February 22, 2012

The Buffalo trip

The Buffalo Trip.  With our location in regards to other schools in the MAAC, there is only one long road trip that we take each year, to Buffalo, New York.  Each school in the MAAC is no further than three hours by bus for us, except for Canisius and Niagara.  So each year we spend three nights in the Hyatt Hotel in Buffalo.  We normally do not practice anywhere except at Rider.  Living out of a hotel and practicing at someone else’s gym is a little different, but over the past six years our players have been very good on the road and know it is a “business trip.”

We left for Buffalo on Wednesday, February 8 thinking this trip would be no different than the past five years.  We couldn’t have been more wrong.  Shortly after we left two of our guys starting feeling sick on the bus and since they both ate the same thing at dinner they thought they had eaten something bad and had a bit of food poisoning.  They were definitely uncomfortable, who wouldn’t be when you want to throw up for an entire six and a half hour bus ride, but they made it.  Neither of the two freshmen looked good when they got off the bus, but we were thinking that they would feel better when they got to their rooms and could lay still for a night.  We decided to put them in the same room since no one else wanted to be with the “sick” guys for three straight nights.  And at this point, there was some communication from Rider that there was some type of virus going around Rider. 

When we woke up on Thursday morning, we played Canisius that night, we found out that Rider had been infected by the Norovirus.  Norovirus is commonly known as the Cruise Ship Virus.  This meant that for about 48 hours our two freshmen would feel awful, but also could be contagious for the next 24-72 hours.  And one of our managers had started to feel sick during the night.  Worse yet, it was his first trip as a manager because he had just been hired for the spring semester.  So we had to move another manager out of his room and triple up one player and another manager in a hotel room. 

Needless to say, we needed to focus our guys on the task at hand, the Canisius game that night.  It took some time, more than any of the coaches wanted, but eventually our guys came through and we defeated a very game Canisius team.  All three sick guys spent the entire day in their hotel rooms, hardly moving at all. 

Friday was rather uneventful except for our sick guys starting to feel back to normal and our practice at Niagara during the afternoon.  We spent the night at TGI Fridays (all the local eateries had the Sabres game on the TVs) watching the Iona-Loyola game and the Jeremy Lin show versus the Lakers. 

The Niagara game on Saturday afternoon was a well played game featuring many runs by both teams.  We had played them only six days earlier at our gym and after falling down by 17 points came back to win on a Brandon Penn three pointer with 0.8 seconds remaining.  This time we went up by 17 points only to let Niagara come all the way back and a two-point lead with 3.7 seconds remaining.  We set up an out-of-bounds play and Jon Thompson hit the game winning three as time expired.  Our entire bench sprinted onto the floor to celebrate as the referees went to the table to review the tape. 

What the replay showed was the ball in Jon Thompson’s hand as time expired, but failed to show was that the clock was started 0.8 seconds early.  The referees ruled the basket no good and we lost the game.  On the long, six and a half hour bus ride home we reviewed the tape ourselves and sat in stunned amazement as you could clearly see the clock start and run almost a full second off before it technically should have.  It was the longest bus ride ever back to Rider. Maybe even more amazing was how effortlessly Jon Thompson went from the free-throw line to the opposite three-point line in three seconds with four dribbles and sank the three.  It really is incredible what you can do in only three seconds. 

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