Swarthmore has served up bounce-back 2nd half of season
“There’s nothing better than playing basketball in March.”
— Swarthmore’s Vinny DeAngelo on the upcoming NCAA Division III tourney, which starts on Friday
SWARTHMORE » The Swarthmore men’s basketball team was in the midst of its second losing streak of January when Landry Kosmalski went rooting around in his bag of coaching tricks.
Deep down in his coaching repertoire, he plucked a tactic from his days at Davidson, playing for and coaching with Bob McKillop.
With the Garnet mired at 8-7 and looking a long way from last spring’s Final Four, Kosmalski presented all 16 of his players with tennis balls with their initials on them. They were to keep the balls with them at all times, as a reminder of the work they’d put in.
And if ever they felt the weight of bouncing back from a tough start difficult, they had something at hand to ping off the pavement to show just how easy it can be.
“We needed to bounce back,” center Michael Caprise said. “And … you bounce it, it comes right back. Just a physical reminder of what we were going through.”
Good luck charms in hand, the Garnet have rattled off nine straight wins and 12 of 13 since the Dunlops left the cans. And so, with 16 tennis balls keeping vigil on a ledge at Tarble Pavilion Wednesday night, the Garnet were preparing for another NCAA Division III tournament appearance, their seventh consecutive.
The opening round will take them away from home for the first time since 2018 when they venture to Connecticut to take on Virginia Wesleyan at 4 p.m. The winner gets the victory of host Trinity, ranked No. 3 in the latest d3hoops.com poll, and Utica in Saturday’s second round.
Swarthmore’s march to a 20-8 record seems unorthodox from the vantage point of its No. 11 preseason national ranking. They exited the top 25 before Christmas when a 7-1 stretch quickly devolved. Three of the first 10 games were against ranked opponents; a fourth was against Widener, which has spent most of the season in the Top 25. The Pride’s 77-57 beatdown at Tarble sent the Garnet into Christmas with two straight losses, and they lost to Rowan and Gettysburg on the other side of the break.
Consecutive losses to Johns Hopkins and at Franklin & Marshall in January left Swat at 8-7 overall and 5-3 in a Centennial Conference it has dominated in recent years.
But out came the bouncy balls, and Swarthmore followed their lead.
“It’s just a reminder that no matter what we’ve been through, we’re going to get off the mat and bounce back,” senior guard Vinny DeAngelo said.
Since the F&M loss, the Garnet have had a few close calls, though only concerning the tennis balls. DeAngelo, a Sun Valley All-Delco and just the eighth three-time first-team All-Centennial pick in
conference history, had his roll under the bleachers at a practice, but he gratefully recovered it the next morning.
Caprise has had nothing more complicated than a switch of jackets to perturb him. No rogue retrievers have derailed the motivational tactic.
On the court, the change has been pronounced. Swarthmore won nine of its last 10 regularseason games by an average of 17.8 points per. The only blemish was a second loss to regularseason champ Gettysburg, but a seven-point road loss was a significant improvement from January’s 23-point thumping at home. Swat capped the regular season by edging frequent nemesis Johns Hopkins by a point.
The second Gettysburg game is when Caprise had an idea that things would be OK. With seven freshmen on the roster, the senior forward anticipated growing pains.
“The middle of our schedule was super tough, and I think we learned a ton of lessons during those games,” he said. “I think around the second Gettysburg
game, we were starting to put it together. And we started rolling from there.”
DeAngelo’s belief goes back further, to the gauntlet of ranked teams on opening weekend. Swarthmore lost to Washington University St. Louis, then rallied past host New York University to win by one.
“From that moment on, I kind of knew that we were one of the best teams in the nation,” DeAngelo said. “There was definitely some bumps and bruises, and we got knocked down a lot during the season. But in the back of my head, I knew we had the resilience to crawl out of it.”
The focus all along was on incremental improvement, on young guys getting more comfortable. By season’s end, DeAngelo would lead the way at 17.4 points per game and Caprise at 15.3 points and 9.2 rebounds. A pair of sophomores in Eddie Paquette and Cal Hanson have turned into major contributors, while freshmen Nyle Coleman, Aidan Godfrey and Caleb Aurelien have stepped into bigger roles.
It summed to the Garnet’s run
through hostile territory in the conference tournament. They vanquished Gettysburg in the semifinal, reaching the final for the eighth straight season and upending Hopkins in Baltimore. This year’s crown is the second straight for the Garnet and fourth in 11 years under Kosmalski, for a program whose previous league crowns dated to 1915 and 1951.
Much as the tennis balls precipitated a shift, so did the captains’ mentality.
With so much lost from last year’s 28-4 campaign, Kosmalski has preached a “no expectations” mindset, not attempting to live up to 2018’s Elite Eight or last year’s Final Four or the unrequited 2020 tournament. Instead, it’s all about the present, as immediate as the recoil of rubber off road surface.
“There’s nothing better than playing basketball in March,” DeAngelo said. “Anything can happen. We’re going to go and enjoy the experience, but we also believe we’re one of the best teams in the country. So we’re up there, going to travel to do business, and we’re going to have fun while we’re doing it.”