By Chris Granozio
Of all the reasons behind game postponements and cancelations, the worst scenario manifested itself Saturday night in New Jersey, where Post University freshman forward Phil Urban suffered a fatal gunshot wound while in his car, roughly 28 miles from his hometown of Manalapan - ruled a homicide by police. That same evening, blithely unaware of their beloved teammate’s tragic fate over a thousand miles away, the Post Eagles earned one of the program’s most impressive victories, shocking #16 Florida Southern College at the Mocs' own tournament, 87-83. Post was riding high and preparing to play its second game of the tournament on Sunday when the horrifying news reached the team.
“The kids were devastated,” head coach Marc Kuntz told us. “We couldn’t play against Barry. I woke up from a nap and was getting ready to go to the game when I found out. It was about 20 minutes before we were supposed to leave and my assistant, who was driving one of the vans, texted me: everyone knows now in our van. I tried to keep it together but had to make an announcement in the parking lot.
By numerous accounts, Urban was a quiet but friendly young man with a great sense of humor.
“He was a great kid and the guys loved him,” Kuntz said. “He was starting to understand what we were about and starting to turn some corners, figure out what his role was.” Urban was a scholarship athlete studying business administration but did not make the trip south with the team. “Down the road, he could’ve been very good,” Kuntz remarked. “He was learning how to become a basketball player.”
One of the behind-the-scenes moments Kuntz shared and I feel is important to include here is that Barry’s Head Coach, Butch Estes, brought his team in to console the grieving Post players, while one of his assistants recited a prayer.
“What a complete class act,” Kuntz said. “That’s a great moment in college basketball."
For now, though, Kuntz describes the state of the team as “complete devastation.”
And understandably so.
“We’re going to a wake tomorrow (Thursday) in New Jersey. I don’t even know where our head is at. As a coach, you’re trying to manage everything. I’ve been talking with all the news media, trying to talk to the (campus) counselors. I keep wondering if there’s some little thing I could’ve done to prevent this.”
Kuntz knows all too well that thinking along those lines isn’t useful, and he is more focused on helping guide his team through this as best he can. After all, there’s no playbook to consult when such a calamity descends upon a team.
Florida Southern's Mike Donnelly was once Post's head coach and offered this comment to D2easthoops.org: "I have so much respect for Marc and the job he has done at Post. It is difficult to try and comprehend the tragedy that occurred this past weekend. Our thoughts and prayers remain with the Urban family, Post University and the men's basketball program."
Urban joins a short list of players over the roughly 40 years I’ve been covering the region who died while still in college. Samuel Gil-Alfaro of American International collapsed from an undiagnosed heart condition during a practice in 2003. Two years later, Tafare Berryman was the innocent victim of gang violence, just one month shy of graduating from C.W. Post. Jimmy Sayegh died of cancer in 2010, his senior year at Concordia, with the school hosting an annual charity game the final years of its existence to raise funds for the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Most recently, Bentley forward Joe Glynn died while playing a summer league game after his freshman year, in June, 2013. Other notable people who didn’t officially suit up for teams but whose losses were felt deeply at their schools: Pace Head Coach Darrell Halloran, who died at halftime of a game in January 1998, Stonehill Head Coach Ray Pepin, who passed away on vacation a month before the start of the 1995-96 campaign, Dominican College assistant basketball coach and assistant SID Mike Coffey died of muscular dystrophy in the preseason of 2016, and Bentley Team Manager Sean Williams, who also left us way too soon in January, 2010. You shall all be remembered here, always.
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There were other postponements/cancelations over the past weekend, albeit for more mundane reasons such as weather (Assumption at Daemen), power (Bloomfield at Franklin Pierce) and structural damage (Bentley at Bridgeport). The former game has been rescheduled for Monday, January 9 at noon. The others are not likely to be made up but aren't officially scrapped yet. The Post-Barry game obviously had to be canceled, marking the second straight year that the first game of the second day at the Florida Southern Tourney was scratched. Last year, Le Moyne and St. Leo had to cancel due to covid.
The just-released list of eligible candidates for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame features many great names, including two with regional D2 ties: Stan Spirou, who was head coach at Southern New Hampshire for 33 years, and John Beilein, who guided Le Moyne for nine seasons before helping improve no fewer than five D1 teams, the last stop being in Ann Arbor.
The region has three teams in the NABC Top 25, each of whom inched up two spots from the previous week: Bentley (20-18), Dominican (23-21) and St. Thomas Aquinas (25-23). STAC was one of 11 ranked teams that lost games last week (three lost twice), so expect some movement when the next poll is released next Tuesday. Even three-time defending NCAA Champion Northwest Missouri State was bitten by the upset bug.
Dominican was the second team in two days to slip past #24 West Texas A&M at the Holiday Hoops Classic in Las Vegas over the weekend. Freshman guard Javel Cherry – playing only his second career game – delivered the winning 3-pointer with four seconds to play and his team down by two, giving the short-handed Chargers their ninth win between one and six points this season… a season sprinkled with pixie dust through 12 games!
I watched eight of the 10 games at that awesome Vegas event, orchestrated by the fine group Sports Tours and that featured 10 teams, half of which were nationally regarded. Le Moyne has played three tournaments this winter in three different cities and Dominican was there for two of them, affording a level of familiarity and comfort as my radio partner, Don Familo, and I quite coincidentally kept bumping into the Chargers’ coaching staff near the casino. I like that whole staff, but Joey Clinton, in particular, has become one of my favorite people in the business. Friendly, smart and humble… the genuine article.
The team that impressed me most at that soiree was Lubbock Christian, which navigated through #4 West Liberty’s vaunted pressure and then had enough in the tank to defeat Le Moyne the next afternoon for a 2-0 weekend. The Chaps also featured the best player, to my mind, on display in Sin City: Australian guard Rowan Mackenzie, who has no weakness to his game and is one of the best players in all of D2.
The only downside to the trip was the atrocious officiating. A local assigner was on hand to watch referees from Nevada and Southern California, and it would seem as if each official was looking to grandstand, blowing the whistle so often that most of the games never had a chance to breathe. In one game alone, there were an obscene 54 fouls assessed in 40 minutes, a good chunk of them not being fouls at all. I always try to be fair and give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but all in attendance were on the same page. In one of the tournament’s funnier moments, during the Dominican-Rollins game, 41-year Tars Head Coach Tom Klusman, noticed Joe Clinton arguing a call, came down the sideline and convivially remarked: “Hey, Joe… they’re BAD!” You bet, Tom!
Also loved the music man playing Rush's "Tom Sawyer" for one of the not-so-bad referees who has that name.
It’s not too common when teams post one-sided records vs. conferences, so I offer to you the following rarities: Pace 6-0 vs. the ECC and Adelphi 5-0 vs. the CACC while being 0-6 in the NE10.
We’ve reached the mandatory holiday/semester break and here’s what we know:
- The CACC is improved and looking better than ever, with Dominican leading the way at a region-best 11-1. Only five of the 13 clubs sport overall losing records and the worst is Goldey-Beacom’s hardly-atrocious 4-8.
- Defending regional champ Bentley may have lost some talent but hasn’t lost a step in the standings, and the rest of the NE10 still must go through Waltham before the Falcons relinquish anything.
- St. Thomas Aquinas has taken a lead atop the ECC table as the conference is way down overall, and it’s a race for second at the moment. Things can certainly change over the course of the next two months, but right now, with Daemen struggling to score, STAC is still the alfa wolf.
- Zack Laput of Bentley, Erik Timko of Jefferson and Darren Fergus of Molloy are the frontrunners for their respective conference Player of the Year awards, with Staten Island’s Messiah Mallory right on Fergus’ heels. In fact, Laput and Timko – the top two scorers in the region – went head to head over the weekend as Bentley knocked off Jefferson in Waltham.
- Scoring is down across the region, as 24 of the 35 teams are mustering fewer than 75 points a game, nine of those under 70 ppg. Twenty-five of the 35 aren’t even making good on 45% of their shot attempts, including everyone in the ECC.
- Parity is prevalent. Though the top teams are still winning the games they should, there have been plenty of scares (Adelphi nearly upsetting Bentley despite missing three key starters, AIC squandering a chance to knock off St. Anselm, Pace sweating out Mercy at home, STAC erasing late deficits vs. multiple teams…) and even some eye-popping results (Chestnut Hill knocking off New Haven without M.J. Iraldi, Staten Island coming back from the dead at St. Michael’s, Daemen dropping back-to-back home games to Molloy and Queens…). Not many things would surprise us this season, so March could be very exciting indeed.
To this point, here are some of the individual high-water marks for the first “half” of the campaign:
- Most points in a game: 41 by Sean McCarthy of Felician vs. Staten Island
- Most rebounds in a game: 19 by Matt Leritz of Bentley at Southern New Hampshire
- Most assists in a game: 14 by James Chestnut of Staten Island at St. Michael’s
- Most steals in a game: 6 by Mike DePersia of Le Moyne vs. Saint Rose, Nate McClure of Le Moyne vs. Angelo State, Seth Sharif-Brown of Dominican vs. Rollins and Marty Silvera of Southern Connecticut vs. Southern New Hampshire
- Most blocks in a game: 7 by Jarnel Rancy of Caldwell vs. Cheyney
- Most 3-pointers made in a game: 7 by Luis Armas of Staten Island vs. Goldey-Beacom and Erik Timko of Jefferson vs. Chestnut Hill
- Most free throws made in a game: 12 by Miles Tention vs. Bentley and Joel Bailey at District of Columbia AND vs. Lock Haven
- Most free throw attempts in a game: 19 by Darren Fergus of Molloy vs. Roberts Wesleyan
Bentley has now won 19 straight at the Dana Center and that’s the seventh-best active home court win streak among D2 teams. Nova Southeastern (FL) leads the pack with 31 in a row, followed by Virginia Union (28), Lincoln Memorial (26), Augusta (23), IUP and Upper Iowa (20 each).
One of the best games of the first semester saw Pace shade St. Thomas Aquinas in Sparkill, 79-77 last Saturday. Neither team led by more than six points in an air-tight second half, as the Setters prevailed, thanks in large part to Adonis Williams’ block of Jamal Barnes’ potential go-ahead 3-pointer with three seconds left.
Georgian Court just may have its best team this year. Not only have the Lions won four of five, they snagged their first-ever win vs. a D1 program, a 75-69 triumph over Delaware State, during which Clint Wright, Jr. and Jelani Jackson led five in double figures with 15 points apiece. Only once in its 10-year history has GCU won more than its six-game total this year and that was a nine-win campaign in 2019-20.
Adelphi’s youth movement has helped steady the Panthers’ ship as freshmen Elijah Lewis (personal-best 30 points), Matthew Price (season-best 19) and Dayshaun Walton (14 points, personal-high 15 rebounds) all played key roles in an 85-79 overtime thriller at Caldwell - the middle chunk of a three-game win streak.
STAC shot 18-32 from beyond the arc vs. Saint Rose in a battle of former CACC rivals from the old NAIA days. That looks so wrong when I type it out but it’s completely accurate.
Cheyney is still not ready for prime time when it comes to funding athletics, but what a job Terrell Stokes is doing trying to make the storied Wolves program relevant again. I mean, he doesn’t even have an assistant coach, for Pete's sake! If the oldest HBCU ever gets serious about its grand plans, don’t be surprised if Cheyney winds up joining the ECC and pairing with UDC as a logical, well-needed travel partner.
Mr. Energy – Amiri Stewart of Wilmington – has the coolest hair in the region. Oh, and the Wildcats are 6-1 since Dan Burke inserted him and his red locks into the starting lineup.
D1 Portal Update: Former St. Michael’s big man Patrick Gardner is rocking and rolling with Division I Marist, leading the team in scoring (17.0) and rebounding (7.6) while currently ranked second in assists (22) and blocked shots (12). Isaiah Moore, formerly of Franklin Pierce, is pacing South Alabama at 18.1 points and five assists a game while shooting a robust 55% from the floor. Former Bentley Falcon Colton Lawrence tops the UMBC stat sheet with 14.5 points a game. SNHU's recent star Aaron Gray is averaging 11.6 points and 5.8 boards at Niagara, Max Zegarowski, who made the move from Franklin Pierce to Stonehill, is pumping in 12 points a night for a former league rival. Ex-Goldey-Beacom guard Nazim Derry is averaging a modest 6.6 points a game at New Hampshire, one-year Assumption post Omar El-Sheikh has a 9.1/8.3 statline at Arkansas State, Christian Davis, the former Le Moyne wing, is averaging 3.3 points per night off the bench at Bradley, and the trio of former STAC players Tobin Anderson brought with him to Fairleigh Dikinson are all doing well, especially guards Demetre Roberts (team-bests of 16.5 ppg and 50 assists) and Grant Singleton (second at 14.7 and 37, respectively). Sean Moore is contributing 5.4 points and team-high 5.6 rebounds in a mostly reserve role.
Feel free to send any comments to chrisgranozio@gmail.com and if you like what you’re reading, please consider a small gift to help defray our costs via our patreon account: https://www.patreon.com/D2easthoops. Until the next column, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, be safe, God bless and happy hooping to all!