Author Archives: Pat Coleman

Insider: On the Road with Amherst’s Ben Kaplan

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In his final season with the Amherst basketball team, Ben Kaplan decided to put his writing skills to good use by keeping a running diary of the Lord Jeffs’ 2009 NCAA Tournament experience.

Last April, my fellow members of the Amherst basketball Class of ’09 and I won the lip sync contest, an annual choreography competition with a valuable prize – the first pick in room draw. We successfully made fools of ourselves and won with our skit entitled “Road Trip” with Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” recurring as the refrain.

Ben Kaplan, AmherstLittle did we know that our theme choice for lip sync would also be the theme of our last season of Amherst hoops, perfectly describing the 2008-09 Lord Jeffs. When the schedules were released late last summer, it was clear that the unprecedented seven-game road trip spanning from mid-January to mid-February would define our season.

I can’t help but remember Wilson, the wise neighbor in television’s Home Improvement, once telling Tim “the Toolman” Taylor, face half-hidden by the fence, “When we’re home, we dream of great adventure, and when we’re on great adventures, we dream of home.” There were definitely times during the seven-game trip (which included three games in Maine) that we wished we were back home.

On the fourth game of the trip, we lost to Colby after erasing a double-digit deficit, also losing starter Steve Wheeler to a rolled ankle suffered during a desperation heave at the end of the first half. We then squandered a 19-point lead in the second half of the next game at Rhode Island College, dropping to 3-2 on the trip and jeopardizing our NCAA status.

Our futures remained muddled the rest of the regular season and through the NESCAC Championship, which took our traveling band of basketball players up to Middlebury, Vermont. Every member of our team had had the good fortune of never playing a NESCAC tournament game on the road, so the weekend was a first for all of us, albeit a first that fit perfectly with our season’s theme.

After an emotional win over Williams to take the season series, we lost in the finals against a fired up Middlebury squad and our season hung in the balances. Twenty-one uneasy hours later, we learned we were off of the bubble and into the tournament. In Division I, bubble teams often gather with their teammates to watch the selection show live, cameras monitoring their every move. For us, guys found out this past Monday in a variety of ways – some watched the selection show online, some ducked out of class to “go to the bathroom” and checked the brackets on the nearest computer, and some just waited to hear from a teammate. I figured we had secured a bid when I heard my classmate Glenn Wong running down the halls in our dorm shouting, “WOOOOO!! Let’s GOOOOOO!!!” We had lived to play another day, and we would be playing at another site. The Road Crew would take to the streets once more.

I figured we had secured a bid when I heard my classmate Glenn Wong running down the halls in our dorm shouting, “WOOOOO!! Let’s GOOOOOO!!!”

Getting into the tournament excited everyone. Even though this marks Amherst’s 10th straight NCAA appearance, it never gets old for anyone, especially the first-years who were experiencing D3’s “playing house” version of March Madness for the first time. Our draw, however, really excited our coaches, who got the opportunity to bother new coaches for clips they would use to scout new teams. The four teams playing at Richard Stockton College in southern New Jersey span four states and four of the eight regions the NCAA uses to break up men’s basketball teams – Stockton from the Atlantic region; their opponent, RPI, from New York and the East region; our matchup, Gwynedd-Mercy, from Pennsylvania and the Middle Atlantic region; and us from the Northeast region. It is, as Coach Hixon said Monday at practice, “Truly a national tournament.”

Another person who our draw excited was Bob, who has been driving our bus since our last Maine trip nearly a month ago. A jovial man who keeps old Three Stooges episodes running on the bus DVD system after wins, Bob told us before our Williams game last Saturday, “You guys better win. I wanna work tomorrow!” Well, Bob, we got you more work, and plenty of time to continue those conversations with our coaching staff at the front of the bus during the five-plus hour drive to Pomona.

After our long bus ride, which guys spent napping, eating, writing papers, reading, watching movies, listening to music, engaging in conversation, or any combination of those activities, we pulled into the Comfort Inn for a quick stop before our 7:45 p.m. practice. During NCAA Tournament practices, visiting teams get 90 minutes of closed-door court time, which we partook in after Friday’s foe, Gwynedd-Mercy, got in its final tune-up. Our practice consisted of the standard warm-up, shooting and scrimmage as we quickly got acclimated with our new surroundings. In order to succeed as the Road Crew, you have to adapt to new settings quickly, and as the shots started falling with more frequency, it was clear that we had gotten used to the deep shooting background at Stockton’s gym. Hopefully they keep falling for us throughout the weekend.

Our schedule for Friday includes an 11 a.m. brunch, probably at the Denny’s a couple of us enjoyed for dinner (the best part of going to Denny’s with the knowledge you’ll be there the next morning is that it makes the timeless breakfast vs. dinner inner struggle a lot easier to decide). Following brunch, we’ll head to Stockton for a shootaround and a review of the scouting report. It’s the same old away game routine for the team that has made its home on the road this season — just a group of vagabonds trying to keep the journey going, hoping to take this road as far as it goes.

Putting on the pressure

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Are last-second free throws the most pressure packed action in sports?

While some would argue for kicking a field goal with three seconds left down by two or standing with the tying and winning runs on base with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, it’s hard to argue against the last-second free throw, because once the referee hands you the ball, it’s just you and the basket, 15 feet away.

The NCAA’s Double-A Zone focuses on how this simple act can be suddenly less than simple and uses a fairly topical reference in the process. Say, a pair of free throws from Sunday’s games. Lot of Division III fans over there.

What we’re reading

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We at D3hoops.com know we are not the only ones writing interesting stories about Division III men’s and women’s basketball, and even if we had a full-time staff of writers we couldn’t corner the market on everything interesting.

I and Gordon Mann especially come across many stories we could never hope to write or do justice, since we all have “real” jobs and such. But we haven’t had an easy way to bring all of those stories to you. Aside from the occasional blog post about a story, which takes more time than we usually have to devote, most just get filed away in the cobwebs of our brains.

However, we’ve changed all that, thanks to a new Web site for journalists called Publish2. One of the features of the site is a tool we’ve used to create a feed of stories tagged as being of interest. You can always find it on the right-hand rail on the front page.

The feed is labeled “What we’re reading” and contains stories we’ve tagged that are of interest to us, along with a quick summary of why they might be of interest to you. You can see what else is in there beyond the five most recent by clicking on the link at the bottom of the box.

You can also suggest stories by emailing links to me at info@d3sports.com, or post them on the message board. It’s great to see what you’re reading, and we would love to read them ourselves and share them with everyone else.

Enjoy!

D-III vs. D-II

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ST. PAUL, Minn. — I went to the St. Thomas men’s game at Concordia-St. Paul tonight and I didn’t see anything that immediately stood out as one team being on a higher level than the other.

Concordia was a little more athletic, but not huge. They did shoot better from three but they got killed on the boards. Their gym was nice but not spectacular. They certainly didn’t take better care of the ball.

The Golden Bears fell to a deceiving 6-5 tonight — I use the adjective because two of their losses are to Bowling Green and Georgia State. Obviously it’s far too early to know where they might end up, and with three games against ranked D-II teams to go, Concordia-St. Paul could end up anywhere.

My exposure to Division II is limited. In fact, I intentionally avoid games against D-II and NAIA schools because I would rather see two teams I cover rather than just one. So this was my first time seeing a D-III team playing a D-II team on the road.

And I wasn’t blown away.

Dallas and the NEAC

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In an era where the price of a barrel of oil has gone through the roof, where air travel has become slower, more expensive and less convenient and where conferences as big as the WAC have talked about making changes to their schedules to save money, the North Eastern Athletic Conference has expanded into that bastion of the Northeast: Dallas, Texas.

I almost don’t have to say anything more, do I?

This is what pursuit of the automatic bid can do to you. We don’t know how the conference will schedule itself this season or how it will actually determine who gets the AQ (remember, that’s the conference’s decision, not the NCAA’s), but at some point, someone will be getting on a plane from New York or Pennsylvania to Dallas and seemingly vice versa.

I’m not sure this is what Division III is all about. I can’t imagine what the Division IV crowd would think of such a thing. I also can’t imagine what these schools are thinking: It’s not like these are the University of Chicagos, NYUs and Case Western Reserves of the world, large research institutions with endowments to match. The NEAC is made up of athletic departments so small that one coach told me a couple years ago their program could only schedule 22 games because that was all they could afford, not the Division III standard 25.

I feel for the University of Dallas, which has lived the lonely life of an independent ever since leaving the American Southwest Conference early this decade in hopes of gaining admission to the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference. And I feel for the NEAC, which has seen its membership change faster than the Law & Order cast,  but I can’t see spending all this money in pursuit of an automatic bid. And if the conference doesn’t play a full round-robin in order to save money, then why bother? You’d only be crowing an illegitimate champ.

Championship access is all well and good, but at what cost?