News Article

March 20, 2008
By Peter Tormey
RALEIGH, N.C. -- The temperature is expected to reach 63 degrees today here, spot-on the average for March 20 and 12 degrees cooler than yesterday’s balmy 75 as No. 7 seed Gonzaga, unseasonably cool in the West Coast Conference Tournament, warms up for its first-round NCAA Tournament game at 12:25 p.m. (EDT) Friday in the RBC Center against No. 10 seed Davidson College.

The winner will play a second-round game at 2:40 p.m. (EDT) Sunday against the winner of Friday’s Georgetown-Maryland Baltimore County game, that winner advancing to next week’s Midwest Detroit Regional. The other Raleigh pod, which will advance to the East Regional in Charlotte, N.C., has top overall seed North Carolina facing Mount St. Mary’s (Maryland), which beat Coppin State 69-60 in Tuesday’s opening game, with the No. 8 seed Indiana Hoosiers facing No. 9 seed Arkansas Razorbacks.

The 25-7 Bulldogs will take part ini a shoot-around today from 1:30-2:10 p.m. (EDT) at the 700,000-square-foot RBC Center, while their opponents, the 26-6 Wildcats of Davidson College, warms up from noon-12:40 p.m. today. Coaches and selected student-athletes from Davidson and Gonzaga will field questions from the media today at 11:20 a.m. (EDT) and 12:50 p.m., respectively.

This marks the first clash of the Zags and Wildcats on the hardwood.

While the Zags traveled three time zones and more than 2,000 miles for this game, the Wildcats had a 163-mile bus ride east on Highway 85 from the town of Davidson, N.C.  The Bulldogs are making their 10th consecutive (11th overall) NCAA Tournament appearance, while this is the Wildcats’ third-straight trip to the Big Dance. The Bulldogs received an at-large berth into the Tournament after losing the WCC Tournament championship to San Diego on the Toreros’ home floor while the Wildcats defeated Elon University for the Southern Conference Tournament crown and its automatic berth into the NCAA Tournament. This marks Gonzaga’s second at large-berth in its decade-long run in March Madness; every other time they won the berth by capturing the WCC Tournament.

Local Lore
Davidson, which holds the nation’s longest active college basketball winning streak at 22 games, is an undergraduates-only college of 1,700 students located in Davidson, population 9,110. Davidson is 22 miles north of Charlotte, N.C., home of the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats who made former Gonzaga star Adam Morrison the third overall pick in the 2006 NBA Draft.

Davidson was founded in 1837 with the establishment of the Presbyterian Davidson College, named for Brigadier General William Lee Davidson, a local Revolutionary War hero in Mecklenburg County. The land for Davidson College came from Davidson's estate.

The RBC Center is one of the finest sports venues in the nation. Its 19,722 red seats make clear this is the den for North Carolina State’s Wolfpack. The $158 million sports and entertainment center, which the Carolina Hurricanes of the National Hockey League also call home, was built in 1999 and is also among the largest basketball arenas in the country. Members of the NHL since 1997, the Hurricanes lit up this part of North Carolina by capturing the Stanley Cup in 2006. Their fans are known affectionately as “the Caniacs.”

This neck of the woods is known informally in these parts as the Triangle, an abbreviated form of the Research Triangle as it is anchored by three big-time universities: North Carolina State in Raleigh, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University in nearby Durham, made famous from the baseball movie “Bull Durham,” which was filmed right here in the Triangle. Baseball fans won’t miss a chance to visit Durham Bulls Athletic Park, home of the real-life Durham Bulls, an affiliate of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays Major League Baseball organization and a member of the Triple-A International League.

People are as warm and inviting here as a fresh-baked pie. While wandering around in search of coffee early this morning, I was greeted many times with big, friendly smiles and was even invited to a prayer breakfast meeting, before I found the coffee. This must be what people mean when they refer to the “down-home, Southern hospitality.” It’s real.

WCC Makes History with Three Teams in ‘Big Dance’
Another reality is this marks the first time in the 56-year history of the WCC that three conference teams got their tickets punched to the Big Dance. San Diego, led by first-year head Coach Bill Grier, a former longtime Gonzaga assistant, is making its fourth trip to the Tournament, while Saint Mary’s, like Gonzaga, settled for an at-large berth. This is USD’s fifth Tournament appearance. The WCC was among eight conferences in the country to send at least three teams into the Tournament. No. 13 seed USD will face No. 4 seed Connecticut on Friday in Tampa, Fla., while the No. 10-seed Saint Mary’s faces No. 7 Miami (Fla.) today in Little Rock, Ark.

The reality for Gonzaga Coach Mark Few is there are no second chances in this Tournament. It’s one loss and you’re out and Few realizes his Bulldogs must step up their game considerably from their last two outings or they will be watching the rest of the Big Dance as spectators, not dancers.

“We need to play better. You are going to have to play really well to play on,” Few told media in a teleconference earlier this week. “We didn't play great against San Diego or Santa Clara. It's a difficult deal when you know you are going to play in the NCAA Tournament. One thing I would like to say that I think gets lost sometimes is that ten-straight NCAA Tournaments is an amazing feat. There are only, I think, five programs that have accomplished it and some of them barely got in by the skin of their teeth this year.”

Difficult indeed. Staying in the Tournament is even harder.