man.”
The two stay in contact and on a recruiting trip last season, Grant visited with his former coach and Donoher’s son Brian. They went to lunch, visited the campus and the Donoher Center.
Ironically, if things had gone differently a few years ago, the Donoher Center would have been Grant’s home.
When Oliver Purnell left for Clemson, Grant expressed interest in the Flyers’ coaching job.
At the time, UD wasn’t particularly interested.
TweetBluffton and the Other Ohio College Tragedies
Friday’s bus crash that killed four Bluffton University baseball players, the charter vehicle’s driver and his wife has stunned the college sports world and especially the state of Ohio, which sad to say, is no stranger to college sports teams’ travel fatalities.
On Nov. 14, 1970, the plane carrying the Cal State-Poly football team — which had just played Bowling Green — crashed at the Toledo Express Airport killing 22, including 16 football players and a student manager.
Nineteen years later — Nov. 18,1989 — the van carrying the Muskingum College women’s basketball team collided with a tractor trailer on an icy interstate highway near St. Clairsville. A player and a team manager were killed.
On January 13, 2000 the van carrying the national champion women’s swim team from Kenyon College crashed on an icy road near Coshocton, killing one and injuring 10.
This time the shock waves are especially deep because of the nature of the accident, because it’s been so highly publicized and especially because all the victims are from western Ohio.
Beavers’ ballplayers who died include freshman pitcher Cody Holp from Tri-County North High, David Betts from Bryan, sophomore infielder Tyler Williams from Lima Senior and pitcher Scott Harmon of Elida High.
The bus driver, 65-year-old Jerry Niemeyer, originally from my hometown, Ottoville, lived in Columbus Grove with his wife Jean, who also perished.
While everybody wonders just how this tragedy happened — did Niemeyer just get confused in the darkness, did he doze or have a health problem, or is it simply a poorly designed and dangerous exit ramp — the over-riding thoughts and emotions right now are with the victims:
All those young athletes with big dreams and loving families and now there’s just so much sadness.
Bluffton is a small, close-knit campus in a just as small town. Almost everyone in the student body of some 1,200 knows one of the ballplayers who was killed or at least someone who knew them.
This will be a defining moment of the campus the same way similar tragedies overwhelmed Marshall University, which lost 37 football players, eight coaches and 30 others in a 1970 crash; Wichita State, which lost 14 football players and 17 others in a plane crash that same year; Evansville, where 14 basketball players and 15 others died in a 1977 plane crash and Oklahoma State, where two basketball players and eight others connected to the team were killed in a 2001 air crash.
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