Big South tournament time

Tournament time.  There’s nothing greater in sports than the parity in college basketball.  And at no point during the season is it more apparent than around tournament time.  The intensity picks up across the board, there’s a fight to teams they may not have played with earlier in the year, particularly in “one-bid” leagues like the Big South.  The awesome thing about March is that no matter what you’ve done to this point, you can still get a ticket to the dance.  The slate is wiped clean, if you’re clicking at the right time, you might find yourself in the NCAA Tournament.

Teams have spent the past two months battling for a regular season conference championship and for seeding in their conference tournament.  Getting the right matchups could be the start of a nice run.  Make an adjustment in your gameplan and the element of surpise may catch other teams off-guard .  During the 2006-2007 season, and my last year as a player at VMI, we made some last minute changes that made a huge difference during our run to the conference championship game.

We spent the entire season trapping all over the court.  We went into the tournament as a 6 seed averaging over 100 ppg.  We finished the regular season with 12 wins, not seen as a milestone at most programs but at the time for VMI, it was a clear step in the right direction.  We went to practice the day before our first round game at Liberty and expected that the game plan would be the usual.  We will force the other team to play the way we want to play, we will trap, we will control the tempo.  Coach Baucom and his staff had a different plan. We played a simple 2-3 zone.  Nothing fancy about it, no trapping out of it, just a straight 2-3 zone.  A pretty big adjustment for a team who was used to doing nothing but trapping for 29 games.

We rode to change to the championship game.  We upset third seeded Liberty at their place in the quarterfinals.  Then went on to defeat the second seed High Point Panthers on a neutral court in Rock Hill, South Carolina.  We took on the Winthrop Eagles in the Championship Game on their home floor.  The Winthrop Coliseum was packed, the energy and fight in the game was on an entirely different level.  We battled down to the last second and lost 84-81 to a Winthrop team that would go on to beat Notre Dame in the first round of the NCAA tournament and finish the season ranked in the Top-25. 

It hurt to lose, more than usual that day since I knew I’d never put on a uniform again, but we all left the arena with a sense of pride that we didn’t have before.  That’s the beauty of college basketball in March, every year there’s a Cinderella story.   You don’t have to have the most talent, you don’t have to play a perfect game.  If you can be a better team than your opponent for 40 minutes, you earn yourself another day to lace ‘em up.

Best of luck to everyone as their conference tournaments begin.

* * *