D3hoops.com: Notables

By Pat Coleman
D3hoops.com

SALEM – If Ursinus is going to bring home the Walnut and Bronze, it will need to be more than a Nick Shattuck team this weekend.

That may go without saying anyway – one-man teams don’t perform well at the Final Four, if their talent is able to get them that far. Nobody who has won the national championship in the past decade could fairly be classified as such.

So since Shattuck is at less than 100 percent, at least the Bears (29-2) will be prepared to run their offense through other people in Friday night’s semifinal against Amherst (25-3).

If there’s one person who knows that well, it’s junior guard John Noonan, who, like Shattuck, is a 6-5 guard. He’s averaged 21.0 points per game in the NCAA Tournament and is shooting 13-for-30 from three-point range in the four games.

“Our offense is focused around Nick and we know that,” Noonan says. “Most of the plays run are geared towards him but you always have to be ready to step up and make shots.

“I’ve said about Nick that he’s fun to play with because he makes players around him better. I’ve definitely benefitted from playing against him. I know I’m capable of scoring and helping the team in other ways also, just coming into the game prepared to play my best and do what I can.”

Shattuck, the D3hoops.com Mid-Atlantic Region Player of the Year, is 37 points short of 2,000 for his career, but is dealing with a combination of ankle and heel injuries that limited his effectiveness in the round of 16 against Gettysburg.

The 6-5 swingman averages 22.3 points per game, shooting 53 percent from the floor and 35 percent from three-point range. The Bears’ No. 2 scorer is Noonan, at 15.1 points per game, but Shattuck has led the team in scoring 21 times in 31 games.

“We realize when he’s having an off game and we try a little harder to pick it up,” says senior center Mike Shema. “It doesn’t really add pressure. It’s just an opportunity. Everyone’s always excited to have an opportunity.”

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Against Gettysburg, those opportunities came for both Noonan and Shema, who scored 22 and 21 points.

“When Nick’s not playing well that means stepping up and scoring more than I usually do,” Noonan said. “I’m ready to do that.”

With what coach Kevin Small termed “a new tape job,” Shattuck scored 19 points and added four assists and two blocked
shots in the 82-76 overtime win against Coast Guard in the Elite Eight.

Opportunities have been plentiful of late for Shema, however. Shema and his family escaped Rwanda to avoid the country’s genocide, and lived in Switzerland for a time before coming to the USA.

“This is my fifth year (in the country), one year of high school and four years at Ursinus College. I started playing basketball around the age of 14 or 15, but I guess I never really seriously played basketball, as in having practices every day, until 16, and then after two years I came over to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. From there I came to Ursinus.”

Shema was basically a blank slate when he came to Ursinus after only two years of serious basketball, and Noonan knows this well, having played against the big man in high school, when he was a 6-9 senior: “I remember that game he had three fouls before the first quarter was over. When I came up to visit Ursinus and saw him up here I was kind of surprised to see him – I didn’t know he came up to Ursinus – when I got here all the guys were saying he’d gotten a lot better. You could tell after that first year how much better he’s gotten.

“Each year he’s gotten better and better. Even from the start of this year to now, he’s improved so much.”

Shema began the season in the starting lineup after beating out a fellow upperclassman and a freshman for the spot, and struggled, scoring just 39 points in his first eight games. But he’s averaged double figures since, and 17.3 points, 10 rebounds and 3.5 blocked shots per game in the tournament. He’s shot 27-for-34 from the floor.

“Every Division I through Division III coach should have a chance to work with a kid like Mike,” said Small, “because not only is he a terrific kid, he’s really bright. He got to us, he started playing basketball two years before he came to us and he really couldn’t even run. We had to teach him an athletic gait and how to hold a basketball position on the floor.”

At 6-10, and perhaps 260 pounds, Shema has turned into a load at the Division III level, and is peaking at the right time.

“Every step, he’s just made monumental strides. The coaches at Middlebury were telling us in Florida they’d watched a lot of film because Jeff’s a buddy of Brad McAlester’s at Leb Val and they gave him film, and he’s like ‘that’s not the kid I watched film of.’ And that’s from Thanksgiving weekend to the end of December.”

With his height, Shema was a force defensively even before his offense came around, averaging more than two blocked shots per game entering the tournament. But the rest of his game may have made the difference for the Bears in terms of getting to the Final Four.

“This year, it was how he’s rebounded,” said Small, “and how he’s begun to understand our offensive scheme and how to play in it – we wouldn’t be where we are today without the way he’s played.

And they may not get any further without him.

“ Bottom line is, in lieu of losing Nick’s points, we’ve needed to turn to Mike, and especially playing some teams like Amherst, who cheat the help a little bit on threes, who do a lot of aggressive denial, who have a switching scheme like us that’s a little complicated – bottom line, you’ve gotta have a post game then. So we’re counting on Mike.”