Author Archives: Pat Coleman

Road show: An extra stop in Maine

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University of New England's Harold Alfond Forum. (UNE athletics photo)

University of New England’s Harold Alfond Forum. (UNE athletics photo)

I have five official stops on my itinerary, but want to do as much as I can to see other schools as well, as long as I made the trip all the way out here. My official schedule has me in Brunswick, Maine, to see Bowdoin host Middlebury in a doubleheader.

Earlier in the afternoon, however, I dropped in on University of New England women’s basketball coach Anthony Ewing, who didn’t have much forewarning I might be stopping by. On Thursday, I did a short drive-by at Tufts to see their renovated gym and met Bob Sheldon and said hello to Carla Berube, but didn’t put either of them on video, knowing I’d see them again.

Biddeford, which was just a 15-minute detour off the interstate, was on my way from Boston to Bowdoin. They have a brand-new facility, including a 900-seat ice hockey arena and a 1,200-seat basketball arena. And UNE is 16-4 in women’s basketball. And they were on my radar because Sports Information Director Curt Smyth sent me a link to a feature story in the Portland newspaper. And I’ll let Ewing tell you the rest:

Road Show: Hoops in Worcester

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Clark's Kneller Gym.

Clark’s Kneller Gym.

WORCESTER, Mass. — The last time I was in Worcester was a long, long time ago. It was November 2006, to be precise, when I saw Nichols and WPI play in Becker’s tiny little gym. That night, Ryan Cain was just starting his senior season, and he didn’t have the best of nights, going 5-for-14 from the floor and 0-for-6 from downtown.

These days, Cain is an assistant coach at WPI, and he and head coach Chris Bartley and fellow assistant Billy Gibbons are here to scout Clark (and perhaps Rhode Island College as well). When I reminded him that that was the last time I was here, he remembered right away: “That wasn’t my best night.”

Not that it mattered — his team won handily that night and Cain went on to win the Jostens Trophy. But while Cain is an assistant coach at his alma mater, he is definitely putting his degree to good use, working at an environmental engineering firm.

The Engineers, who I will also not see on this trip, have beaten Clark already and have to play the crosstown Cougars again to end the NEWMAC schedule. They’ve also beaten Rhode Island College already this season, and tonight RIC defeated Clark 74-63. Clark was within 3-5 points most of the game, trailing by three as late as 5:40 left before the Anchormen put the clamps down.

I talked with Bob Walsh after the game:

The final word on La Sierra

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La Sierra’s long trip through the provisional membership process, trying to become a Division III member, took a wrong turn this past fall and finally has come to an end. The NCAA’s Division III membership committee reported that “In regards to La Sierra University, the institution that was instructed to rejoin the process as a year one institution, it is trying to do the right thing and attempting to understand what it takes to be a Division III institution.”

La Sierra, in Southern California, could have been through the four-year process and become an active member of Division III by now, in a spot of the country that could desperately use more Division III schools. Instead, the school has joined the NAIA, according to a release this week.

It isn’t easy to become a Division III school. Many of the schools that start the process are not fully prepared to do so, especially those that have to add sports, in some cases several, to make the minimum. In this case, La Sierra has finally washed out of the process.

60 teams: That’s progress

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I know that there is some debate as to how many Pool B teams there should really be in this year’s NCAA Tournament and thankfully, we have some time for the NCAA to resolve that, in what seems to be an annual occurrence in every sport we cover.

But I, for one, was glad to see the tournament field expand, even by just a little.

This so-called incremental expansion has been skipped in previous years. Remember the 48 teams the men’s tournament was stuck at for a long time? That was based on one playoff spot for every 7.5 NCAA teams, the old ratio before expansion came a few years back. Except by the time the last 48-team tournament came around, we were actually getting shorted by the NCAA because more teams had joined Division III without new teams getting added to the postseason.

Sadly, one person close to the committee said they couldn’t figure out how to construct a 49-team field, as if it had to be seven brackets of seven teams. Not a high point!

So I was afraid that we would have to wait until we got all the way to 416 Division III men’s teams, a full 64-team field, before they bothered to expand it. We will probably get to 64 eventually, but the field isn’t likely to grow any larger, since ESPN has no interest in broadcasting a D-III play-in game.