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Posted Feb. 14, 2007

Shooting
from the hip

Bryan Schnettler is in rare company among NCAA 3-point shooters.

In the summer of 2005, two of the best pure shooters in the country went mano-a-mano at the Johnny Tauer Championship Basketball Camp. It was St. Thomas' Bryan Schnettler against Northern Arizona's Stephen Sir in front of every student in camp, as well as a dozen basketball coaches. The two traded rainbows around the 3-point arc, shooting off the catch, on the move, and around screens. They stepped farther and farther back behind the arc and let it fly.

We'll take Schnettler's word for it that he was better in just about everything, and that the only thing he couldn't match was when Sir started hitting 40-foot set shots.

"I shot pretty well that day," Schnettler said with a laugh. "Not to sound cocky, but I shoot pretty well most of the time."

Schnettler didn't come across as cocky during our conversation. If anything, he came off as a straight shooter (pardon the pun). He and Sir are the only two players in NCAA men's basketball to make 100 3-pointers this season shooting them at 49% or better.

Schnettler is the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference's top scorer at 19.8 points per game. He's made more than twice as many 3-pointers (105) as two-pointers (51) and shoots it better from long range too (49.3% on 3's, 42.1% on 2's). Schnettler is also among the nation's best free throw shooters, at 92.2%.

St. Thomas is 21-3, 17-2 in league play and has an All-American candidate at center in Isaac Rosefelt but Schnettler's shot is one of the other reasons that the Tommies are national contenders.

Not that it's easy for him to get shots now that everyone knows how gaudy his stats are. Teams have started to play box and one or triangle and two against Schnettler and have one defender face guard him all game. The best way to hold Schnettler down is to limit his shots, which St. John's did when it held him to just four in an upset win in January. The two teams meet again on Saturday and St. Thomas can clinch top seed in the league playoffs with a victory. A loss gives the top seed to St. John's.

"I don't think I've had a game where I took four shots since fifth grade," said Schnettler, a native of Sartel, Minn. who transferred to St. Thomas after spending his freshman year at UW-Superior.

When Schnettler shoots at a high volume, he tends to get in a pretty good rhythm. He can recall at least five instances in which he went around the 3-point line, taking five shots in each spot and making all 25. Getting into a comfort zone allowed him to outshoot Sir (Schnettler says the only person to beat him in a shootout recently is former teammate Neal Anderson). Wherever he goes, he always gives it his best shot (pardon the pun, again). So what's the secret?

"The two most important things are hard work and belief," Schnettler said. "The first thing I'd let someone who wants to shoot well know is that the more repetitions you get, the better you're going to be. You want to follow through high, use your legs, and keep the ball not in the palm of your hand, but on the pads of your fingers. And you have to be confident. Confidence is by far and away, the most important thing for me."

AFTER GRADUATION: In between basketball games and classwork, the question of the moment for Muhlenberg senior forward Meghan Courtney is what she's going to do next. This is someone who has a different perspective on her future than most student-athletes.

Meghan Courtney used basketball as a way to reach aboriginal children in Australia.

Courtney had an internship in New York at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues for the past two years and has done work for the Indigenous Peoples' Center for Documentation, Research and Information (DOCIP). Last summer she traveled with a professor to Australia after getting a grant to do research working with aborigines. The project was a study of Organizational Sustainability through Aboriginal Employment Training Models.

Among the ways she introduced herself to the community while there was to run a basketball clinic for local children.

"It was great to see how basketball can fit into my life and help academically too," Courtney said. "Sports are a universal language that you can use to break down people apprehensions."

Basketball was a small part of the daily life. This was the equivalent of being thrown into the real world, only this real world had a totally different feel to it. Graduate school or more field work is likely on the horizon next, with an emphasis on international studies, though Courtney got the equivalent of a masters in the subject with her experiences.

Muhlenberg's Meghan Courtney also reached 1,000 points for her career earlier this season.

"Some of the communities were far away from cities," said Courtney, who hails from Amherst, Mass. "It was amazing to take yourself out of what you know and experience life in a different way. We camped out in the desert. Our car tipped on a dirt road. We got stuck there and ended up eating kangaroo for dinner. That was the most adventurous story I have."

Courtney is a captain on this Mules team, which lost eight seniors off last year's Centennial Conference championship squad. They were replaced by eight freshmen and three new starters found their way into the lineup. As a result, Courtney has emerged as one of the team's leaders and the best players in the league. She ranks second in the Centennial in scoring, third in rebounding and first in blocked shots, and scored her 1,000th career point earlier this month. Muhlenberg is 19-5, 13-5, good for third place in the Centennial in what was thought to be a rebuilding season. The Mules are coming off back-to-back losses to the two top teams in the standings -- McDaniel and Dickinson -- but Courtney is optimistic about the team's chances in the postseason.

"I know that teams didn't expect a lot from us, but we really bonded," Courtney said. "It's been pretty incredible to play on this team. I think we get a lot of energy from our teammates and that contributes to our success at the end of games."

TECHNICALLY WINNING: It doesn't quite make the front page splash that comes when Calvin beats Hope, but on that same day, twice this season, the Caltech women's basketball team was won a Southern Collegiate Interscholastic Athletic Conference basketball game.

Four-year players, such as Lindsay King, have experienced some brutal losses but are getting rewarded with conference victories.

The men's basketball team may have gotten most of the headlines after stopping its massive Division III losing streak, but the Beavers women's team's accomplishments merit mention since this season marks the first that Caltech won a SCIAC game since joining the league in 2002.

Each Caltech squad has gotten national exposure. The men were featured on ESPN's College Game Day and last year's team was the subject of a documentary film, Quantum Hoops, currently being shopped around at film festivals. The women will be featured in an upcoming segment on a program airing on the Hallmark Channel, though ESPN may want to take a look at their recent success too. The team is 3-18 with SCIAC wins over Pomona-Pitzer and most recently Whittier last Saturday.

You're dealing with a different caliber of student when you talk about Caltech. Students there go on to build computers or fly space shuttles. The school challenges students to become the world's best problem solvers, so much so that even medical school seems easy afterwards. The honorary captain for the Pomona-Pitzer game was Robert Grubbs, the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. A look at the player profiles on the team's Web site show that this is a group of extremely intelligent thinkers. One player, when asked to describe herself picks the word "impish" and another wishes they had the superpower of "translucent invisibility." The workload can be described as "insane" as is the pressure on students to succeed. Basketball is a good way to stay sane.

Photo by Mandy Gamble Rene Davis might be masquerading as a forward but she's doing a fair impression, at 18th in Division III with 10.9 rebounds per game.

"In the Caltech brochure, it says that going to Caltech is like trying to drink water from a fire hose," said Beavers junior captain Lindsay King. "That sums it up. They throw information at you. You try to catch as much of it as you can. It's not easy for anyone."

That's how it was on the basketball court a few years ago for Caltech, where the women's team averaged 15 points and lost by an average of margin of 60 points.

"There were games (as a freshman) where I cried because it was so frustrating," said King, a New Hampshire native. "I knew we were better than what we were showing."

The scoring average has since more than tripled and the average deficit has been sliced to 17. That's because coach Sandra Marbut has been able to retain players like King, who is the school's all time leading scorer and fellow captain Rene Davis (among the nation's top rebounders) who are the team's first candidates for All-SCIAC honors. In past years, students gave up the sport after freshman year, but these two are part of a group that's stuck with it. Davis returned even after suffering a broken hand in her first year. They've also been able to coax promising talents like freshman point guard Lisa Yee into coming to the school upon learning of acceptance. This is a small team that scraps for rebounds. The roster is comprised almost entirely of guards, though Davis noted "Some of us pretend to be forwards."

The two wins have not come easily. The Beavers rallied from nine points down against Pomona-Pitzer to win 55-53 and a 16-point deficit against Whittier to win, 54-52. In each instance, the game's outcome hung in the balance until a 3-point try at the buzzer was missed. The Caltech fans showed they were pretty smart too. Attendance, which at times not long ago was barely double digits, was better than 800 fans combined at the two contests.

"The first win was surreal, and I couldn't stop smiling for two days afterwards," said Davis, the team's leader in floor burns, who had a double-double in each contest. "After the first win, it was really important for us to get another so that you couldn't write off the first as a fluke."

How good is it going now for Caltech? It has even gotten to the point where King, when talking about an upcoming opponent, can say "We feel we match up well with them," words she never would have uttered two years ago.

"It's a new era for Caltech basketball," Davis said. "When I first got here, we had a player, Andrea Kung. When she started, she was playing to keep the program alive. The school used to have a hard time getting women to play. Now the goal is to win SCIAC games. It's a pretty big difference."

NOTE OF THE WEEK: By our count, there are 12 Division III basketball leagues which we have not written anything about for either gender. Over this week and next, we'll shoot for 100% inclusion, so indulge us in the following tidbits.

The New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) is the only league in Division III to enter the week with two teams ranked in the top 10 in free throw percentage on the men's side and two teams ranked in the top 20 on the women's side. In women's hoops, WPI ranks 16th (73.9%), one spot ahead of Wheaton, Mass. (73.7%). In men's basketball, Wheaton ranks fourth (78.5%), five spots higher than MIT (76.9%).

In the Presidents' Athletic Conference, Westminster's women's team looks to be headed to the nation's biggest turnaround. A year after finishing 8-19, Rose Scott's squad is 18-5 entering Wednesday. A win in the regular season finale would give the team 20 victories for the second time in school history (the first was 2004-05).

A win on Feb. 10 was a small step for Eastern Nazarene, Division III's last winless men's program this season, out of the Commonwealth Coast Conference. It snapped a 21-game losing streak and marked the first head coaching win for Jon Yeh. The school notes that Yeh is believed to be the first Chinese-American collegiate head men's basketball coach in the country.

Dominican's men's basketball team played four consecutive overtime games to open the month of February, including three against fellow Northern Athletics Conference teams. The Stars went 2-2 in those games (they're 2-4 in overtime overall) and are 14-9 with two regular-season games remaining. They've clinched their first winning season in more than a decade.

If you have a tip for Note of the Week, send it to atn@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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