Grid, why have you been so quiet about your team?

I'll bet they're awesome with a piece of metal though.

 

the baseball team made the NCAAs last year.

 

Here's the story from SI...


Rebuilding the Bonnies


Rebuilding the Bonnies
School picking up the pieces two years after scandal
Posted: Tuesday March 1, 2005 3:47PM; Updated: Tuesday March 1, 2005 4:46PM


OLEAN, N.Y. -- It is a typically cold and snowy February night in this cozy patch of western New York, but inside St. Bonaventure's Reilly Center, there is a brief moment of warmth. The home team has pulled within one point of Dayton, 58-57, with 3:07 remaining, and the building has awakened. The small but giddy pack of yellow-clad undergrads standing along the baseline is emphatically chanting "DE-FENSE, (clap, clap), DE-FENSE," while the sound of stomping feet reverberates through the rest of the arena. Though the game has been close throughout, only now does it feel like these 4,173 spectators are allowing themselves to believe that victory is possible for their hometown Bonnies.

It is not to be.

Lanky Bonnies guard Patrick Lottin misses an easy lay-in, and walk-on Greg Lewis flubs two free throws as the Flyers go on to win 68-61. No one seems to be particularly angry. For most of these St. Bonaventure fans, resignment has long since replaced any inclination toward frustration, considering their team's depressing fate has little to do with the actual coaches and players on the floor. If anything, these loyal followers walk out to their snow-covered cars feeling something they haven't experienced often the last two years: encouragement.

At a press conference 20 minutes later, Bonnies coach Anthony Solomon can barely suppress a grin. "I'm so impressed with our young men, at how we continue to compete at such a high level," he says. "We've continued to improve, and it showed again tonight."

Solomon is a 5-foot-9, youngish-looking 40-year-old who, in a T-shirt and practice shorts, could be mistaken for one of the team's graduate assistants. He is infectiously optimistic. Speaking one-on-one after the press conference, he smiles and cups a hand to the side of his mouth while talking about his team, like he's giving away a secret.

Listening to him rave about the improvement of the three juniors who will be returning next season and the impact he's expecting from two long-awaited transfers, and for a moment, it's possible to be transported into the rosy future living in Solomon's head.

In the present, however, St. Bonaventure is a 2-24 basketball team whose name is associated with only two things to much of the outside world. "When people at home [in Binghamton, N.Y.] ask me where I go to school," says junior Christina Helczyn, "the first thing we're known for is being the school with the bad basketball team. Or, it's that basketball team that had the welder."

 

Much like a Lawrence, Kan., or a Bloomington, Ind., the lifeblood in Olean, N.Y., (population 15,000) is Bonas -- as the locals call it -- basketball. The program might not be Duke or North Carolina, but it's ripe with history -- from Bob Lanier's 1970 Final Four team to the '77 NIT championship to the 2000 team that lost to Kentucky to double overtime in the NCAA tournament's first round. From November through early March, talk of basketball fills the air at Ray's Barbershop and Angee's Restaurant. Meetings and events are scheduled so as not to conflict with Bonas' home games. "We're in a very isolated area, and Bonaventure basketball is the social event," said Olean resident John Bartimole, a 1976 grad and season-ticket holder. "When the Bonnies do well, it lifts the spirit of this community."

Two years ago this week, that spirit was shattered by scandal. News that starting center Jamil Terrell had been allowed to play during the 2002-03 season despite having only earned a vocational welding certificate from his previous school, Coastal Georgia College, blindsided the campus. The NCAA declared Terrell ineligible, St. Bonaventure voluntarily forfeited the six Atlantic 10 victories in which he'd participated and the league's presidents voted to ban the 13-14 Bonnies from their upcoming conference tournament. The players, betrayed and angered, took the stunning and audacious step of boycotting their final two regular-season games, sending columnists and sports-talk hosts around the country into a frenzy.

That a Division I program would bend the rules could hardly be viewed as a surprise, what with coinciding scandals that year at Georgia, Fresno State and, later that summer, Baylor. That it could happen to a tight-knit Franciscan university of 2,800 students, where friars in robes and sandals roam the campus alongside backpack-toting undergrads, though, was enough to shock even the most hardened cynic and to cause immeasurable embarrassment for anyone with an attachment to the previously pious institution.

"There wasn't a person here who didn't feel appalled that this could have happened," said Associate Athletics Director Steve Campbell, an Olean native who's worked at the school for 17 years. "It didn't seem possible that it was our school, that we were being lumped in the same class with people who cheated."

What made St. Bonaventure's scandal so remarkable was who allowed it to happen: Dr. Robert Wickenheiser, the president of the university. A basketball fanatic whose son, Kort, was a Bonnies assistant coach at the time, Wickenheiser green-lighted Terrell's admission the previous summer against the advice of his athletic director, Gothard Lane, and the school's compliance people. The NCAA would later find that during the season Wickenheiser also circumvented a university-wide deadline so Terrell could withdraw from a class to avoid getting an incomplete.

In the chaotic weeks that followed, Wickenheiser resigned; Lane, head coach Jan van Breda Kolff and his assistants were fired; and the school launched an internal investigation. That August, in the scandal's darkest hour, board of trustees chairman William Swan, a devoted Bonas alum who carried a brochure of Franciscan values with him at all times, hung himself in his basement, leaving a note saying he'd let down his alma mater by failing to prevent the fiasco.

Once the school and the NCAA completed their investigations, St. Bonaventure had been placed on three years' probation, given a one-year postseason ban and stripped of three scholarships.

"One mistake [stigmatized] the whole program," said Ahmad Smith, the Bonnies' leading scorer, and one of three remaining players from that 2002-03 team. "We go to away games and the fans still make jokes about the welding degree. We had nothing to do with it."

Many at the school say they should have seen the disaster coming. From 1992-2001, the head coach of the Bonnies was former player Jim Baron, a universally loved figure who, in 2000, led the team to its first NCAA tournament in 22 years, as well as three NIT trips. When Baron was lured away by Rhode Island (most Bonnies followers blame Wickenheiser for failing to retain him), Wickenheiser jumped at the opportunity to bring in van Breda Kolff, a higher-profile name who led Vanderbilt and Pepperdine to the NCAAs. Longtime Bonnies followers say van Breda Kolff wasn't the right fit, that he regularly went above athletic officials' heads to deal directly with Wickenheiser and that they could sense a "win-at-all-costs" mentality creeping into the program that manifested itself in the recruitment of Terrell.

"This dreadful fall from grace did not happen overnight," said Sister Margaret Carney, St. Bonaventure's president since last June and a faculty member since 1997. "It may have become public overnight, but tiny signals were present at least a year or two prior to this. The minute you begin to shave away tiny increments of obligation, you begin the slippery slope."

van Breda Kolff, who lives in Nashville and is seeking to return to college coaching, has filed a $21.5 million lawsuit against the university, alleging, among other things, breach of contract and libel (Lane has also filed a $3 million wrongful termination suit.) "The actions of St. Bonaventure in its wrongful discharge were devastating," said van Breda Kolff's attorney, Lew Conner. "The [NCAA] charges against him were not found to be valid."

In the wake of his firing that spring, second-leading scorer Mike Gansey transferred to West Virginia (where he currently starts), backup Calvin Brown left for Norfolk State, and van Breda Kolff's only two fall signees, Dan Cage and Patrick Tatham, asked for their releases (Cage is now at Vanderbilt, Tatham at Cleveland State). When Solomon was hired May 5, 2003, he inherited a program with six returning players, no incoming recruits and the inevitability of NCAA sanctions.

"All it took was one person [Wickenheiser] to destroy an entire program, and it ticks me off," said Dr. James Moor, a political science professor at St. Bonaventure for 31 years. "A lot of people worked darn hard for that program. To see that pulled out right out from under you is terrible."

 

wonderful.

 

Last year's Bonnies team, which fielded nine scholarship players after Solmon added three last-minute, desperation recruits, finished 7-21 despite the presence of all-conference point guard Marques Green, a near-20-points-per-game scorer. With Green graduated and half of this year's 10 scholarship players newcomers, the Bonnies started the season by losing to Iona, Marist, Canisius and seven others before their first victory Dec. 29 against 1-8 Alcorn State at the Islander Invitational in Corpus Christi, Texas. It would be their last until a Feb. 12 home game against Rhode Island, 4-16 at the time.

The Bonnies have just three true Division I players, speedy sparkplug Smith (who was recently named co-Atlantic 10 player of the week), swingman Lottin and combo guard Wade Dunston, a juco transfer. Nearly everyone else serves as a warm body, with the possible exception of raw freshmen Isaiah Carson and Michael Lee.

While there is still a loyal contingent at every home game, average attendance at the 6,000-seat Reilly Center has fallen from 5,337 per game last season to 4,211 this year, including a noticeable drop-off amongst the notoriously rowdy student section. "My freshman year," said senior Billy Howard, "if the game started at 2, we would get up at 8 to start tailgating. The student section was a sea of yellow shirts. If you didn't get there at least an hour early, there was no guarantee you'd get a seat."

Now, says senior Kristy Michalek, "You talk to people and it's like, 'Are you going to the game?' 'Oh, I don't know.' Sometimes you forget there's even a game that night. School pride is down a ton."

The man charged with restoring that pride is Solomon, an assistant for three years under Mike Brey at Notre Dame before coming to Olean. Perpetually upbeat and energetic, he speaks with genuine excitement not only about the future but, strange as it may sound, the recent past.

For most of the season, his team was getting wiped off the floor within minutes of tipoff. On the Thursday and Friday before the Rhode Island game, though, with the team 1-20, Solomon skipped practice in favor of two closed-door meetings he referred to as "Reality Check." He did most of the talking the first session, while the second gathering was for the players.

"No one enjoys losing like that," says Solomon. "So I told them, 'Yeah, we're 1-20. But we don't have to play like we're 1-20, we don't have to compete like we're 1-20 and we don't have to behave like we're 1-20. We don't have to let our record dictate our entire being.'"

The message apparently resonated, because over the past two weeks (Saturday's 87-66 loss to Fordham notwithstanding), the Bonnies have been playing at a higher level than they have all season. After beating Rhode Island, they went to Xavier and stayed within single digits until the final 10 minutes while grabbing a season-high 18 offensive rebounds. At St. Joe's, 10-1 in the conference at the time, Bona was within six points with two minutes to go in the first half before the Hawks' Pat Carroll hit consecutive 3-pointers, sending St. Joe's on its way to victory. And against then 15-8 Dayton, the Bonnies couldn't have looked more crisp in their transition game while building a 34-25 halftime lead and were within shouting distance the rest of the way, including that fleeting moment late in the game when they almost pulled back ahead. Smith, who has been on a tear recently, scored 26 points

"A team of lesser character would not have played as hard as they have the last couple weeks," said Dayton coach Brian Gregory. "With character kids like Ahmad Smith, sooner or later they're going to turn it around."

Give it time
Moor was getting gas recently when the man filling his tank noticed the St. Bonaventure sticker on his car. "He says to me, 'It's going to take five years to rebuild that program.' I said, 'I hope you're right.'"

Moor worries that Bonas basketball may never return to the days when winning records and postseason trips were an annual occurrence. Whereas other rebuilding schools such as Georgia and Baylor can recruit from a large metropolitan talent pool, the Bonnies' home base couldn't be more isolated. Their school has the smallest athletic budget in the Atlantic 10 ($4.9 million in 2003-04; Xavier's, who like St. Bonaventure doesn't have a football team, by comparison, was $10.2 million), a conference that is significantly down this year and will only get tougher next season, particularly with the addition of Charlotte and St. Louis. And the reality is the Bonnies will likely be dealing with the residual effects of the scandal for years to come.

"This is real recruiting going on here, believe me," said Solomon. "Because of our circumstances, we have to dig and dig and turn over every rock and stone there is. If we get a call [on a possible recruit], we have to research it."

Solomon's most important recruit to date is Tyler Relph, a West Virginia transfer who will be a sophomore when he becomes eligible next season. A former New York Mr. Basketball at McQuaid Jesuit in Rochester, he fills a glaring need at point guard, just as 6-10 Siena transfer Paul Williams and fall signee David Fox, a 6-10 juco transfer, will give the Bonnies much-needed size. With the program's scholarship-reductions removed after this season, Solomon hopes to sign two more players this spring.

It's not inconceivable St. Bonaventure could at least reach the double-digit victory mark next season. In the meantime, Solomon must play out this season's last string with the hand he's been dealt.

"I get calls from friends all the time saying, 'Are you OK? How are you holding up?'" Solomon said. "Well, I'm fine, because I know where we started, and I know where we are now.

"We cannot feel sorry for ourselves. As long as we continue to give great effort, intensity and passion, we'll get where we want to."

A whole lot of people are counting on him to be right.

"Bonaventure is so much a part of the economic, spiritual and social existence of this community," Bartimole said. "We have to stay optimistic."

 

Charlotte joined the A-10 only after receiving a written guarantee they'd never have to play Bona's.

conveniently left out that part of the story, didn't you?

 

I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. I didn't post that to bash the Bonnies. I posted it to show how the new coach is trying desperately to bring them back from something that never should have happened. I hope they come back and come back strong. I hate to see a team/town suffer due to the stupidity of a few.

BTW, Charlotte has played the Bonnies in the past and they've been good games.