| Scranton head coach Mike
Strong should be celebrated for how he finished his career and the
way he treated people along the way. Photo by University of Scranton athletics |
By Gordon Mann, D3hoops.com
At one point, not too many years ago, Mike Strong and the University of Scranton dominated the Middle Atlantic region of Division III women’s basketball. The Lady Royals made the NCAA tournament every year but one from 1999 through 2010 and twice made back-to-back appearances in the Final Four. They were the Goliaths of the Freedom Conference, a lock to host games throughout the NCAA tournament, and a mainstay near the top of our Top 25 poll.
In 2007 Scranton moved to the newly formed Landmark Conference and won two more conference titles. But, after the Lady Royals lost to TCNJ in the Elite 8 in 2009, they also seemed to lose their edge as the best team in the region. Scranton returned to the NCAA tournament the next season and was beaten soundly by Marymount in the first round.
Then the Lady Royals saw their reign as conference champions end. Moravian, Juniata and Catholic took their turns atop the Landmark Conference from 2010 through 2013. Scranton made the NCAA tournament as an at-large team in 2013, but got blasted by Williams by 20 on a neutral court. Scranton looked like it was still a good team, but no longer one with meaningful national title aspirations.
If that had been the case, there would still be a lot of reasons to celebrate Mike Strong’s career, his longevity and his historic success. He won 815 games, more than any coach in Division III women’s basketball history. He took Scranton to the NCAA tournament 26 times and the Final Four eight times. He won an NCAA Division III women’s basketball national championship, something only three other programs from that part of the country have done. And he’s touched the lives of hundreds of women who played and coached at Scranton during his 34 years there.
But that’s not how Strong finished his career.
Last season, in what ended up as Strong's last one as Scranton's head coach, the Lady Royals went 26-4. They finished the regular season on a seven-game winning streak and easily captured the Landmark Conference crown. In the NCAA tournament, Scranton rolled over Bridgewater State in the first round and survived Vassar in the second, before falling to Montclair 82-77 in the Sweet 16.
After the loss, optimism about a bright future should have eased the pain for Scranton’s players and fans. Their top three scorers -- Meredith Mesaris, Sarah Payonk and Alexix Roman – should return this season. They are all tall and talented, giving Scranton size, depth and skill at the forward position that is rare for teams in this part of the country. The ceilings for Payonk and Roman are particularly high since they were freshmen last season. Lindsay Fluehr, who led the team in assists, will also be back for the upcoming season. Add another guard or two and Scranton is ready to make another run at the Final Four.
That bright future made it easier for Coach Strong to step away from the Scranton sideline. “I’m leaving the cupboard well-stocked,” he said in the school’s press release announcing his retirement. “I’ve had an awfully good run, well beyond my wildest expectations. And now I wanted to make sure that I go out on a high note.”
When the season begins in a couple months, it will be strange to see someone other than Mike Strong on Scranton's bench. He has been the face of this program for three decades. But more than that, he has been the leader of this program for that period. Some long-tenured coaches ease into retirement by delegating many of their duties to assistants while retaining the title as head coach and collecting wins along the way. That was not Strong’s way.
During games he was always active and animated on the sidelines, all the way through his career. In 2011 Strong broke Phil Kahler’s record for Division III women’s basketball coaching victories when Scranton beat Cabrini, 46-43. It was a dramatic finish with the Lady Royals thwarting a last-minute play drawn up by Cabrini Coach Kate (Pierangeli) Pearson, who played for Strong at Scranton. Coincidentally Strong wasn’t around to see that last play. During the game he was so animated that, for the first time in his career, he picked up two technical fouls and was ejected.
Strong was also passionate about the other aspects of his job. Scranton's Assistant Sports Information Director Randy Shemanski recalls. “Every time I looked in on practice, he was in the middle of the court in shorts and a T-shirt, whistle around his neck, teaching just as energetically as he did when I first covered the team for The Scranton Times in the early 2000s.”
In Strong’s last trip to the Final Four, hours before Scranton played Hope, he ran practice in more ways than one. When I entered the Springfield College gym, there was Strong in wind pants and a sweat stained T-shirt, running up and down the floor with his players. Scranton Sports Information Director Kevin Southard notes, “Even recently I saw him talking passionately to recruits on visits and felt he still had that drive in him.”
In addition to his passion, Strong was warm and welcoming to our staff at D3hoops.com. Being nice to the media isn’t a perquisite for success, especially in Division III athletics, but Strong did it anyway. The first time I met him, he greeted me like a long-lost friend, with a big smile and an embrace. Years later, when I sent him an email requesting a quote about Taryn Mellody for our All-Decade Team, he responded almost immediately with a thank you, a quote and a plug to add Kelly Halpin to the team.
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"Not only was Coach Strong very kind and open when we interviewed him after a tough loss, but he did something that surprised me then and has stuck with me ever since. Like Ray mentioned, I interviewed Strong after his tough loss to Wash U at the Final Four. I then did some sideline reporting during a later game. When I returned to the “broadcast booth,” I found a hand-written note that Strong had left for me. He complimented by interview questions, and he wished me luck in my career. I remembered it being a well-composed and surprisingly long note. For me, it was just touching (and inspiring) that he would take the time, hours later, to write that note and come leave it for me. But there’s more. Two weeks ago, as I was cleaning out some old boxes of papers that I had in storage, I found Strong’s note. I thought I’d thrown it out long ago. So I read it, smiled, and put it in a pile with other papers for the trash bin. (I’m trying to downsize my stuff...) I hadn’t gotten around to throwing it out yet, so after reading this article I fished the note out of the pile and scanned it. To this day, I really don’t understand why Strong wrote the note, much less why he was so complimentary. My questions couldn’t have been that special. My takeaway was simply that he’s a good guy and he wanted to give a kid a boost." - John Vukelj, D3hoops.com broadcaster |
Strong was even gracious when he probably didn’t feel like it. Former D3hoops broadcaster Ray Martel, Jr. remembers approaching Strong during the 2000 Final Four. Scranton had just been eliminated by Washington U. in the national semifinals, 64-30. It would have been understandable if Strong was reserved or dejected. But he was just the opposite.
“[He was] very complimentary to Wash. U and their team and he was very open about the game plan and what he thought was the reason they lost,” writes Martel. “John Vukelj was my partner that year and he also had a chance to interview Mike. Again, the same thing. Total honesty and he treated a couple of young broadcasters like they were professionals from a major network.”
Note: After seeing this article, John Vukelj emailed us to say there's more to the story. See John's note to the right.
In one sense, it would have been fun to see Strong coach one more year, to see how his talented team would respond to the added incentive of this being his last season, to see the response he would get from the home crowd in his last game coaching at the Long Center.
But this isn’t a bad way to finish his career. “Yes, I’m leaving quite a good team, but also when I took over, that first year we went to the Final Four (of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women tournament),” Strong says. “So I also took over a very good team. I guess it’s a case of what goes around comes around.”