Creating his own March memories
Oakville product anxious to create tournament moments
“(Kimbal) brings people together, connects them, and gets them going all in one direction.” JOE GRIFFIN BUCKNELL ASSISTANT COACH
BUFFALO, N.Y.— As Kimbal Mackenzie prepared for his long-awaited moment on college basketball’s biggest stage as a member of the Bucknell University Bison, he was thinking back to a crucial turn in the journey.
He was, at the time, all of 15 years old, a six-foot guard from Oakville who had just finished Grade 9 at Holy Trinity Catholic Secondary School. And while he was clearly a talented athlete — the MVP of his basketball team and a quarterback on the football squad — he wasn’t exactly possessed of the outlandish athleticism that would make him an obvious NCAA Division 1 prospect. Sure, he’d played with CIA Bounce, the GTA club that once nurtured an NBA showstopper named Andrew Wiggins. But he was no Andrew Wiggins.
So he didn’t appear to be the prototypical candidate to leave his comfortable family home and move to Baltimore, where he would live with a host family he had never met while attending a prep school he could only hope would be a good fit.
And, after he made the jump, there were moments when life in the Baltimore Catholic League didn’t appear to be the ideal environment.
“I got homesick. I was a young kid . . . There were times when it would just overwhelm me,” Mackenzie, 20, was saying Wednesday. “But I stayed with it. And it was the goal that drove it. The goal of playing here.”
“Here” is the opening weekend of the NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball tournament, better known as March Madness, which beginning Thursday will pare a field of 64 to 16 in four of the greatest days on the sporting calendar. The giants of the sport, as they almost always are, will be among the featured attractions. The likes of Villanova and Duke, Kansas and Kentucky, North Carolina and Arizona, all arrive with serious hopes of a run to the April 3 title game in Phoenix.
But if the Final Four is largely reserved for the NCAA’s one percenters, the tournament’s opening weekend is more often the name-making domain of plucky underdogs.
And it’s here that Mackenzie, a sophomore starting guard with 13th-seeded Bucknell, will attempt to slay fourth-seeded West Virginia at Key Bank Center.
Maybe none of it happens if Mackenzie didn’t make the jump to the Baltimore Catholic League, where, after that rocky beginning, he was named player of the year as a senior en route to landing a ride at Bucknell, where he’s majoring in economics.
“(Going to Baltimore) was a huge leap, especially for a six-foot guard,” said Joe Griffin, an assistant coach at Bucknell. “A lot of times you see guys make that leap to prep school and they’re six-foot-seven borderline NBA players. But I think Kimbal gained an edge from his time in Baltimore. He definitely has a toughness to him.”
Kevin Mackenzie, Kimbal’s father, said the concept of going away to school so young was, in some ways, daunting. But Kevin Mackenzie, who was born in England and grew up in Virginia, spent part of his youth as a boarder at Ridley College in St. Catharines, Ont.
“He ended up growing up a lot,” Kevin Mackenzie said. “Those years away from the family going to high school — he’s a very mature young man now.”
The leap to Baltimore wasn’t made completely alone. Mackenzie made the trip with another aspiring GTA hoopster, Mississauga’s Elijah Long. So it was a happy coincidence that Long, now the leading scorer as a sophomore guard at Mount St. Mary’s, also found himself on the practice floor at Key Bank Center on Wednesday. Long and the 16thseeded Mountaineers, thanks to their win over New Orleans in Tuesday night’s first-four play-in game, get the privilege of opening their tournament on Thursday against Villanova, the defending champion and No. 1 overall seed.
Long’s older brother, Naz MitrouLong, is also in the tournament: He’s a high-scoring guard for the fifthseeded Iowa State Cyclones, who begin Thursday night against Nevada in Milwaukee. In all, something like 26 Canadians dot the rosters of tournament teams.
“It’s surreal, because we call came from our little area in Canada. And now we’re all playing here,” said Elijah Long.
Bucknell, though this is its first tournament berth since 2013, comes with a reputation as a drama provider. Back in 2005, as a No. 14 seed, the Bison beat third-seeded Kansas. In 2006, they took down Arkansas.
Not bad for the champion of the academic-focussed Patriot League and a school with an enrolment of 3,600 whose small campus in Lewisburg, Pa., is nobody’s idea of a launching pad to big-time sporting success.
“It’s in the middle of nowhere. You come here and you don’t see people for miles. And then you see people on buggies with horses. There’s an Amish community right near us,” said sophomore guard Matt O’Reilly. “It’s definitely different. I would say it’s the perfect mix of academics and athletics. It’s the only place in the world where you can get a fullride scholarship and also get that Ivy League-esque education.”
For Mackenzie, it’s been a place where he’s found an important niche as a player. Griffin praised him as a rare sophomore leader.
“You notice who people gravitate towards when adversity hits in a game. He brings people together, connects them, and gets them going all in one direction,” Griffin said. “Not everybody has that ability. It’s just being a person everyone’s comfortable with. And he is that guy for us.”
If he’s become Bucknell’s glue guy, perhaps it’s because he’s stuck on the idea of finding themselves in the tournament since around the time he and Elijah Long played together as eight-year-old tykes. As Long said on Wednesday: “March Madness, for us as kids, was like the NBA.”
As Mackenzie smiled and nodded at the notion that a lifetime of aspiration was about to be realized, his attention was drawn to an NCAAissued T-shirt adorned with this year’s tournament catchphrase: “Create Yours.”
“I think it’s a beautiful statement if you look at it the right way,” he said. “It’s our destiny. We can do what we want with it. We control it. We create it. We can do anything we dream of.”