“We had a kid coming in here from Arizona and we went to pick him up at the airport,” he said with a smile already starting to surface. “We’re rolling in here and we see some deer.
“Well, the kid goes, ‘Man that’s a BIG dog!’ My wife and I, we just fell out. The (city) boy thought that was the biggest dog he’d ever seen.”
This season a lot of people may have been similarly fooled when they came to watch Wilberforce basketball. If they were drawing from the past couple of decades, they had to figure they’d be looking at a dog, too.
“Look up there on the walls,” Darius Foster, the star of the team, said as he sat at the edge of the Bulldogs’ court and motioned upwards.
“You don’t see any basketball banners do you? It’s been a long time since there was success here.”
The history-rich, 156-year-old private school — the first U.S. college owned and operated by blacks — had some great athletic success in the old days, but in the mid-1980s it dropped sports for seven seasons.
Since then Bulldogs basketball has mostly struggled. It’s gone through several coaches and even its best season — the 1998-99 campaign when the team went 19-16, won the American Mideast Conference tournament and advanced to the NAIA playoffs — was wiped out by NAIA sanctions because of a pair of ineligible players.
Last season Wilberforce had a 5-23 record and coach and Athletic Director Geoff Warren was not retained.
Futrell, who the past three years had been an assistant at nearby Cedarville University, wasn’t hired as the replacement until July. He then brought along Andy Allgrim, another Cedarville assistant, to be his lone coaching partner.
The Bulldogs promptly started this season losing 14 of their first 18 games. They were blown out by 40 by Lindenwood, 34 by Marion University and 25 by Cedarville.
And yet if you listen now, that’s not barking you hear.
That’s cheering and applause.
Wilberforce is suddenly soaring, pulled upward and onward as though its players are gripping the reins of a team of flying reindeer.
They have won nine of their last 13 games. On Tuesday night they won their first playoff game in ages, overwhelming visiting Point Park, 91-76.
This afternoon they meet No. 1-seeded Daemen College in the AMC tournament’s championship game on the Amherst, N.Y., school’s home court. The winner advances to the NAIA Division II national tournament in Branson, Mo.
The teams split during the season, so a victory certainly is not out of the realm for Wilberforce, says Bulldog point guard Terrance Morgan, a senior from Stivers High School who had 16 points and seven assists against Point Park: “If we play defense, if we don’t lollygag out there, we can beat anybody.”
Foster, who led the Bulldogs with 31 points against Point Park, agreed: “Great players make great plays on special days and (today) is a real special day for Wilberforce. There’s a lot at stake. This is for history.”
Building unity
When Futrell and Allgrim took over the one thing they noticed players making was enemies.
“You know how a team of guys usually hangs out together?” said Allgrim. “When we first got here we saw guys had their groups of two or three, but they just weren’t a team. Honestly, they didn’t like each other,”
Futrell nodded: “I’ve never seen anything like it ... And here’s the perfect example.
“Early on, Terrance Moore became ineligible and it was a tough deal. He had struggled to be part of this team. He’d sat out all last season getting his grades right. Then he slipped again and I had other guys come in and more or less say, ‘OK, now it’s my turn.’
“We had a lot of conversations about that — about this being a team and how we’re all in it together. If one guy falls, it’s all our fault because we didn’t make sure he was doing the right thing.”
Moore managed to shore up his academics, missed just six games and today is one of the team leaders.
But early on, just as his stock was plummeting, so too was the status of Foster.
The coaches both say the California high school product is a definite NCAA Division I talent. Early academic issues forced him to go the junior college route and in the process several West Coast D-I schools backed away.
An excellent recruiter, especially considering the school’s budget constraints, Warren convinced him to come to Wilberforce and he starred. But when the new coaches came in, he clashed with Futrell.
“In the beginning some of us weren’t buying in,” Foster admits. “The chemistry wasn’t there.”
Futrell said he and Foster knocked heads so mightily early on that he dismissed his star for a week and thought of dropping him from the program.
One of Foster’s best friends on the team talked to Futrell about the situation: “He said it’s just a thing of trust with him — that when he trusts you he’ll do whatever you say.”
As Futrell would find out later in conversation with Foster, his star player was a foster child who just recently found out he had nine or 10 brothers and sisters and is in the process of meeting them.
“After coming through foster care I think the trust issue was a very real thing for him,” said Allgrim. “And as it’s turned out, we don’t have a more trusting guy now than Darius. He’s the most reliable person we have. He does anything — and everything — we need.”
With Foster on board and fellow senior Ronald Hightower, the team’s leading rebounder, serving as the team’s rudder, the Bulldogs’ fortunes started to change.
Catching a break
Futrell said the team caught another unexpected break when it found Lynden Davis, a talented guard, playing intramural ball at Wilberforce.
“When Terrance was out we were talking in a hotel room during a road trip and (Hightower) mentioned a guy who plays intramural ball who he claimed was ‘similar to Chauncey Billups.’
“He told me (Davis) hadn’t wanted to be a part of the program last year, but that he’d tried to talk him into playing. That’s when I said, ‘How about calling him again?’
“We got him on the line and I told him I still had some scholarship money left. It turns out he had played at Wayne State. He thought about it over the break, called me after Christmas and said he’d give it a shot.”
Davis became a starter and over 14 games is averaging 7.4 points, 2.7 assists and 3.3 rebounds.
“As Coach was giving us all that discipline and structure, he kept telling us things would turn around,” said Morgan. “And they finally did.”
He said when they lost on the road to NCAA Division I Tennessee Tech by one in late November that was “an eye opener — we saw what we were capable of.”
There were still plenty of bumps as the Bulldogs played mostly larger schools on their nonconference schedule and lost all seven of their games in December.
Then they beat Point Park, at the time the nation’s top-scoring NAIA Division II team, and season began to lift off.
“Coach has helped us come together on the court and he’s making us become men, too,” Morgan said. “And now everybody’s excited — our teachers, the university president, everybody. It’s just a lot of fun now.
“It’s pretty unbelievable, really. I never would have guessed that this team would be so close to making it to the national tournament. A year ago who would have seen all this?”
Then again, when it comes to Wilberforce, sometimes what you think you’re seeing and what you actually do are quite a bit different.
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