3:02 am | March 6, 2019 | Go to Source | Author:
Ah, conference championship week. Fun, friendly basketball among rivals in their respective conferences that makes for great sport television.
And, also, a nerve-wracking, heart-pounding, all-or-nothing, ride-or-die affair for programs with one shot to get to the Big Dance.
We asked our coach analysts to talk about the madness before the madness: conference championship week.
What’s the toughest part of preparing for a conference tournament?
Fran Fraschilla: Preparing for a mid- or low-major tournament is far more difficult than preparing for a tournament in a power conference. No matter what you’ve done over the course of the season, all that matters are three days in March. I coached in four conference championship games at the mid-major level, and your head wants to explode because of the pressure of knowing that no matter what you did, no matter how successful you were over 16 or 18 games, all that mattered was winning the conference championship. It’s why championship week has become must-watch reality TV. The agony and ecstasy of the pressure of getting in the Big Dance is unlike anything I experienced in the rest of my coaching career.
Seth Greenberg: It’s not the preparation as much as it is the mindset of staying in the present. There is an inherent pressure with conference tournaments, especially if you’re in a one-bid league. When I was at Long Beach State it was win or go home. When I was at Virginia Tech, it was a little different, because the one year we made the tournament we thought we were in the NCAA tournament as a top-25 team. But then in other years, we knew we had to win a game, or multiple games, and still won’t get in. There’s an inherent pressure of playing in the tournament. The games, the atmosphere, the tension are all different. What you’ve got to get your team to understand is that pressure is what it is; you can’t control it. What can you control? How hard you play, getting to the next play, playing through adversity. You can’t get stuck, and that was the biggest thing: the mental aspect, rather than the physical. You’re playing a team probably for the third time; you have a very good understanding of who that team is and what they’re trying to accomplish. Keep your team in the present.
Dan Dakich: It wasn’t really hard after the first round: getting all the info you need, getting your kids convinced that you can beat the team or that they better play hard because they already beat the team. I always felt like kids were really excited about playing in conference tournaments. Particularly in the MAC, because that’s your NCAA tournament ticket — gotta win to go. I never had a problem with preparation, but more about kids being kids: we either lost to the team once or twice, or whatever happened in the last game against the team we’re about to play, you have to make sure they understood that this was gone and a new day has dawned.
What’s a great memory you have from a conference tourney?
Fraschilla: My first year as a head coach, taking Manhattan College to its first NCAA tournament in 38 years, was one of the highlights of my career. What I remember most was being down 10 at halftime to Niagara, and battling back to have a free throw win the tournament final and get the Jaspers into the NCAA tournament. When I signed my first contract at Manhattan, the school gave me a $50,000 loan for a down payment on a house for my wife and my young son, and in this two-page contract, it was written that if I took the team to an NCAA tournament, the loan would be forgiven. Sure enough, with the score tied, my best free throw shooter stepped to the line with one second to go and missed the first free throw. It was the first time all season long that I said to myself, “This next free throw is worth $50,000.” My senior point guard Chris Williams calmly made the second one and not only did we have an incredible moment during championship week to be part of March Madness, but I pocketed 50 grand. Which is still a lot of money today, but an awful lot of money then!
Greenberg: Probably my first Big West Conference championship. In 1993 at Long Beach Arena, we were playing with a very good team [Lucious Harris, Bryon Russell] and it was our first game in the conference tournament. We were down to Cal State Fullerton at the half. We made some slight adjustments concerning our defense, but it was a really special team; they didn’t get stuck. They continued to play, to grind, to trust each other; no one tried to do things they couldn’t do, and we came back. In that championship game against New Mexico State, we had a play for Terrance O’Kelley, a junior at the time. We were down one, and we were coming out of a timeout; we ran a quick break, got into the lane, drag screen, and then we found O’Kelley open and he — he was like Inspector Gadget, he had the longest arms in the world — made this jump hook, and that put us in the NCAA tournament.
We won another championship with a memorable, kind of last-second play, in 1995 two years later. We put a guy named Eric Brown in against Reno in Las Vegas; we called a timeout to run one play that we hadn’t run all game and Eric Brown delivered. He knocked down that shot and won the tournament. And that was really interesting because our college president, Bob Maxson was there. He was the former college president at UNLV and left under less-than-perfect circumstances. He didn’t want to come to that game, but I called him up, told him we’d win the tournament, and asked him to be there. So we got that trophy and I handed it right to him; he’d always been good to me and I was happy he was part of that championship.
Dakich: I have a great memory that turned into a bad memory. We rolled to the finals of the MAC tournament with this kid, Keith McLeod, hitting three unbelievable shots to avert an upset in the quarterfinals against Akron when I was with Bowling Green in 2002. I always loved that walk back to the hotel because it’s underground: my wife, my kids, the fans, everyone is together and happy. We spent the the entire night preparing for the next game vs. Ball State and we beat the hell out of them. They were pretty good and we were supposed to lose to them. But then it turned into a bad memory because we just couldn’t beat Kent State in the finals. But I loved the two nights of walking back with everyone, my family, from the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland to the Renaissance Hotel. It was an absolute highlight of my career, and so much fun to see everyone so happy together.
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