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Posted Feb. 20, 2003

Sure, Eau Claire can go the distance

A couple of weeks ago UW-Eau Claire senior co-captain Kristi Channing gathered the team for a meeting prior to the second matchup against defending national champion UW-Stevens Point. She handed the other players a sheet of paper and had them write their name in the center. The sheets then were passed around the room and each teammate wrote a comment about the player whose name was on the sheet. When they were done, each player had a list of all the things that they did best.

Indeed, most of the players that night played to their biggest strengths. Channing and junior forward Becca Spaeth, the team’s leading scorers, combined for 41 points. Co-captain Janel Soppeland, the team’s emotional leader, and sophomore point guard Katie Murphy tallied nine assists, seven steals and only one turnover between them. Junior center Brooke Wozniak grabbed nine rebounds, including four on the offensive glass. The reserves combined to outscore the Pointers' bench, 17-11. It all added up to a 20-point edge at halftime and a 22-point win.

“We’re not afraid to let each other know how valuable she is to the team,” said Channing, a psychology major who organizes leadership discussions with teammates regularly and does her own mental preparation through pregame visualization. “After we did that, we went out and played one of our best games of the season, so I think it worked.”

That’s one of the intangibles that the Blugolds have going for them — great team chemistry. It has helped them get through an unbeaten regular season in the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and put them in position to make a national championship run.

“When things haven’t gone well, we’ve been able to turn to each other,” said Soppeland, who missed the last seven games of last season with a torn ACL and used the team’s 2-5 mark without her as motivation to come back a more valuable player. “We know that if each of us can get themselves ready to play, you can then turn to your teammates and know that they are all ready to play.”

Things have gone very well for Eau Claire, whose only blemish on a 24-1 mark came 16 games ago against a South Dakota State team that was ranked No. 1 in Division II at the time. The 73-59 loss was a confidence builder and a lesson-teacher.

“We wanted something that would push us,” said Eau Claire head coach Tonja Englund, who played on the 1991 NCAA championship team at St. Thomas and arranged this contest through her friendship with members of the SDSU coaching staff. “It’s one of the best thing’s we’ve done all year. We played them tough. It showed us that we could play at their level.”

It showed just how important the unmeasurable aspects are to winning a game.

“They did every little thing right,” Soppeland said. “From V-cuts to stepping in passing lanes. They were scrappy and tough, and banged you on every play We saw how they carried themselves with such confidence. We know now that we could have beaten them. That was a great game for us.”

Since then, the Blugolds have had a knack for pulling games out by playing their best basketball down the stretch. The unbeaten mark was in jeopardy on Feb. 15 at UW-Whitewater, when Eau Claire trailed by seven points with eight minutes left. The Blugolds closed the game out with a 25-10 run. Channing and Soppeland teamed for 17 of those points.

“Janel is the comeback player of the year type,” Englund said. “She is our glue. She is the one that holds us together and takes care of us. Kristi has really come into her own because she has developed her game. She changed the way she played. She was just a low post player when she was a freshman and redshirted. Now she shoots the 3 and can take you off the dribble. She causes mismatches for everyone.”

The Blugolds can enter the WIAC Tournament fairly comfortably knowing that an NCAA bid is a virtual certainty, regardless of how league play turns out. Just don’t mention that to any of them now.

“This group has said from the very beginning ‘Let’s control our own destiny,” said Englund, now completing her third season as head coach. “Hopefully we’ll be able to just continue to do that.”

GET CAMERON CRAZY: With conference tournaments and the NCAAs coming up, we'd like to know what you do as fans to give your team a homecourt advantage. The students at East Texas Baptist, for example, turned out in droves for the last game, turning the homecourt of Ornelas Gym into the “House of Blues” in a win over LeTourneau on Tuesday. A crowd of more than 1,000 made for a raucous atmosphere.

So tell us about your groups and send along a photo to mark@d3hoops.com. We’ll post the best ones. Keep attachments to a reasonable size, please, under a 100K if possible.

SOLID AS A . . . Rockford coach Bill Lavery realized that he had one of the hottest teams in the state of Illinois, not to mention the nation, when he spotted his barber in the stands at one recent game.

Troy DeCook has Jeff Gibbs-size for a center, but the NCAA Tournament will likely show if he has Jeff Gibbs skills.

Rockford heads into the NIIC Tournament semifinals at 23-2, with a 12-0 league mark and a 14-game win streak. It is only the second team in the 48-year history of the program to win 20 or more games, joining the squad that won 20 in 1977-78. This is impressive considering the Regents returned only one of their top five scorers from last season’s league championship team and the only returnee from that group, 6-foot-2 center Troy DeCook is a player of the year contender despite going up against much larger opponents every night.

Early wins against Augustana and then-No. 17 Wartburg set the tone.

Five players in the seven-man rotation, led in scoring by senior Billy Lewis, have scored 20 points in a game and the team’s pressing defense, has settled back at the end of games and on four occasions has gotten game-clinching stops in the final seconds.

The second largest city in the state has embraced the team recently. The team has averaged nearly 1,100 fans per game in its last four home contests, more than double what it was averaging prior to that.

“We’ve got the people supporting us,” said Lavery. “It’s been a really magical year. Now we just need to get Rockford on the (basketball) map.”

FOREMAN FEELING THE HEAT? With Willie Chandler hot on his heels, we caught up with Division III’s all-time scoring champion, Andre Foreman, who scored 2,940 points at Salisbury State (now Salisbury University) from 1988 to 1992.

Does anyone even remember this? It was Willie Chandler's 1,000th career point.

“The scoring record is a great accomplishment,” Foreman said via e-mail, “but we all know that records are made to be broken, so I am sure it will not be my record for very long.

“My best memories at Salisbury were my last two years. I was scoring champion my junior year and we made the playoffs. In my final season, we won 27 games in a row and were ranked second nationally. We made it to the Elite 8 and our gym was sold out for almost every game.”

Chandler has a chance to break the record if things go right for his team. He enters Saturday's game with Villa Julie with 2,808 points. If Misericordia (14-9, 9-6) can make the PAC finals, something it hasn’t done since Chandler’s freshman year, Chandler could play at least three more games, then possibly get more in the NCAAs or ECACs.

Chandler already caught one break as he was fighting the flu when he learned that Monday’s scheduled game with Villa Julie was postponed due to the snowstorm that blitzed the eastern seaboard. He’s also been slowed by a bad back, a bad ankle, and gimmick defenses, but still is averaging 26.7 points per game. Chandler scored 37 on Wednesday night for Misericordia, when the game was rescheduled.

“I get box-and-one, diamond-and-one, and teams playing man against me and zone against everyone else,” said Chandler. “It doesn’t bother me. They play those defenses and we win. We’re just trying now to win the PAC.”

Teammate Jason Perry, who with Chandler set the combined scoring for two classmates, has offered Chandler help both on and off the court. While Chandler will pursue a pro career, Perry will graduate in May with a degree in health sciences, then should get his masters in physical therapy next year. When Chandler first started having back trouble, Perry offered him exercises to do. When Chandler runs into trouble on the court, Perry usually winds up taking the shot.

“It will be nice to see Willie hopefully wearing a (NBA Developmental League) jersey or an NBA jersey someday,” Perry said. “I’ve had a dream to play basketball overseas, but it’s not a big deal for me if I don’t. Basketball has been my life and all good things must come to an end. I came to college for an education. I want to be a physical therapist someday for a professional team.”

SEEDING NIGHTMARE: Is there any league more wide-open than the women’s half of the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference? Four teams entered the week tied for first — Babson, Springfield, Coast Guard and MIT, and three could remain deadlocked, so long as MIT wins its makeup game on Thursday night. Coast Guard knocked Springfield down a notch earlier this week with an upset road win. Even the fifth through eighth place teams in the league have a legitimate shot to win next week’s conference tournament. Mount Holyoke won at Coast Guard; Wellesley edged MIT; Wheaton lost close games to MIT and Coast Guard; and Clark beat Babson by 15 points.

AUTOMATIC: Two significant streaks came to an end in the past week — both taking place at the foul line. Concordia-Moorhead sophomore Jamie Visness had her free throw streak come to an end on Feb. 12 in a loss to St. Catherine. Visness had made an NCAA record 69 in a row dating back to last season and 57 straight this season.

Coe sophomore point guard Nick Wilkins, left, came within one free throw of tying the national record for most consecutive free throws made in a season, finally missing on Saturday against Simpson after making 58 in a row. Wilkins did break his team’s record and the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference marks, and ended up with 65 in a row dating back to last season. The national record for consecutive free throws in a season is 59, set by Mike Michelson of Coast Guard in 1990, while the mark for consecutive free throws over a career is 70 set by D3hoops.com All-American Korey Coon of Illinois Wesleyan from February 1998 to December 1999.

SCI-HIGH: It’s been 20 years since the Occidental won a league championship and this year’s team is on the verge of doing it again, leading the SCIAC with an 11-0 mark by two games with three to play. Occidental coach Brian Newhall is familiar with that 1983 championship team, of course. He was the point guard and team MVP.

Besides shooting for the automatic bid, Occidental is also trying to become the first men's basketball team to run the table in the SCIAC. Doing so would put them in line for a first-round bye.

Notes for Around the Nation are compiled with the help of sports information directors across the country. If you have suggestions or information for this column, please send it to mark@d3hoops.com.

Previous columns
2007-08 columns
March 6: Faith restored
Feb. 27: John Jay, Cinderella
Feb. 21: No safety net
Feb. 14: Ursinus better enough
Feb. 8: Hope-TMC on collision course
Jan. 31: Plattsburgh's big shot
Jan. 24: UMD answers call
Jan. 18: Like Bosko, like son
Jan. 11: Keystone stakes
Dec. 13: Unstoppable
Dec. 7: UWW aiming deeper
Nov. 30: Coach's shadow lingers
Nov. 15: Strong duo
2006-07 columns
2005-06 columns
2004-05 columns
2003-04 columns
2002-03 columns
2001-02 columns

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