Head coach Bob McKillop’s basketball team is what got them together. It’s what brings them together. It’s what keeps them together.
“Davidson basketball,” Tripp said, “is the reason I see Bro, when he lives however many hundreds of miles away, three or four times a year.”
They like the intimacy.
“We can talk to Coach McKillop,” Bro said. “Not because we give millions of dollars. Because we care.”
They like the continuity. The college has had three presidents since ‘95 but just one basketball coach.
They like the underdog story.
Davidson is unique in Division I basketball -- a tiny school, 1,700 students, a No. 9 national academic ranking in the U.S. News & World Report and a location that puts it in the middle of all the attention-getting ACC schools.
It also has a history uncommon for a mid-major program: In the late ‘60s, Lefty Driesell took the Wildcats into the national spotlight: big crowds, the cover of Sports Illustrated and to back-to-back regional finals. That it has happened before gives the program’s fans the hope that it can happen again.
The Davidson basketball story is that chance.
And the chance never ends.
Comments?
That weekend I flew from Tampa to LAX Friday night, game was Saturday afternoon in Anaheim, then home on the red eye. My wee-hours connection that night on the way back east? Detroit.
ReplyDeleteAnother memory from that trip: Bro, at about 3 a.m. PST, at a table in a Denny's by Disneyland, using salt and pepper shakers to demonstrate Davidson's guard play.
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