Proud alum:
Steve McElvene’s KETTERING — mom, Jenell Shoals, hasn’t forgotten her late son’s teammates. She commented on a Flyer Nation Facebook post on Friday after the team lost to Davidson and raised the spirits of hundreds of disappointed fans.
“This was just a bump in the road,” Shoals wrote. “The best is yet to come. It’s always greater later.”
Dayton senior point guard Scoochie Smith saw that comment and thought it was fitting his team will get to play not far from McElvene’s hometown, Fort Wayne, Ind., in the NCAA Tournament. Dayton (24-7) earned a No. 7 seed on Sunday and will play No. 10 seed Wichita State (30-4) on Friday at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.
Ten months after McElvene’s death, the team will return to his home state to play its biggest game of the season. Shoals will be there, senior forward Kendall Pollard said. She was in Pittsburgh for the A-10 Tournament and planned to travel to see the team wherever it played in the Big Dance. She won’t have to travel far.
Her presence will mean a lot to the players because McElvene means a lot to them.
“Steve is definitely going to be in our minds when we’re playing,” Smith said.
The last time Dayton played in three straight NCAA Tournaments
Four straight:
(1965-67), it finished 21-9 the next season and played in the NIT. UD won the 1968 NIT. Don May was the star of that team, averaging 23.3 points per game as a senior.
Dayton’s seniors traveled a tough road back to the tournament, but all the experts had them as a lock entering Selection Sunday, and the experts were right. Smith, Pollard and Kyle Davis will be the first players in UD history to play in four straight NCAA Tournaments.
“It’s a great feeling,” Davis said. “Me, Kendall and Scoochie came in with the mindset of setting the bar high for this program. It paid off.”
Graduate assistant manager Brian Frank, who played at Kent State, attended the Mid-American Conference championship game Saturday in Cleveland with Brian Walsh, UD’s assistant director of basketball operations. Frank played at Akron.
Kent beat Akron 70-65 to earn a NCAA Tournament berth. It is a No. 14 seed and will play No. 3 UCLA on Friday in Sacramento, Calif.
“We have a saying at Kent that tradition never graduates,” Frank said, “and we went back to support the guys that are playing there now.”
Wake Forest is back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2010, when the ninth-seeded Demon Deacons beat No. 8 Texas 81-80 in overtime in the first round before getting blown out by No. 1 Kentucky 90-60.
This equals the longest drought the program has experienced since missing six consecutive tournaments from 1985-1990.
Under the direction of College Basketball Hall of Famer Danny Manning, who is in his third season at Wake, the Demon Deacons had one of the biggest turnarounds in Division I this year, going 19-13 after struggling to an 11-20 record that included a 2-16 mark in the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2015-16.
Kansas State starts three sophomores, and the player with the most minutes off the bench is a freshman.
Sophomore guards Barry Brown (11.7) and Kamau Stokes (11.6) are the secondand third-leading scorers for the Wildcats, while sophomore forward Dean Wade leads the regulars in 3-point percentage (40.9) and is third in rebounds (4.6).
Freshman forward Xavier Sneed averages 7.4 points and 18 minutes off the bench.
UC Davis is one of four teams making its NCAA Tournament debut this season, joining Northwestern, Northern Kentucky and Jacksonville State.
The Aggies, who made the jump from Division II in 2004-05, had never made the Big West Conference Tournament championship game before winning this year’s title as a No. 2 seed with a 50-47 triumph over No. 1 UC Irvine.
The only other time UC Davis advanced to postseason play was in 2015 when the Aggies played in the NIT, falling to Stanford 77-64.
The North Carolina Central roster features eight players who transferred from other Division I schools, including senior guard Patrick Cole.
Cole, who began his career at Coppin State before transferring to Siena and ultimately landing at NCC, averages a team-best 19.5 points per game and was the Most Outstanding Player in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference Tournament.
Senior guard Dajuan Graf, who averages 14.3 points per game and made the MEAC all-tournament team, transferred
Not only is Mount St. Mary’s familiar with the First Four, having played here in 2014 in a 71-64 loss to Albany, the Mountaineers have experience facing tournament-caliber teams.
Mount St. Mary’s regular-season schedule included six teams in the NCAA field of 68: Arkansas, Bucknell, Iowa State, Michigan, Minnesota and West Virginia.
The Mountaineers were 0-6 in those contests, losing by an average of 19.3 points, but they should be well prepared to face New Orleans on Tuesday.