March beckons, and it’s the best month of the year. Yes, it’s all about college basketball, but no, it’s not so much about the NCAA Tournament.
Conference tournaments start today, and when I think of how great March is, I think of conference tournaments. When I used to walk into an arena to cover a conference tournament, as well as when the ball was about to go up for the opening tip of any of the games, I would think to myself, “This is college basketball!”
The NCAA Tournament is wonderful. It’s a great three-week tournament with amazing moments, star players who shine brightest, unknown players who have big moments out of nowhere and we determine a national championship. One Shining Moment is what it’s all about, and anyone who loves the game eagerly awaits the video for it after the great three weeks. I’ve had the good fortune to cover some great games in this, like Vermont’s win over Syracuse in 2005 and the buzzer-beater in 2009 at The Garden that put Villanova in the Final Four.
But conference tournaments are something else entirely, especially in the conferences where only the tournament champion will go. Everything is on the line and anyone can win, and when the games are a neutral site you can feel it even more with all of the teams there. Seasons and careers will end in these games, some of them quite storied in nature. And if you think the players and coaches are nervous as can be, let me tell you something: there were a few times I was quite nervous sitting there on press row!
So many of the greatest games I covered were in conference tournaments, especially in one-bid leagues. My coverage took me to many great places, some of which I probably wouldn’t have otherwise traveled to, but what they all had in common was great basketball with everything on the line. You could sense the urgency, but there were so many stories that developed, too.
I lived the dream for a long time in covering college basketball, and conference tournaments provided a little of everything. I’ve covered many an America East Tournament as well as the Patriot League. The first of many CAA Tournaments that I covered in part or in whole was in 2006, the first time in 20 years they had a team receive an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament and with some other drama like the finish to one first round game and the infamous Tony Skinn punch to Loren Stokes. A year later I covered the last Mid-Continent Conference Tournament, whose championship game had a dramatic finish that included a star guard scoring his 2,000th career point at a good time. It was part of 22 games in 11 days in three Midwest cities, and when it was over, I had no time to waste as I had a 9:30 p.m. flight out of Chicago on Selection Sunday so I could be back in the office at my day job the next morning.
Also notable in 2006 was the Atlantic 10 championship game that I covered. Xavier held off Saint Joseph’s in a game where only the winner would be in the NCAA Tournament, as George Washington was knocked off in the quarterfinal and was the only at-large worthy team in the conference that year. Xavier had battled plenty of adversity to get there, but I’ll never forget walking into the Saint Joseph’s locker room after the game – it was, as one assistant later described when I talked about it years later, like a morgue. If you ever doubt that these kids care, all you had to do was walk into that locker room. One player did an interview with myself and a few others in tears. It was a humbling experience, to say the least.
In 2009, I saw Morehead State win the Ohio Valley Tournament for the first time in over a quarter of a century, with the winning basket coming from a freshman who once upon a time seemed unlikely to even still be in the program at that point in the season. The game itself was a heart-stopper, but the story was even better.
I won’t forget how in 2010, I covered the Patriot League championship game at Lehigh on a Friday afternoon, then drove a few hours of largely back roads and secondary highways to Lake George, New York. I checked into the hotel quite late in the evening, wrote my story, went to bed late, then after a few hours got up for a quick breakfast before checking out driving over two hours up to Burlington, Vermont for the America East championship game, where the host team won while having heavy hearts. Less than a week earlier, I saw my alma mater drop a heart-breaker at the CAA Tournament to a team they had lost a couple of those to in Virginia before.
Fast forward to 2015, the last year I traveled for conference tournaments, and we come to two of the greatest games I covered and a couple of others that were really good but paled in comparison. I covered Bryant finally breaking through with a Northeast Conference Tournament win in a double overtime thriller; this season the Bulldogs won their first NEC regular season title. Just a few days later was a CAA semifinal game I’ll never forget, another double overtime thriller that William & Mary pulled out over Hofstra.
All of these conference tournaments had many heart-stopping moments, and not just in the championship games. There is so much I think back to from these, so much of which never saw any print. The anticipation I had when traveling to them, as well as the reflection in writing about the games and even traveling back, was all part of what made it magical. It’s what makes March the best month of the year, no questions asked.