Big red machine
Unlikely Ivy power Cornell streaks into tourney
ITHACA, N.Y. - It can be a lonely bus ride down Interstate 81 from Syracuse in the dead of a winter's night - and it was every bit that and more for Steve Donahue this past December. The coach of the Cornell men's basketball team had had high hopes for the 2007-08 season; indeed, the Big Red were preseason favorites to win the league title.
But things were not going as planned. An 80-64 loss to Syracuse had been Cornell's third straight, dropping the Big Red to 4-4, and there was a Christmas break coming with no games for a week. The Ivy League season would start in a month.
Three days before the Syracuse loss, the team had been beaten badly by a so-so Bucknell team on the road and Donahue had made a decision: There was going to be change. Practices would be more intense. Defense would be stressed. Accountability would be demanded. The first test was Syracuse and it did not go well.
"I was still thinking after that Syracuse game that maybe I was wrong after all," Donahue said. "Maybe we were still a year away. We were so young."
Well, they are still young. There's one senior on the roster and the two best players are sophomores. But they responded to what the coach was preaching - and they most assuredly are not a year away. Something clicked high above Cayuga's waters in the week between the loss to Syracuse and the return-from-Christmas win a week later over Stony Brook.
"Coming into the year, we knew we had firepower and we relied on that too much. We tried to run and gun and didn't play a lot of defense and while we were winning, it was a false sense of success," said sophomore forward Ryan Wittman, last year's Ivy League Rookie of the Year and Cornell's leading scorer this season at 15.4 points per game. "We had a talk after that losing streak. Then Coach started getting on us in practice. We started to play better defense and I think that's why we've been so successful."
There would be one more loss all season - at Duke, a game in which Cornell gave the highly touted Blue Devils all they could handle. That was Jan. 6. The Big Red then ran the table, becoming the first non-Penn, non-Princeton team to go undefeated in the Ivy League (14-0), snapping the two schools' 20-year stranglehold on the league title and earning the league's automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament.
They've won 16 straight games, the second-longest winning streak in the country after Davidson's 22-gamer. Last Sunday night, the players, coaches, and extended Cornell family gathered at a local golf course (architect: Robert Trent Jones, Cornell '30) in a room decorated with red and white balloons and Mylar basketball balloons. In between bites of pizza and chicken wings, sips of bottled water, and cellphone chitchat, the team found out its prize for this stunning turnaround season: a 14th seed in the tournament and a first-round matchup tomorrow against Stanford.
"This moment is for the kids," said Donahue, who went to the NCAAs eight times as an assistant coach at Penn. "They're the ones who made it happen."
Well, sort of. A lot of the credit has to go to Donahue, who has patiently constructed a pretty good program at a place better known for hockey and where it can be hard to get basketball players to even visit. Donahue inherited a team in 2000 that looked more like a candidate for Division 3, and he won 12 games in his first two years, admitting now, "I wasn't a very good basketball coach. I thought I was. But I learned very quickly there was a lot I didn't know."
Since then, there has been improvement every year, with this season's 22-5 record the best in school history.
Shift in recruiting
Donahue has done it by taking the recruiting prowess he showed as an assistant at Penn and using it on a countrywide basis. A look at Cornell's roster shows not a single player from New England, only one from New York (St. Bonaventure transfer Jeff Foote), and individuals from Oregon, California, Kansas, Nebraska, and Canada.He gave up long ago trying to get the hot-shot preppie from New England. He gave up trying to compete against Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and the brand names they convey. He wants a special kind of kid, one who isn't intimidated by upstate New York's tough weather, by the school's rigorous academics, or by the notion that you had better be prepared to work hard and fit in.
"Originally, when I got here, my idea was to get that prep school kid in the Northeast," said Donahue, who had gotten kids for Penn along the I-95 pipeline from Philadelphia to Boston. "I soon found out those were wars we weren't going to win.
"Geographically, we had to diversify. An assistant I had for five of those years kept saying, 'We've got to start going away from the other Ivies. We've got to focus on the Midwest. This is a beautiful, rural campus; they'll feel comfortable.'
"And, at the end of the day, you've got to understand you're still Cornell. It's a remote place. It's not for everybody.
"We're involved already with better basketball players because we're winning. But I don't want to lose the type of kid we've been successful in getting - a guy who wants to be here, work hard, buy into the team concept, get some personal growth off the court, and fits here in this campus and environment.
"You're not going to get the best people in certain areas because they'll come here and it won't be right for them. I know that. That's OK."
Valuable pieces
Wittman, son of Minnesota Timberwolves coach Randy Wittman, committed before his senior year at Eden Prarie (Minn.) High School. He had been injured, unable to participate in some of the critical recruiting tournaments, but selected Cornell after some aggressive recruiting by Donahue, numerous conversations with the coaching staff, and a school visit in which he fell in love with the place and enjoyed the company of his future teammates.Seven-footer Foote joined the team Dec. 19 after sitting out a year under NCAA regulations regarding transfers. By the time he set foot on the court at Bucknell, he had not played in a game in 2 1/2 seasons (he redshirted a year at St. Bonaventure as a freshman walk-on and then sat out the transfer year). He is from nearby Lockwood, but was swayed to Cornell after seeing how Donahue and the staff responded to a serious neck injury to Khaliq Gant. While Gant was hospitalized, one of his caretakers was Foote's mother, Wanda.
Then there's reigning Ivy League Player of the Year Louis Dale, whose presence at Cornell is equal parts mystery and buzzard's luck. He's 5-10, quick, was nominated for a spot on the
At the insistence of his mother, Willette, he mailed out game tapes to a number of schools that had shown some interest in mailings, one of them Cornell. Some of the tapes were sent back because the bigger schools (Virginia and Vanderbilt, to name two) had already finished recruiting. Donahue saw the tape and thought it was a practical joke.
He quickly dispatched an assistant to Birmingham and the man returned with Dale's completed application and his $400 deposit for admission.
"He can play anywhere in the country," Donahue said. "If one of these Pac 10 teams or Big East teams needed a point guard to come in and play and handle the ball, he could do it. But at this level, he's very special. We need him to do more than that - and he does. And he's going to keep getting better."
Dale might have had his breakout game against Duke. In the first half, he turned the ball over on his first four possessions. "I was moving a little too fast for the way I should play," he recalled. In the second half, he was singlehandedly responsible for 14 Duke fouls, was borderline unguardable, and had Coach K singing his praises.
"That game was a great experience," Dale said. "It proved to us that we could play with any team in the country."
One loss, many wins
The team weathered one more storm. The day after the Jan. 15 victory over New Jersey Institute of Technology, point guard Collin Robinson did not show up for practice. When the coaching staff finally reached him, Robinson said he was quitting the team.It was a bolt out of the blue. Robinson, who had transferred from Southern Cal and had broken Keith Van Horn's season scoring record at Diamond Bar High School, was a top reserve, averaging well over 20 minutes a game. But, according to Donahue, "He was not happy with his role.
"He felt it was best if he left," Donahue said. "I don't get into the details when kids don't want to be a part of our program. When I was building this, there were five or six of these a year. It was hard. I learned early on not to take it personally."
Said Wittman, "We could have gone one of two ways. We could have said, 'Great, there goes one of our top players' and we could feel sorry for ourselves. But we went the other way. We knew we still had the pieces."
They did indeed. They ran through the Ivy League, winning games by an average of nearly 13 points, holding opponents to 40.3 percent shooting while shooting 50.3 percent themselves. There were a couple of close calls: a 1-point win at Harvard in which Cornell trailed by 5 with 25 seconds left, and a 94-92 win at Penn, snapping a 19-game losing streak at the fabled Palestra.
Regardless of what happens tomorrow at the Honda Center in Anaheim, Calif. - many feel Cornell's wild ride will come to an end against bigger, stronger Stanford - it has been a remarkable season. And with virtually everyone back, a couple of decent recruits, and a much more challenging schedule, things look promising for Cornell next year.
The long, cold bus rides won't come to an end. But they may be a lot easier for Donahue to take.
Peter May can be reached at pmay@globe.com
