Bro and Tripp

CSTV.com:

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.

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From the pages of Charlotte magazine

Here:

Now it’s almost forty years post-Lefty. Bob McKillop has been Davidson’s coach for almost half of those. His team won a school-record 29 games last year, is returning every player of any consequence, is in line for a third straight NCAA tournament appearance, and has on this season’s schedule games at Charlotte Bobcats Arena against North Carolina and Duke.

This year could be the year the Wildcats win back Charlotte.

All it took was the legacy of a coach who did his thing and left, the development of a coach who’s done his thing and stayed, burgeoning suburbs, and finally a skinny, unafraid 19-year-old kid who could end up being the most important player in the history of Davidson basketball.

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