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Posted Jan. 12, 2006

E-mail: mark@d3hoops.com

Quakers shaking things up in OAC
The locker room was silent and the heads were down after Wilmington's men's team had its eight-game winning streak snapped by Muskingum in overtime at home on Wednesday night.

“When you see that type of commitment and feeling,” said Quakers first-year head coach Scott Ruele, “that's when you know that your guys truly care about what they're doing. They were very hurt. When losses don't bother our guys, that's when we'll have a problem.”

Scott Reule spent four years as an assistant for Wilmington's women's team, winning a national title in the process.

For the most part, this has been a feel-good season for Wilmington, which is nearing as many wins this season as it had in the last three combined — 15. The No. 17 ranked Quakers are 12-2, 5-2 in the OAC, a significant turnaround for a program that won only one game two seasons ago, when Ruele was an assistant for Jerry Scheve's national champion women's squad. He was in that role until this summer when he left to take a job as recruiting coordinator at Wright State but decided to return to his alma mater after two months when then men's coach Marc Kuntz left for a Division II assistant's position.

Ruele told his team that the chance to be a head coach at his alma mater was why he left Division I after a brief taste. He's big on the passion and commitment that he's noticed in his players.

“They say that kids don't care how much you know until they know how much you care,” Ruele said. “I told the kids that I want to be here. I'm not looking to move on. They know that somebody is going to be with them every day.”

We've talked a lot in this space this season with teams who were on the cusp of good things and were looking for building-block type wins. Wilmington has already been there and done that, dating back to when top-scoring forward Eric Stirling scored to beat the buzzer and win Anderson's season-opening tip-off tournament.

Brett Carpenter has played for four coaches in his four seasons at Wilmington.

“We didn't play our best, but we were able to win,” said senior forward Brett Carpenter. “That's when we knew we were going to be good. In other years, we found ways to lose. This year we've found ways to win.”

“That's one of those games where you develop the little extra edge you need to be successful,” added Ruele.

The Quakers have had that going for them regardless of the opponent. They opened some eyes when they won at both Baldwin-Wallace and Ohio Northern in consecutive games. The Quakers are pushing the ball up the floor, similar to how their women's team does, but have also implemented an in-your-face defensive style that has led to many scoring opportunities.

Stirling is this team's equivalent of Final Four MVP Tara Rausch, the senior scorer who averages 18 points per game. It also helps that he's one of the most unselfish players on the squad and the team leader in assists. John Rohrbacher (8.6 points) has impressed with his decision-making skills and clutch shot ability. The other senior starter, Carpenter, has filled in nicely with whatever role is needed. Leadership has been a key as well. Ruele was pleased to hear from John Carroll men's coach Mike Moran, who was impressed with the way that the Quakers have progressed.

“The biggest thing I'm pleased with is the effort,” Ruele said. “I want us to get much better defensively as the year goes on. That can set the tone and really be a key later in the year and in the conference tournament games. I also want us to rebound a little better both offensively and defensively. But our level of intensity has definitely been a key to our success.”

ON TARGET: Which is more impressive: shooting 50% from 3-point range or making 55 straight free throws? To find out, we asked someone who's done both: Rose-Hulman junior guard Suzy Carlson.

“I would say the free throws,” said Carlson, who has been perfect from the free throw line this season, and is shooting better than 50% beyond the 3-point stripe (24-for-45) for the second straight season. “That's because with free throws, it's a lot more mind and concentration. It's just you and the hoop.”

Carlson enters this weekend needing only to make six more free throws in a row to match the Division III single-season record, set by Valerie Kepner of Baldwin-Wallace in 1988-89. The career mark for all divisions is 69, set by Concordia-Moorhead's Jamie Visness in 2002-03 (Kepner also made 69 straight, but her first eight came at Lake Erie, which wasn't an NCAA school at the time).

Carlson's total is actually 56 dating to the final game of last season in which she went 1-for-2 from the line (she shot 83% from the line for the season). Rose-Hulman is 7-6 this season, 0-3 in the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference, and getting 16.5 points per game from Carlson, second on the team. She's had days ranging from 1-for-1 to 12-for-12 at the free throw line and has been unfazed by recent attempts that nearly broke the string. One shot came particularly close, hitting the back rim and hanging on the front rim before rolling in. Carlson also hasn't been affected by others mentioning her success.

“My teammates talk about it all the time in practice,” said Carlson, who estimates she makes 80% of her free throws in non-game situations. “Then, we had a game the other day where some of the girls on the other team asked me about it during the game. They said ‘Is it really true?' And I said ‘Yes.' Someone yelled out ‘You're jinxing her,' but I said, ‘No, they're not. I don't mind.' ”

ROOKIE RUN: Oglethorpe women's coach Ron Sattele admits he thought his team might be 0-4 after four games, based on the squad's history and the fact that it was loaded with freshmen. Yet here we are, 13 games into the season and the Petrels, amazingly enough, are 12-1, 10-0 in South Region games and 3-0 in the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference. Oglethorpe, which has never had a winning season dating back to the programs origins in 1991 and was picked ninth in the coaches preseason poll, even squeaked into the Top 25 at No. 24 this week.

Sattele traces the successful start back to those four games, which included wins Bridgewater and 10-2 Emory. It was just a matter of giving this new-look, youthful team, featuring four freshmen starters, a little confidence.

“They came in ready to play right on Oct. 15,” Sattele said referring to the first day of practice. “They all run and hustle and play good defense.”

The Petrels have road games this weekend at Trinity and Southwestern which should serve as a good mark for how far the Petrels have come. Oglethorpe has gotten swept in each of its three SCAC weekend road trips in each of the last two seasons, though it did pick up two nice victories on a California trip, in which Sattele and his team stayed in his daughters newly built home.

It will be interesting to see how Oglethorpe's running, pressing style, implemented by the 62-year old, white-bearded, second-year head coach and his staff, fares against teams that can handle the ball a little bit. It will also be interesting to see how a lineup that features this many freshmen handles a little bit of pressure. The freshmen have shown no problem adjusting to this level. First-year guard Katie Kulavic (17.8 points, 5.4 rebounds, 4.4 assists) leads the team in scoring and steals (nearly three per game) and still refers to herself and teammates as “underdogs.” First-year forward Biz Richmann (10.8 points, 6.6 rebounds) leads the team in rebounding.

“We've got a great bunch of girls who are young, but don't play like they're young,” said the team's lone upperclass starter, junior guard Erin Flynn (12.5 points, 4.7 assists) who transferred in two seasons ago from Division II Augusta State. “I played in AAU ball with lots of Division I players, but these girls understand the game better than any other I've played with.”

NEW FACES: Internal studies done at Immaculata showed that only 4% of students wanted to go to a women's college and only 1% wanted to go to a Catholic women's college. With that in mind, the school recently made a significant decision. After more than eight decades as an all-women's institution, it went co-ed this fall, opening up all sorts of doors that hadn't existed. That turned out to be one of the best things that could happen to the school's women's basketball team, which added eight freshmen to what ended last season as a seven-player squad.

Immaculata's glorious basketball history with national titles and prominent alumnae is a ways in the past, but the team is carving out its own new niche with a 8-2 start this season. Picked to finish last in the PAC, the Mighty Macs are 3-0 in the league, having beat Alvernia last Saturday and face a key contest at Gwynedd-Mercy this weekend. This is a significant jump for a team that went 4-21 overall a year ago. Junior forward Meg Legere, fresh off a bout with mononucleosis, scored the go-ahead basket. She leads the team in scoring and rebounding (13.0 and 7.6 per game respectively)

“I've never had a team with this much depth,” said head coach Patty Canterino, a 1992 grad of the school, which won national championships in 1972, 1973, and 1974, and has produced prominent alums such as Theresa Grentz (head coach at Illinois) and Marianne Stanley (who won three national titles coaching Old Dominion). “In the past, if a game came down to the end, we weren't able to finish it. Now, we're at a point where we know what it feels like to win.”

LONG AND WINDING ROAD: I had the chance to talk to both coaches before/after broadcasting the Brandeis-Carnegie Mellon men's game last Friday and both asked questions that I figured I'd investigate.

The first came from Brandeis men's head coach Brian Meehan suggested doing a study, as he wanted to know how frequently road teams in the UAA that lost on Friday fared on Sundays. The UAA's schedule is mirrored by only one other in Division III, the SCAC, as both leagues require flights for road trips. Meehan's thinking was that a loss on Friday makes it extra-difficult to coax a team into winning on Sunday. Well, thanks to our handy-dandy scores database, containing game results from the past three seasons, we were able to study the numbers, for both the UAA and the SCAC.

Records are teams' wins and losses on Sundays of two-game conference road trips, depending on the Friday results:

What conclusions can we draw? It depends on the league, according to D3hoops.com publisher Pat Coleman:

For the UAA men, it looks like we have a lot of sweeps over the past three years: Teams that lost on Friday also lost on Sunday, which makes sense. In the UAA, teams face Chicago and Wash U in the same weekend, Emory and Case Western Reserve, Brandeis and NYU and Carnegie Mellon and Rochester. The teams are very similar and it makes sense that an opponent would either sweep or get swept. I'm not sure we can draw a conclusion from this group.

Of the four conferences, it looks like the UAA women and SCAC women have the toughest turnaround from Friday to Sunday, since those who won on Friday night have the lowest winning percentages on Sunday afternoon.

But sometimes all it means is that teams that lose on Friday lose on Sunday because they aren't that good any day of the week. Although it makes sense that teams losing on Friday are more difficult to motivate on Sunday, we need more evidence before making a call.

STAGING AREA: Tony Wingen at Carnegie Mellon had another query, one that I'll throw out to the public. His team lost at Bluffton last week, but he noted something unusual during the game. The Tartans play in Skibo Gym, which contains, among other things, a stage for performances. Bluffton plays in Founders Hall, which also happens to have a stage. Wingen was curious: How many games have been played (or to pardon the pun, “staged”) this season in which both teams home gyms had a stage? Feel free to let us know.

QUICK START: Skyline commissioner Tracy King wrote in regarding the odd scheduling quirk in the league that had Yeshiva's men having played eight games before some teams had played any. King explained that the Skyline has historically allowed teams to schedule games on their own, but agreed next season to go to a block scheduling format similar to that used by another 11-team league, the SUNYAC. Yeshiva, because of the Jewish holidays, gives it students most of October off, and thus doesn't even start its winter break until after the New Year. As a result, the Maccabees load up their schedule early in the season and go three weeks without playing in January, which in turn allows the rest of the league to catch up.

PONDERINGS: The NESCAC season finally tips off this weekend after the league had a pretty good run in non-conference play. On the men's side, eight teams went 8-3 or better, including Connecticut College, which with nine victories needs only one to match its combined total from the previous two seasons combined. Remember that the Camels, 2-25 in league play, upset Tufts last season. A road win this weekend at either Williams or Middlebury would help significantly in building credibility and confidence for the young program, which only has one senior on the roster.

The “Super Sleeper” scorecard on the men's side is a mixed bag at this point. I still think our best hope is St. Thomas, which had a bad hiccup at home against Augsburg , but has rebounded to win three straight. We'll keep the faith on UW-Stout, which looked great early, but has since dropped three in a row, starting with a heartbreaking buzzer-beater against UW-La Crosse. Rutgers-Newark is 9-3, but the hot team in the NJAC right now is William Paterson, which used a 26-point win over the Scarlet Raiders as the springboard for a seven-game win streak. Brockport State is 5-5, but we still hold out hope, as its losses are against teams who are a combined 42-9 in their other games. Brandeis (7-5) is facing an uphill climb at this point, in a league without a postseason, after dropping games at home to Carnegie Mellon and Rochester .

And since we spoke of great free throw shooting on the women's side, we should make sure to give props to Montclair State's Gian Paul Gonzalez and Catholic's Patrick Satalin for their terrific foul shooting this season. Satalin is the men's leader, having made 60-for-62 through his first 13 games. Gonzalez is not only getting to the free throw line at an incredible rate (142 attempts in 12 games, he's making the most of every opportunity (132 makes). Gonzalez, who is averaging a whopping 29.8 points per game, has made his last 44 free throws, including a remarkable 22-for-22 in an overtime triumph over Rowan. For those curious, that number is still eight shy of Division III's all-time single-game mark, set when Rob Rittgers was a perfect 30-for-30 for UC San Diego against Menlo in 1988.

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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