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| Rowan file photo |
Rowan men’s basketball coach Joe Cassidy wanted to watch Rowan’s 1996 NCAA Tournament game against Illinois Wesleyan, but he could not find film of it. He contacted Illinois Wesleyan’s coaching staff in August or September, he said, to ask for a recording. Illinois Wesleyan sent Cassidy a DVD.
“I flipped it in the computer to watch it, just to make sure it worked,” Cassidy said in a telephone interview on Friday. “And I couldn’t turn it off.”
It was not a technical glitch that prevented Cassidy from turning off the DVD. It was the quality of basketball that he was seeing.
“Both teams were playing phenomenally hard and phenomenally well,” Cassidy said. “You cannot find 15 minutes of better Division III basketball than what was played the first 15 minutes of that game that night.”
He added: “The first 15 minutes, the game just flowed. Both teams were running up and down, and it just was a high-paced, fun game.”
The tempo decreased in the second half, Cassidy said. But the game was still exciting, and Rowan pulled out a 79-77 win. That victory put the Profs in the NCAA title game. Rowan won that as well, 100-93 over Hope.
This season marks the 20th anniversary of Rowan’s only NCAA championship. The Profs host Division I La Salle on Saturday as part of a day honoring the 1995-96 team. John Giannini, the head coach of Rowan’s championship team, is the current La Salle head coach. Cassidy was an assistant coach at Rowan during the championship season and has been the head coach since then.
Rowan had reached the Final Four under Giannini in 1993 and 1995. Each time, the Profs lost in the semifinals and won the consolation game to finish in third place. So in 1996, the semifinal against Illinois Wesleyan loomed large.
“It was a big mental obstacle,” Giannini said in a telephone interview this past Saturday.
With the victory, Rowan earned what had eluded the team: a spot in the final.
“It was such a relief that frankly, it gave us a lot of confidence and it took a lot of pressure off of us,” Giannini said. “We had all the respect in the world for Hope, and we knew they were a terrific team to make it that far, but we felt we were going to win.”
Rowan won some of its NCAA Tournament games that year by very comfortable margins. The Profs blew out York (N.Y.) in the first round, 130-66. Rowan followed that with a 102-83 win over Jersey City State (now named New Jersey City), an 85-77 win over Williams, and a 98-70 win over Stockton before facing Illinois Wesleyan.
The Profs had three Division I transfers that season: Demetrius Poles, Roscoe Harris, and Antwan Dasher, playing the final year of eligibility they were unable to use at the D-I level. (That loophole was soon closed.) They also had Terrence Stewart, a four-year player who is second on Rowan’s all-time scoring list with 1,628 career points. Dasher and Stewart made the All-Tournament Team, with Stewart named the Most Outstanding Player.
Though Giannini left after the championship season to become head coach at Division I Maine, Rowan remained a successful team. In each of Cassidy’s first four years as head coach, the Profs won at least 21 games and went to the NCAA Tournament. In the 1998-99 season, Rowan went 25-2 and won the NJAC championship.
Rowan has not appeared in the NCAA Tournament since 2000. Last year, the Profs went 16-10 with an NJAC Tournament appearance. Rowan is 2-4 this season, and La Salle is 3-0.
“The Division I team is bound to be bigger, stronger, faster, quicker, and they will be,” Cassidy said. “But we’re certainly looking forward to the challenge of playing someone of that caliber and seeing how we can do against them.”
Rowan and La Salle may not know each other well, but their head coaches are close friends. The two men talk on the phone every week, Giannini said, and try to go out to dinner at least once a month.
“Joe and I picked each other’s brains every single day that we worked together, and that has not stopped,” Giannini said. “We still ask questions, we still try to get better, and we still, I think, get a lot out of our meetings.”
Giannini has attended an annual all-day preseason Rowan staff meeting “at least once out of every two or three years” since leaving Rowan, he said. He and Cassidy live in the same New Jersey town, Mullica Hill. Cassidy said that he is the godfather of Giannini’s oldest daughter.
Cassidy was an assistant to Giannini for the final five seasons of his seven-year Rowan tenure. At practices, Cassidy and Giannini coached opposing teams in intrasquad scrimmages.
“Joe and I were just trying to teach our own system as well as we could to our team,” Giannini said. “So it wasn’t really us strategizing against each other; it was more utilizing Joe’s coaching ability the best that we could.”
The coaches will be true opponents on Saturday, though even that game may feel like a collaboration.
“We’ve been exchanging ideas for over 20 years,” Cassidy said. “So I don’t think either team will have any surprises in terms of the X’s and O’s.”
