Men’s Hoops Over, Women Getting Started, Giving Day Next Week!
This is a quick post to set up a big couple of weeks coming up! We’ll start with hoops, but we really want you all to look out for a special post tomorrow. Warning, old guys are trying to catch up and we’re hoping to have lots of new stuff coming up.
Well, we’re a few days late in wrapping up a forgettable JMU Men’s Hoops season, but after a first-round win on Friday, the Dukes played hard but fell as expected to the two-seed Charleston on Saturday. This season was a strange one, as a disastrous November and December Out-of-Conference start to the season understandably fed the obvious narrative that this team was terrible and Coach Rowe was over his head. But after that 2-10 start, and without excusing that start, the Dukes quietly went a respectable and not unexpected 8-13 the rest of the way, mostly in conference play. We’ve always been most excited about Coach Rowe as a recruiter and with seven seniors leaving the program, he’ll certainly get his shot this offseason to upgrade the roster. We do feel a bit bad for this group of seniors, most of whom joined a program we all thought was on the rise after the ’13 tourney run. Cabarkapa, Lukic, Kent, Satkus, and Dalembert were all in that group (Vodonavich was around for the tourney run and Brown transferred in later) and all appeared to work hard for the program throughout their time and never had issues off the court and for that this group deserves thanks regardless of this year’s record. But an injuries to the promising Dalembert and the glaring lack of a true point this year pretty much scuttled any hopes of a better finish.
In more hopeful news, the women HOST the CAA tournament (thank goodness for getting that thing out of Upper Marlboro) this weekend. They open play Thursday at 5 against the winner of UNCW/Charleston on Wednesday. They’re the two seed (sorry about the locale there top-seed Elon), but at the Convo anything seems possible.
Finally, JMU’s second annual Giving Day is coming up one week from today, next Tuesday, March 14th. Last year’s event was a home run for the entire university, including the Duke Club, and this year could be even better! We’ll have a special JMUSB challenge so come back tomorrow for the full announcement!
Great breakdown. This men’s team suffered form a lack of consistent shooting as well as the point issue, and Shakir Brown just kept disappearing (still don’t know if it was a problem with Rowe or what). Regardless, this season left me pining for the Electric Zoo days. The jury is out on Rowe. He took a team with a lot of returnees from 21 wins to 10, and the style of play wasn’t promising– remember, these guys averaged 75 PPG last year. If CoC and UNCW can build a program, we should absolutely be able to rule this weak-ass conference, and we’re not.
I listened to the final two games on radio so I did not see what got Rowe tossed on Friday or how that full court pass by cOf c happened which led to the loss on Saturday. But both seemed kind of inexcusable and kind of showed poor coaching. There were injuries but like the above post noted, it was a senior laden team that went from 20 victories to 10. Not an impressive start. Maybe he’ll turn it around next year but also as noted above, the style of play was not interesting to watch. Got to give him time but Rowe’s hiring just seems questionable unless we just could not get anyone else interested or are seen as a bad job move even for someone wanting to be a head coach anywhere. Just see no reason why we cannot be as competitive in basketball as we are in football and generate the same level of interest. Thanks for the reminder about giving day.
I bet the top 12 from the football team could beat the men’s hoops team 8 out of 10 times.
I’m POSITIVE we could when I was in school.