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| Photos by Ryan Coleman, d3photography.com; Husson athletics |
By Riley Zayas
for D3sports.com
There is a conscious understanding in what it takes to contend for a national title in the NCAA Tournament. Having the ability to win consecutive games with relatively short rest in between is a must. So is the skill set to beat teams of varying styles, especially those from different regions and conferences. More often than not, it involves winning games against uncommon opponents, and doing so on a neutral court.
With the NCAA Tournament still eight weeks away, each of those elements was present in Las Vegas as the final days of December unfolded at the D3hoops.com Classic. Sixteen teams arrived from eight states, each looking to come out of their holiday breaks with momentum heading into conference play. When the action drew to a close, three teams in particular walked away having won twice; the men’s teams of Trinity (Texas) and Husson, as well as the Occidental women’s team.
The 2-0 trip held unique significance for each.
“That’s why you go to the D3hoops.com Classic,” Trinity head coach Jimmy Smith said, “and try to play the top quality teams that you can. It gets you ready for these conference battles, because you know every game in conference, for the most part, is going to be tough.”
Smith’s Tigers headed to Las Vegas as the nation’s 22nd-ranked team, but in the days after their narrow 84-83 victory over Clark and an 83-62 win over Pomona-Pitzer, Trinity made a jump into the Top 10. All the signs of a special team were evident in the 11-0 start heading into Christmas, as Trinity garnered wins against Whitman, Claremont-Mudd Scripps, Mary Hardin-Baylor, and Hardin-Simmons, off to one of its strongest starts in program history. Upon arrival at the D3hoops.com Classic, the Tigers did not seem to miss a beat, picking up where they had left off as the undefeated stretch lived on.
“We’ve played a lot of teams with different styles in our non-conference schedule,” Smith added. “I think that’s served us well.”
Trinity certainly got that mix of styles in Las Vegas, first facing an up-tempo Clark squad that kept the pace quick and the scoring frequent before battling a team marked by size and length in Pomona-Pitzer. It proved to be a pair of adequate tests before Trinity returned to its SCAC schedule, looking to continue what has become a historic campaign thus far.
For the first time since joining the SCAC, Trinity’s season opened with a double-digit winning streak. The Tigers’ performance at the Classic only raised their national profile, putting them in the conversation as a possible first-weekend NCAA Tournament host and certainly, as the frontrunner in the SCAC.
“You can’t take any game for granted,” Smith said. “For me personally, I want nothing more than for these seniors, who laid the groundwork as far as our first recruiting class here, to be the ones to get over the hump and win that first conference championship. There’s no feeling like it.’
So far, Trinity has come incredibly close to experiencing that feeling. But in each of the past three years, it has eluded the Tigers for one reason or another. Smith took the Tigers to the league’s tournament final in each of his first three years at the helm, and now in his fourth year at the helm, is seeing his team aim at taking a crucial step forwards.
“I know that Tanner [Brown], Grayson [Herr], and Abdullah [Roberts], our three seniors, have been to the SCAC championship game three times in a row, and we haven’t won it yet,“ Smith said. “[In 2022] we got to go to the NCAA Tournament and won a game and all of that, it was a great experience and definitely something those guys want to get back to. But I know that to cap off their careers, to get a ring [would be special].
“It’s a delicate balance too, because you know how hard it is just to make the tournament.”
That is a statement Occidental head coach Anahit Aladzhanyan understands quite well. Her team competes in another Region 10 conference, one that shares all four of the SCAC’s letters but is located a little further to the west.
“The SCIAC is a talented, tough conference for sure,” Aladzhanyan said a few hours before her team tipped off against Cal Lutheran, just days after winning twice in Las Vegas.
She is spot on. The SCIAC women’s title race is daunting. Just four teams make the nine-team conference’s postseason tournament, meaning more than half of the league sees its season end in mid-February.
That has been the case in each of the Tigers’ last 10 seasons, having reached the SCIAC Tournament semifinals in 2013 after an 11-5 campaign in league play, and a 16-10 record overall.
But the season in which Aladzhanyan and her squad are in the midst of has a different feeling to it. Things have clicked quicker in Los Angeles this year, it seems; Aladzhanyan’s fifth as Occidental’s head coach. The Tigers headed to the D3hoops.com Classic with an 8-1 record, their only loss coming against Whittier three weeks prior.
“We’ve been itching and clawing and doing our best to get into the conference tournament,” Aladzhanyan noted. “The kids are healthy. We’ve got all the pieces. We’ve had all the pieces in the past, just not at the same time. It’s fun to have it all jell together and our goal is certainly to make the conference tournament, see how far we can go.”
Upon arrival in Las Vegas, Occidental proved its strong start was no fluke. Even in a game that tipped off at 10 a.m. local time, the Tigers came out of a matchup against Westminster (Mo.) with a 67-59 win. Despite leading just 26-25 at the half, Occidental mounted a 13-2 run midway through the third quarter, and never looked back. Westminster pulled within six at the 1:39 mark of the fourth, but the Tigers dispatched the late rally with four straight points from Toni Thompson.
Thompson proved to be one of the most thrilling players at the classic, captivating the crowd as she scored time and time again. The guard scored 23 points in both the win over Westminster and the victory over Rhodes the following day, and into SCIAC play, averaging 26.2 points per game. It has not surprised Aladzhanyan in the slightest, earning the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player honors.
But it was not just Thompson who stood out for Oxy. Sophomore Paige Yasukochi converted on all three of her 3-point attempts against Westminster, scoring a career-high 15 points. Playing in her hometown, sophomore Gabriela Etopio tallied three steals in 16 minutes against Rhodes. The list goes on, and the 2-0 performance in Vegas aiding in the building momentum found for this Occidental team, aiming to do something the program has not done in a full decade.
“It’s been really nice to see the senior leadership set the tone for our younger players,” Aladzhanyan added. “But our sophomores got a ton of playing time and experience last year. So they’re ready.”
The night before Occidental earned its second win in Las Vegas, the Husson men capped off a perfect 2-0 stretch in a pair of outstanding second halves. In wins over La Verne and Whittier, the Eagles outscored their opposition by 20 points or more. In fact, while facing Whittier in their second game at the D3hoops.com Classic, head coach Warren Caruso’s team found itself trailing 46-36 at halftime.
But that deficit was short-lived. Husson outscored the Poets 49-25 over the game’s final 20 minutes, earning the Eagles’ 12th victory of the season. The day before, the Eagles’ first matchup of the Classic was tied with La Verne, 45-45, at the intermission. Only one team ended up exceeding its first-half point total, as Husson scored 51 in the second half, and won 96-75.
“It was a great opportunity to be down 14 with 16 minutes to go, and make a run to tie it pretty quickly,” Caruso said of the Whittier win. “And then we took control in the last 10 minutes. It was a real lesson learned for us, and that’s the mark of a good team, to respond when you’re down. It builds that trust with each other and what we do.”
A longtime contender in the North Atlantic Conference, they are knocking on the door to their first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2019, and the performance in Las Vegas only further fueled that quest. Just as the pieces all seem to be gelling at the right time for Smith in San Antonio and Aladzhanyan in Los Angeles, Caruso’s team is firing on all cylinders heading into the heart of the NAC schedule.
“A mark of this year’s group is that they play with a high level of trust in each other,” Caruso said. “Our backcourt doesn’t only have our two leading scorers; they’re also our two leading assist guys. That’s a really good place to be for our program and our team, to have two guys who can not only score for us, but are more than willing to distribute as well.”
Perhaps more than any other program at the D3hoops.com Classic, Husson’s roster is incredibly geographically diverse. For the second northernmost institution in D-III men’s basketball, the Eagles’ roster has no shortage of players from warm-weather states. Oklahoma, California, Florida, and Georgia are represented, alongside natives of Maine, New York, Maryland, Washington D.C., and New Hampshire.
So as Husson wrapped up the first half of its season, winning 80-66 at MIT, and closed out the semester with finals, Caruso’s players headed home for the holidays. When they met next as a team, it was in Las Vegas, 2,940 miles away from their Bangor, Maine, campus.
Coming back from all corners of the country, the Eagles’ arrival in the Nevada desert saw the team form together once again.
From a mental standpoint, it marked the beginning of the second half of Husson’s season. From Vegas onward, nearly every week includes at least two games, and in some cases three. In a so-called “one-bid” league, one in which the conference champion is almost always the only team from the conference selected to the NCAA Tournament, each conference matchup means just a little bit more. And because getting out of the gate quickly in January holds that level of importance, a 2-0 week at the D3hoops.com Classic held great significance within the anatomy of a season.
“Another reason why we like to travel right after Christmas is that we have to get back at it,” Caruso said. “You get two practices and then you’re playing again. It’s one more thing to look at with the type of team we have. They’re locked in. They’re in the gym without having to be pushed. So we’re really fortunate in that way.”
Trinity emerged with its sizable win over Pomona-Pitzer just hours before Husson took the floor for its second win against Whittier. And four days after the final buzzer sounded on the Tigers’ time in Las Vegas, they were back in San Antonio, battling Schreiner in a rematch of the 2023 SCAC championship game. A full circle moment for sure, considering it was the very place in which Schreiner ended their season in a 69-67 loss a year ago.
As it turned out, this meeting proved to be even closer, a one-point margin. And the victors were reversed. Just days after Jacob Harvey scored 33 points in the defeat of Pomona-Pitzer, Tanner Brown stepped up with 32 points of his own in a 12-of-13 shooting day, as Trinity kept its perfect intact.
And the lessons learned in Las Vegas had immediate results for Trinity upon arrival back home. The 82-81 win over Schreiner resembled the Tigers’ 84-83 victory against Clark in a number of ways.
“I think that game really had us prepared for the game last night, in terms of situational things,” Smith said. “[Against Clark], that was the closest game we’d been in. We hadn’t been in a game that was one possession with that little time left. We found ourselves in a similar scenario, where we had some fouls to give, and were up one. We were able to use those and get a stop again.”
Occidental’s return to SCIAC play also seemed to parlay off the momentum that began in Vegas. Toni Thompson’s 42 points led the way in an 85-81 win over Cal Lutheran, helping the Tigers notch their third league win. They now sit just two victories away from tying last year’s SCIAC win total, and a single win from tying last year’s overall total.
It’s only January.
“You get a little taste of that success, and it drives you,” Aladzhanyan said, when asked about how her experiences as an assistant with Occidental’s NCAA Tournament teams in 2009 and 2011 impacted her. “It’s definitely something that we’ve been aspiring to get back to. I would love for our current squad to have that experience. I really hope that we can have a strong second half, and the opportunity to compete for that.”
Getting to the NCAA Tournament is a lofty goal in a division in which just under 15 percent of member institutions are still playing come March. But after the 2-0 performances from Trinity, Occidental, and Husson, that certainly feels like an attainable goal heading into the second half push.
Husson’s second half of the season began with a victory, and yet another second-half comeback, keeping with the Eagles’ pattern at the Classic. Down 35-28 to Maine Maritime, Husson outscored the Mariners 33-23 in a 61-58 win. And for good measure, the Eagles erased a four-point halftime deficit at Maine-Farmington on Monday night, taking an 88-80 victory back to Bangor.
“We work through each day, game, and practice with the idea that we want to learn and get better to know who we are when we get to the end,” Caruso noted. “I think we have some great opportunities ahead of us. We generally get teams’ best shot in conference play, because when you’re having a good year, they’re coming after you. We have to be ready for that.
Caruso mentioned that one of the biggest benefits for his team in the trip to the Classic came in the styles of play that were faced with both La Verne and Whittier. Matchups between teams from Maine and California do not happen often, but they play out in Vegas, and that has only made Husson better prepared for its conference stretch.
“We’re well-prepared to play a lot of different styles,” Caruso added. “We’ll see where this next six weeks takes us. Hopefully when the tournament rolls around, we’re playing our best basketball.”
