The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Ruane brings UB up to speed and builds success
Every season is a journey and Fairfield’s ended Monday night in Albany one step short of the NCAA Tournament with Sydney Johnson’s extraordinary embrace of senior Tyler Nelson.
The moment near the end of the MAAC championship loss to Iona went viral and the long, tearful hug gave the nation its first emotional March reminder of how a team’s fabric and a coach-player relationship grows strong through a long winter of a college basketball.
“I really wanted Fairfield to get that one,” Bridgeport coach Mike Ruane said. “It would have been something special.”
Ruane obviously doesn’t know how his team’s Division II NCAA Tournament journey will end, but he does know it began with a November exhibition victory against Fairfield and with a decision that his team would go full pressure every night of what would prove to be a transformative 2017-18 season.
Oh, Bridgeport, ranked 13th nationally in the last poll, has been to the NCAA Tournament 10 times in Ruane’s 18 years with the Purple Knights and there is rich history that includes Manute Bol in the ’80s and national championship appearances in 1991 and 1992 with Lambert Shell.
“The season started out with a great win, a win at the buzzer [on a Bakary Camara layup] against Fairfield and we kept it rolling from there through a [school-record] 16-game winning streak,” Ruane said.
What fueled this was the decision to incorporate a fullcourt pressure defense that allowed Ruane to use a lot more of his team.
“We’ll go 13-14 deep and I think it’s the right way to do it,” Ruane said. “That’s the style of the future, to use more people, which makes less of a star system. But you’ve got to have the depth.”
The Purple Knights, 25-5, will display that depth Saturday against Merrimack in the first round of the East Regional at LeMoyne College in Syracuse. Sam Joseph leads the team at 14.1 points, but eight players average at least seven points and 11 score
more than four.
Ruane used to employ the 1-2-2 three-quarters press that Villanova has made famous.
“We’d try to speed up and slow teams down based on that way with your personnel,” he said. “But we’d never gone to this fullcourt, running and jumping, kind of Louisville, West Virginia system.”
What ultimately persuaded Ruane to go that way wasn’t Louisville or West Virginia. It was a rival, the one that snapped that 16-game winning streak Sunday in the ECC championship.
“It was St. Thomas Aquinas, that’s what they did to win the region last year,” Ruane said. “They were able to beat Northeast-10 programs by doing it. I didn’t think you could, because those teams have such good, smart ballhandling guys.
“But it’s really effective. We figured we could do it just as well or better than them. We’ve geared our program toward it, geared our recruiting toward it. You need runners. You can’t have plodders and space eaters. We need guys who can dribble, shoot, run and have some size.”
Ruane said his point guard D’Vonne Trumbo sets the tone. He can run all day. He’s also the only player to average more than 25 minutes, at 29.4. Once the team began to scrimmage and saw how effective extreme exertion and a deep bench could be, the players bought in one after another.
“We play a 10-second game at practice,” Ruane said. “Once you get the ball you have 10 seconds to score. And once you score, you’re pressing. Really up-tempo for four minutes. That’s a lot of possessions. We take all sorts of stuff away. We make teams coach inbounding the ball. Some teams can’t even get it over halfcourt. It’s a great way to play and, using so many guys, it makes it difficult to scout us.”
The on-court transformation comes at a time when successful D-II recruiting has transformed.
“It has changed a lot,” Ruane said. “When I first came to Bridgeport, it was all transfers, all JUCO and Division I transfers. Mature kids coming in. I did that for 15 years. I used to feast off that list.
“Then all the Division I schools started taking Division I transfers. They evolved. We had to evolve.”
So much has been made of the more than 700 D1 players transferring to other D1 schools each year, graduate players, etc. Yet in the telling and retelling of what it all means, the impact on DII has been a minuscule part of a national story.
“There became a void,” Ruane said. “You still can get the JUCO players if they fit academically. But this is the first time four freshmen have gotten major minutes for us. It’s changed to where we’re turning to more overlooked freshmen and prep kids. We’re all over the smart prep kids. If Jere Quinn calls me from St. Thomas More [where Ruane got Trumbo and Hashem Abbas], I’m scholarship-ing the kid. Those kids are D I level talents, but with all the D1 transfers and graduate students, these kids are gold for us.”
A D II men’s program is allowed 10 scholarships. D I men are allowed 13.
“That has changed for us, too, in that any academic and financial aid you get, you can add to that,” Ruane said. “So those 10 scholarships can cover 20 guys. That’s why we can get more players. It really is because of the great support of our president Neil Salonen, who came in 2000 and is retiring. He injected the money and staff support.”
The Division II tournament happens in a flash. Ruane will take his team to Syracuse on Thursday night. The Purple Knights will practice Friday. They play Saturday at noon. There are eight regions each with eight teams. You win Saturday, you play Sunday. You win Sunday, you play Tuesday. You win Tuesday, there’s the Elite Eight in Sioux Falls, S.D., on March 20, 22 and 24. Bang. National champion.
Among East Regional teams, Bridgeport has beaten St. Thomas Aquinas twice, Bloomfield and Merrimack. If the Purple Knights get past Merrimack, they’ll play the winner of the two others. Of course, they just lost to St. Thomas Aquinas.
“We weren’t focused enough,” Ruane said. “We knew we had beaten them twice and were going to the NCAA anyway and maybe that it would be easy. It wasn’t. But now it’s one and done.”
It’s March. That’s the journey of college basketball. One and done and it ends in hugs.