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With only 7 healthy players, Wagner is set to face 1-seed North Carolina – NCAA.com
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DAYTON, OH – You’ve played 40 minutes. And not just 40 middle-of-January minutes but 40 hard minutes, NCAA tournament minutes. You and your Wagner guys have led all night, were up on Howard by 13 points only three minutes ago, but now it’s down to one and there are 14 seconds left. You’re at the free throw line on weary legs, knowing that if you miss, it could mean a last-second loss that would be a knife through your heart. Your team has only seven healthy scholarship players — seven — so there has been no time to rest and maybe catch a breath and be ready for such a moment.
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous,” Julian Brown would say later in the Wagner locker room Tuesday night. “But that’s when you have to brush it off and keep your chin up and get it done.”
But how hard must it be, to have the needed focus and mental toughness after 40 minutes of foot-to-the-floor win-or-else tournament basketball? “It’s been tough for us all season and in those moments you’ve just got to come together and stay committed to our culture and what coach preaches to us every day,” Brown said.
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Brown made both free throws for a three-point lead and Howard was left to try to save the night from outside the arc with three potential overtime-inducing 3-pointers in the last six seconds. None fell, so the team that hadn’t had a live practice in 2 ½ months was the first winner of the 2024 NCAA tournament with a rotation you could fit in a minivan.
March Madness began properly, with a battle to the last shot in the last second, won by a team moving on with a skeleton roster and a story to tell.
Look at the Wagner bench Tuesday night as they held off Howard 71-68. Two reserves ready to be called, sitting, amid a bunch of coaches, and then at the end of the bench a platoon of Seahawks in warmup suits who weren’t going to get in the game. Six of them had been injured earlier this season, leaving only seven players. Been that way for some time. “We’ve got more coaches than players,” guard Tahron Allen had said the day before. “It’s what makes us unique.”
The players understand that. So does the coach.
“Having seven players, I would imagine, some places they might just come in the gym and just, hey, let’s go through the motions,” Donald Copeland said. “We never did that. We prepared the right way. We expected to win even when we did lose.”
By now, the Wagner players are accustomed to facing the world shorthanded. Of the six injured Seahawks, Copeland said he had four penciled in as starters on his depth chart and the other two as rotation players. “Obviously it didn’t work out that way,” he said. “But you kind of just go through it.”
And so they have.
“We don’t mind how many players we have, we just compete,” guard Javier Ezquerra mentioned.
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“Underdog, you know, it’s Wagner,” said guard Melvin Council Jr. The Seahawks will be Thursday, certainly.
This band of a few good men gets No. 1 seed North Carolina next. In Charlotte. Good luck with that one, but nothing has stopped them yet, so long odds and thousands of fans in Tar Heel blue probably won’t faze them.
“It’s adversity,” Brown said with more or less of a shrug since they’ve seen that in waves. “Being calm through the storm and coming out dry has been important.”
Tuesday was typical hard labor. Ezquerra, Council and Julian Brown all went 40 full minutes, and Wagner flirted with a true body shortage late with three players carrying four fouls. But the Seahawks shot 52.7 percent and even though they missed four of their first seven free throws, Brown made the two that counted.
Let’s pop into the Wagner huddle during a timeout with 17 seconds left. The Seahawks knew that as soon as they inbounded the ball there would be a foul. Someone would have to shoot two of the most important free throws of the season. Brown had a message for his coach.
“I went to him and said ‘I’m going to ice the game.’ Coach has confidence in me. He said, ‘OK, go ice the game,’ and that’s what I did.”
Council, who scored 21 points, had the same idea. “I told Julian Brown, go get the ball, go make the free throws. And that’s what he did for us.” Said Ezquerra, “He’s built for these moments.”
The road here has not been easy. Not a day of it, with a coach trying to figure out how to plug all the holes.
“I want to get this out there to everybody,” Copeland had said Monday. “I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to seven players. And it was hard, because I didn’t know. You don’t know what you’re supposed to do. Our last live practice (that was Dec. 27), I lost a guy to injury. And that’s when I said we can’t practice anymore. And it was constant changing and understanding — are you doing this the right way? Or should we be doing this?”
All he can do is ride his horse as far as they can run. Ezquerra played all 120 minutes in Wagner’s three wins in the Northeast Conference tournament. Council was off the floor only 22 minutes in the Seahawks’ 16 season league games. Brown hasn’t had a game under 35 minutes since Feb. 3. Those three all went 40 Tuesday night.
“The things we did do in drill, they needed to be excellent and outstanding at it,” Copeland said. “When they weren’t I held them accountable. And they let me do it, and they had expectations of themselves, So I would say if there was a group to have seven players with it, I’m probably lucky it’s these guys, honestly.”
It has required all hands on deck, including the coaches, who sometimes have to take the court against their own players in practice. Good thing Copeland is still very much in basketball shape, after leading Seton Hall in scoring, assists, steals and free throw percentage in 2006. He had 17 points that March in an 86-66 first-round loss to Wichita State. Eighteen years later, he’s still going up and down the court because his team needs the practice bodies. His assistants, too.
“Who has the best game?” Council said of the staff. “It’s the head coach. I give him that.”
Those words were taken to the head coach. “That is the smartest thing he’s said since he joined the program,” Copeland said.
So the Seahawks are moving on after Wagner’s first tournament victory in history. All seven of ’em. “I think it’s huge, to get an NCAA win added to everything that’s happened,” Copeland said.
“Nobody knows where Wagner is,” Council said. “So for us to put Wagner back on the map is amazing.”
It’s on Staten Island, by the way, the campus sitting on the second highest point of the island with a view of New York City. “You can see all the boroughs,” Brown said. “It’s beautiful.” The towers of Manhattan are only a 25-minute Staten Island Ferry ride away.
Not a lot of the college basketball world probably knows that. It will if the Seahawks win their next game.
Monday, April 8 (National championship game)
Tuesday, March 19 (First Four in Dayton, Ohio)
Wednesday, March 20 (First Four in Dayton, Ohio)
Thursday, March 21 (Round of 64)
Friday, March 22 (Round of 64)
Saturday, March 23 (Round of 32)
Sunday, March 24 (Round of 32)
Thursday, March 28 (Sweet 16)
Friday, March 29 (Sweet 16)
Saturday, March 30 (Elite Eight)
Sunday, March 31 (Elite Eight)
Saturday, April 6 (Final Four)
Mike Lopresti is a member of the US Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, Ball State journalism Hall of Fame and Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame. He has covered college basketball for 43 years, including 39 Final Fours. He is so old he covered Bob Knight when he had dark hair and basketball shorts were actually short.
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