Meet Stephen F. Austin
Had Spring Break not come this week, Danny Kaspar said his Stephen F. Austin men’s basketball team would have had perfect attendance in class.
‘Oh golly, I would have never had to check class,’ said Kaspar, the Lumberjacks’ head coach. ‘They would have all gone to class so they could bash on their chests and show how proud they are. Nobody would have missed class.’
That’s what the first-ever NCAA Tournament berth in school history will do. Stephen F. Austin won its first Southland Conference title Sunday to join the field of 65 and drew the onerous task of facing Syracuse in the first round.
The 14th-seeded Lumberjacks (24-7) enter the Tournament on an eight-game winning streak, but from a virtually unknown conference. Their best player, Matt Kingsley, wasn’t offered a Division I scholarship anywhere but Stephen F. Austin. (Kingsley once tried to convince Kaspar that Long Island had interest, but Kaspar doesn’t believe it.) Their point guard, Eric Bell, is 5 feet 3 inches and among the shortest players in the nation. And three of their starters are junior college transfers.
‘I’m usually not going to get the offensive players that Syracuse gets,’ Kaspar said. ‘So, I have a philosophy that anybody can play defense. It’s a matter of believing that you can win if you play defense.’
Stephen F. Austin ranked second in the nation in scoring defense, allowing 56 points per game, and third in the nation in field-goal defense at 37.4 percent.
Texas A&M Corpus Christi head coach Perry Clark, who coached against Syracuse while at Miami from 2001-04, said the Orange can expect the Lumberjacks to slow the game down as much as possible.
‘What helps them defensively is that they really control the ball,’ said Clark, whose team lost twice to SFA this season. ‘They don’t come down and shoot the ball fast. The games are all possession games. It changes the flow of the game and they do a good job of that more so than anything else. They really don’t do anything special defensively.’
The school, located in Nacogdoches, Texas, is named for Stephen Fuller Austin, the founder of Anglo-American Texas. About 12,000 undergraduates attend. ‘It’s not a big town,’ Kaspar said.
In terms of basketball history, the Lumberjacks have had minimal success. The program moved to Division I in 1986-87, the same season Syracuse lost in the national championship to Indiana. In the two seasons before Kaspar took over as head coach in 2000, the Lumberjacks won 10 games total.
‘This program was in the dumps,’ he said. ‘Everyone wanted to play us. The phone was ringing off the hook.’
That’s why, as the laid-back Kaspar said, anything from here forward is a bonus. It took him nine seasons to reach the NCAA Tournament, which is what enticed him to leave a winning program at Division II University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.
‘You have to understand, we’ve reached our goals and this is icing on the cake,’ Kaspar said. ‘We want to win. The biggest job I have is convincing these young guys that they have as good a chance to win as anybody.’
Current members of the Southland Conference are 7-19 all-time in the NCAA Tournament – the last victory being 14th-seeded Northwestern State’s shocking upset of No. 3 Iowa in 2004.
Kaspar can point to that when trying to motivate his team for the upset.
‘You try to stay as loose and relaxed as you can,’ he said. ‘You want to have fun.’
The key to an upset, Clark said, will be for someone other than Josh Alexander to make shots. Alexander, the 2008 Southland Conference Player of the Year, averages 14.5 points per game and shoots 35.1 percent from 3-point range. After Alexander and Kingsley (16.2 points per game), who was this season’s Southland Conference MVP, no other Lumberjack averages over 7.6 points.
Both Kaspar and Clark spoke glowingly of Kingsley, who was recruited mostly by Division II and junior colleges. Even Kaspar had entertained the idea of just letting Kingsley be a walk-on, but at the last minute offered a scholarship and redshirted the big man for his first season.
‘He was a no-confident, lost puppy,’ Kaspar said.
The maturity and experience of playing in the NIT last season – the school’s first-ever postseason berth – has helped Kingsley and his teammates take the next step this season, Kaspar said.
Kaspar wants to keep the game in the 60s for his squad to have a chance. And if the Lumberjacks can do that, anything can happen, he said.
‘If you play them well, and it’s a close game,’ Kaspar said, ‘you’ll have a lot of fans cheering you on.’
Published on March 18, 2009 at 12:00 pm
