Tates Locke connects opposing NCAA coaches
Brad Stevens, 33, is in his third season as head coach of Butler University, Duke's opponent. He has taken his team to the NCAA tournament every year he's coached, but this is the first time it's gone beyond the second round under his leadership.
But despite their differences in ages and experience, Kryzyewski and Stevens share a connection, once removed, to Taylor "Tates" Locke.
At different times during his head-coaching career, Locke hired the men who hired Krzyzewski and Stevens at the beginning of their careers.
The connection to Krzyzewski began in 1963 when Locke, then the head coach at the U.S. Military Academy, took on Bobby Knight as an assistant coach.
Locke left in 1965 and Knight became head coach. Krzyzewski would play for him at Army.
After he completed his military service, Krzyzewski became an assistant coach under Knight at Indiana, his first college coaching job.
The link to Stevens began in 1990 when Locke, then the head coach at Indiana State University, hired Thad Matta as an assistant coach.
In 2000, Matta became the head coach at Butler and hired Stevens as the coordinator of basketball operations, the first job of his college coaching career. Previously, he had been working in marketing for Eli Lilly and Company.
Matta left after one year for another coaching job (he's now the head coach at Ohio State), but Stevens stayed and rose in the ranks.
If Locke is the grandfather figure in this story of coaching bloodlines, he's also a grandfather with baggage.
After Army, he became the head coach at Miami University of Ohio before taking a similar position at Clemson University in 1970. His time there became a kind of cautionary tale of coaching excess.
Under investigation for recruiting violations and other infractions, Locke left Clemson in 1975. The NCAA subsequently found 40 rule violations under his watch and placed the team on probation for three years.
Locke wrote of his fall from grace in his 1982 book Caught in the Net.
"The book is for young coaches, to let them know about the personal hell they're in for if they do what I did," he told Sports Illustrated's Rick Telander when the memoir was about to be published.
After Clemson, Locke coached briefly in the National Basketball Association and then served as head coach at Jacksonville University 1978 until he was fired in 1981.
In 1987, Knight hired him as an assistant at Indiana.
"I think Coach Knight felt that Tates was lost, that he needed a new direction in life," the Indiana athletic director told The New York Times then.
In 1989, Locke took over at Indiana State, where he coached for five seasons.
Now 73, he has also been a scout and a special assistant to the general manager of the Portland Trail Blazers of the NBA.
(c) 2010 Muckety LLC
UNI Vs Michigan State: Michigan State Wins
ST. LOUIS - After the first and second round games of the NCAA basketball tournament which was filled with astonishing wins and surprising defeats, it is the time for the Sweet Sixteen. Sweet Sixteen which started on Thursday, March 25 is coming out with some brilliant performances on the court. On Friday UNI was pitted against Michigan State University team where both the teams came up with some brilliant performances. It seemed that UNI was in no mood to lose the opportunity to ride into the Elite Eight for the first time ever, and the Michigan State University team was not in a mood to allow that to happen.
Both the teams came up with a good show but it was Michigan State University's Korie Lucious who stole the game. In 39 minutes Korie Lucious helped his team with four assists that led the team to have a lead over the UNI which had to struggle to equal the score. He did an amazing job on the court and contributed 10 points. Durrell Summers added 19 to the team's score. After the win the coach of the Michigan State team seemed all elated and reportedly said that he plays the game to win. The win has led the Michigan State University team to the Elite Eight.
On the part of the UNI team, which has caught the attentions after the early NCAA game, where they had defeated top seeded team Kansas, the day turned out to be a bad one. The UNI team tried its best with Adam Koch adding 13 points and Kwadzo Ahelegbe adding 12, but it seemed that the game was determined for the Michigan State University team with Kalin Lucas providing team Michigan State with that last minute shot.
Copyright(c) 2010 Taragana
Pitt fans shouldn't be upset
Thinking out loud:
- There are a lot of really unhappy Pitt basketball fans out there following yesterday's 71-68 loss to Xavier in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
They shouldn't be.
There's no question the Panthers overachieved with 25 wins this season and a second place showing in the Big East.
After losing the trio of DeJuan Blair, Sam Young and Levance Fields from last year, no one was expecting coach Jamie Dixon's club to reach the 20-win club for the school's ninth straight year.
The future, meanwhile, looks bright with Jermaine Dixon the lone senior who will be missing from the starting cast.
Dixon didn't help the Panthers against Xavier, going one of nine from the floor and scoring only two points.
- Did the Big East's stock drop with only two (West Virginia and Syracuse) of its eight representatives advancing to the Sweet 16?
- Put your hand up if you had Northern Iowa beating Kansas on your bracket sheet Saturday. I don't see one hand.
- Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said over the weekend he was concerned when asked about quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.
I would hope so after the Steelers' star quarterback has been accused of sexual assault by two different women in a span of nine months.
It's no secret that Tomlin's job would be a lot tougher without Roethlisberger calling signals.
I find it hard to believe that the Steelers are talking about making a deal with Tampa Bay to bring Byron Leftwich back at quarterback.
- Isn't it nice to see that five of Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Delwyn Young's 11 hits are home runs?
Don't look for his power display to continue when the games start counting.
In his four-year major league career which consists of 234 games and 519 plate appearances, Young has hit only 10 balls out of the park.
Speaking of the Pirates, their leading hitter this spring is outfielder John Raynor with a .385 batting average.
The funny thing is that Raynor probably won't be wearing a Pirate uniform two weeks from today in the home opener with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
- It's hard to believe that the Pittsburgh Penguins' game in Detroit tonight is their first in Joe Louis Arena since June 13.
If you have a short memory that's when the Pens won the Stanley Cup with an exciting 2-1 win over the Red Wings in Game 7.
- Wondering what kind of season Marian Hossa is having after playing 12 games for the Penguins in 2008 and the entire 2009 campaign with Detroit?
In 46 games for Chicago, Hossa has 21 goals and 22 assists for 43 points. Last year with the Red Wings, he had 40 goals and 31 assists for 71 points.
- If I were a betting man, I'd say Mike Rice won't be coaching basketball at Robert Morris very much longer.
Rice's stock definitely soared when his Colonials took heavily favored Villanova into overtime before losing 73-70 in the opening round of the NCAA tourney.
- And thanks to Chuck Smith, of Rostraver Township, who says the road to success is marked with many tempting parking places!
Copyright (c) 2010 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co
Pac 10 Basketball Tournament
The Pac 10 basketball tournament will be starting its semi-final matches this evening. In the first round that was held on Wednesday, Oregon beat Washington State by a score of 82-80. As the game came down to the final seconds, the score was tied resulting in overtime. In the quarterfinal games on Thursday, UCLA beat Arizona by a score of 75-69, and California beat Oregon with a final of 90-74. Stanford beat Arizona State and Washington beat Oregon State by a score of 59-52.
The semifinal games of the Pac 10 basketball tournament this evening will have UCLA playing California and Washington taking on Stanford. California is the number three seed of the tournament and is looking to participate in the championship game on Saturday. The winner of the tournament automatically gets a bid to the NCAA tournament. Arizona State will be holding its breath to see if they receive a bid to the NCAA tournament. With the loss to UCLA it may be a long shot.
In the California win over Oregon, Jerome Randle had 22 points, while leading his team to the semifinals. Patrick Christopher had 21 points and five assists. California comes into the tournament, holding the Pac-10 title and a record of 22-9 while UCLA finished sixth in the standings and have an overall record of 14-17, and a 8-10 record in the conference. In the event that UCLA should upset California, they will be looking to get into the final games that they can earn that automatic bid. Just like some of the other conferences the Pac 10 basketball tournament may hold some surprises.
hotcappers.com
St. Louis is the perfect place for Missouri Valley tournamentYou'd suspect that since St. Louis is the headquarters for the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament, the city would be the perfect place for the men's basketball extravaganza.
Well, you are a right thinking individual.
It's the ideal spot.
The Valley set up shop in St. Louis 20 years ago and there seems to be no reason to move its premier event. The successful men's tournament has also spawned a women's one right around the bend.
For the third consecutive year, the women's tournament will play out at the Family Arena in St. Charles, Mo. It'll run next week and league champion Illinois State, which features Civic Memorial High graduate Katie Broadway, is the team to beat.
The women's tournament still has a long way to go in finding its local groove, but please realize it's just 15 years old. The men's one has been around for 34 seasons and the best decision Valley officials made - that covers 103 years for you old-timers - was anchoring the tourney in St. Louis.
It wasn't a slam-dunk sell at the time. Some wondered aloud if St. Louis would be the natural choice for the event, now a four-day affair. They expressed their apprehension about it, but Commissioner Doug Elgin, now in his 22nd year, convinced them that the community would be the right setting.
I guess it's a bit unorthodox because St. Louis doesn't have a home team in the 10-school field. Saint Louis University, which was in the Valley from 1937-74, participates in the Atlantic 10 Conference. Nearby Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, which is making the transition to Division I, is latching on with the Ohio Valley, housed in Nashville, Tenn.
Then again, look at the Valley landscape. Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Missouri State, Illinois State and Bradley are close enough to call the city its second home for one weekend.
Evansville, Indiana State and Drake aren't that far away. Northern Iowa, Wichita State and Creighton round out the field and you don't hear those folks complaining about coming to St. Louis.
There was more consternation in 1991, the year the Valley made the shift to The Lou.
Host Illinois State defeated SIUC 81-78 in the 1990 finals at Normal and MVC officials decided it was time to unveil a neutral venue.
The coaches clamored for it. They figured if one of the conference schools played host to a Valley tournament, it was an enormous advantage. And these were the days when the MVC could only wedge one team into the NCAA Tournament.
So in 1991, old Kiel Auditorium - once the home of the NBA's St. Louis Hawks - welcomed the Valley tourney. Creighton defeated Missouri State 68-52 in the finals, but nobody raved about it.
It wasn't until SIUC captured three successive titles from 1993-95 that the Valley show began to grow. The Carbondale fandom got hooked on it, as did the ISU folks when the Redbirds swept to back-to-back championships in 1997-98.
Missouri State started to get the fever in 1992, when the Bears won their first - and only - tournament title. Curiously, they've finished second a total of seven times in 19 years.
Creighton has won it the most - seven times - in St. Louis, while Drake (2008) and Northern Iowa (2009) celebrated crowns the past two years. Wichita State (1985, 1987) has prevailed twice but never here. ISU and SIUC both have snared four tourney championships.
Bradley, for all of its storied basketball history has won it only twice (1980, 1988) and neither were in St. Louis. Evansville, the league's newest member - it joined in 1993 - is without a tournament championship.
In fact, the Purple Aces are a wobbly 4-16 in MVC postseason competition.
Yet there's hope for them, just as there's anticipation for others. Today, for example, Northern Iowa is striving for its third tournament title in seven years. And Wichita State is seeking its first one since 1987.
It makes for good theater in St. Louis. College basketball is a driving force that's constantly on the rebound. Just ask the hometown Billikens, experiencing a revival of sorts.
By the way, they weren't here this weekend.
thetelegraph.com
DC to play Wisconsin-Whitewater in NCAA tournament
"March Madness" has arrived and the Defiance College men's basketball team which will be partaking in the festivities for the first time since 2001.
DC learned this morning Wisconsin-Whitewater (22-5) will be Friday's opponent with a 6 p.m. tip slated. Grove City (19-8) meets Wooster (23-5) in the other Friday Division III regional game with the two winners to collide on Saturday. All three games are at Wooster.
The Warhawks will be making their 16th NCAA Tournament appearance and won national titles in 1984 and 1989. This will be Whitewater's fourth consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance after it went from 1998 to 2005 without a bid.
Whitewater won the regular season Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, one of the nation's elite conferences, before losing in the WIAC Tournament championship game to UW-Stevens Point on Saturday. The Warhawks were ranked No. 8 in the D3hoops.com Poll last week and earned an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament.
Senior 6-9 center Dustin Mitchell leads the Warhawks with 18.2 ppg and 8.9 rpg. Senior guard Dupree Fletcher (13.4 ppg), freshman guard Nolan Free (6.9 ppg), junior guard Phil Negri (8.4 ppg), sophomore forward Alex Edmunds (7.7 ppg), senior forward Mike Bendall (10.3 ppg) and junior guard D.J. Dantzler are other top scorers for Whitewater.
"You spend all day yesterday looking at projections and do your own guess work and where could you could go," said DC second-year coach Kyle Brumett this morning. "But it's just so unique. It's so hard to accomplish, looking at how few times we've been in and how long ago it was.
It's not just us, there are other teams out there. There's going to be 20-win teams that aren't going to get in. It would've been different if we didn't get the automatic bid. If we would've been sitting on the bubble and waiting, the anxiety and excitement for the Selection Show would have been a completely different feeling. That's why they call it on the bubble."
The Yellow Jackets (23-5) will take an eight-game winning streak into the NCAA Tournament after knocking off No. 6 seed Franklin, No. 2 seed Hanover and then top seed Anderson University last week during the HCAC Tournament to earn an automatic berth into the tournament.
Of the 61 bids into the NCAA Division III Tournament this year, 40 are gimmies in automatic bids via Pool A (teams that won their conference), two pool B bids (teams that are not a member of those 40 conferences) and 19 Pool C bids (at-large teams).
HCAC regular season champion Anderson was among the at-large teams selected. The Ravens (22-5) will play in the Carthage regional against St. Thomas (23-4) in the first round.
The Jackets will be making their 34th journey into a national tournament, fourth at the Division III level. DC played in the NAIA national tournament 30 times before becoming affiliated with the NCAA Division III level.
Defiance College is in the midst of the program's most successful season since making the transition to the NCAA Division III level with a 23-5 record. It's the most triumphs by a Jacket team since the 1987-88 team went 24-7.
Copyright Defiance Publishing, LLC 1995-2010
Comeback hits heights in history
If not for the six-overtime thriller that Connecticut and Syracuse staged March 12, 2009, in the Big East Conference tournament quarterfinals, they might be talking about the game Pitt and West Virginia played Friday night into Saturday morning as the greatest Big East game of the new century.
As it is, the epic contest that kept a capacity crowd at Petersen Events Center on the edge of their seats will have to merely settle for being the game of the year in the Big East.
Perhaps the game of the year in college basketball.
And certainly one of the all-time greats in annals of Pitt basketball.
Pitt's 98-95 triple-overtime victory was not only noteworthy for its length. It was only the third Big East regular-season game to go to triple overtime in the history of the conference and Pitt's first since 1976.
This game was special for all of its momentum swings, clutch shot-making and endurance in the face of exhaustion over a 55-minute marathon that took more than three hours in real time.
And, oh yes, one miraculous comeback at the end of regulation that made it all possible.
"It was another classic game for us," Pitt junior Brad Wanamaker said.
Classic comebacks are becoming old hat for the Panthers, who erased a five-point deficit in the final minute of regulation to force overtime Jan. 16 against Louisville in a victory. This comeback made the one against the Cardinals look easy.
Friday night, Pitt erased a seven-point deficit in 22 seconds in the final minute of regulation to force overtime. That alone makes this game remarkable.
Yet there was so much more that took place after regulation that contributed to the game's greatness.
But first the details of the comeback:
West Virginia led, 66-59, before Ashton Gibbs made a jumper with 43 seconds left to make it 66-61. West Virginia senior Da'Sean Butler missed a free throw with 43 seconds left, and Travon Woodall made two free throws after being fouled with 36 seconds left to make it 66-63.
After two Darryl Bryant free throws made it 68-63 with 35 seconds left, Woodall quickly answered with a runner in the lane to make it 68-65 with 31 seconds remaining.
On the ensuing inbounds play, Nasir Robinson forced a turnover, and Brad Wanamaker saved the ball from going out of bounds (although replays show he might not have stayed in bounds). His desperation pass landed in the hands of Woodall, who found Gibbs open in the corner for the tying 3-pointer with 26 seconds left.
The score was tied, 68-68, at the end of regulation.
Pitt had a great opportunity to win the game in the first overtime. Gibbs, a 91-percent free-throw shooter, was at the line with seven seconds remaining and Pitt ahead by three. Gibbs missed and West Virginia capitalized.
Bryant dribbled up court and made a 3-pointer with one second remaining to tie the score at 78-78 and force a second overtime.
Pitt again had a golden opportunity to salt the game away in the second overtime. The Panthers led by three with 20 seconds remaining when Butler went up for a 3-point attempt. Gary McGhee lunged toward him and fouled him as he released his shot.
Butler made all three free throws to tie the score at 88-88 to force a third overtime.
Finally, with three of his teammates on the bench after fouling out, Gilbert Brown made two free throws with 28.8 seconds remaining in the third overtime to give Pitt the lead for good after 12 ties and 12 lead changes in the first 54 minutes.
Gibbs redeemed himself by making two free throws with 10 seconds left to give the Panthers another three-point lead. Only this time, the Mountaineers could not pull another rabbit out of their coonskin hats.
Bryant's desperation 3-pointer with three seconds left grazed the front of the rim, and McGhee pulled down the rebound to end the longest home game in school history.
"Without a doubt it's the greatest game I ever played in," Brown said. "It was the greatest comeback since I've been at Pitt. We had the Ronald Ramon buzzer-beater [against West Virginia in 2008]. But this tops it. The way we fought back at the end of regulation and then in the first and second overtime was huge. And then pulling it out in the third overtime was even bigger. I definitely think this goes down as one of the greatest Pitt victories against West Virginia."
Brown did not need to utter those final three words. Pitt has played in other great games throughout the years, and it's probably too difficult to rate them. But it's hard to imagine another game with as many swings of momentum, as many clutch plays in crunch time.
The end result for Pitt (19-6, 8-4) meant that it tied West Virginia (19-5, 8-4) and Georgetown (18-5, 8-4) for third place in the conference with six games remaining. And according to Brown, this victory was much needed for a team that had fallen on some hard times in recent weeks.
"It's a big emotional boost as well as a confidence boost for us," he said. "I think we needed a win like this to make us believe we can do this. Early on in the season, when we had our first five wins in the Big East, we were rolling. We really felt like we could get it done and possibly be in contention for a Big East regular-season championship. And then after going through the struggles we went through, pulling this game out it really shows the character of the players, how we fought every day in practice just to get back to this point."
Copyright (c)1997 - 2010 PG Publishing Co., Inc
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