By David Collinge
For D3sports.com
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- This is already the best season in 101 years of Capital men's basketball, but the Crusaders are not satisfied.
"It's kind of an empty feeling when our team is 26-4 and we haven't won a championship," said Capital head coach Damon Goodwin. His team already owns the school record for victories, eclipsing the mark set just last season, and has reached the third round of the NCAA tournament for the first time in 27 years, but they finished second to sectional host John Carroll in both the Ohio Athletic Conference regular season and tournament. "At the beginning of the year we had three goals," Goodwin explained. "We didn't accomplish the first two, and now we're trying to accomplish the third. But on the other side of the coin, I think that's something that motivates our guys."
Another motivating factor for the Crusaders is the presence of seven seniors on the roster, more than any other team still alive in the tournament. All seven are in the rotation, with four of them starters. "I've been coaching Division III basketball for 20 years and I've never seen a team have seven seniors," says Goodwin. "That should be an advantage for us. We are going to advance or end our season depending on what our seven seniors do."
Having so many teammates whose careers are on the line each night is a motivating factor, according to sophomore point guard D.J. Frazier. "The seniors are great leaders," he said, shortly after scoring the winning basket to eliminate Wooster in the second round. "We (underclassmen) feel like that this is their last chance to go to the championship, and we feel like it's our last chance right now -- we're not worried about the future."
Two of those seven seniors have crossed the thousand-point threshold and continue to climb up the career scoring chart in Bexley. Nate Stahl, the two-time OAC Player of the Year and a D3hoops.com All-American in 2008, will become the second-best scorer in Capital history with his next basket. "Nate is a kid that's scored 1,500 points and if you look at how many shots he takes a game, it's not a lot," said Goodwin. "He's been a very unselfish scorer for us, and I think that's a strength of our team. If he plays in another system, I guarantee you he's a 20-25 point (per game) scorer."
Stahl is joined on the wing, as well as the all-OAC first team, by fellow senior Ryan Wood, whose 1,183 career points rank him 20th all-time at Capital. The team's leading scorer at 14.2 points per game, he's a 46% shooter from the three-point line, which would have been good for 12th nationally had he qualified by hitting four more shots. Goodwin is quick to point out that Wood, like Stahl, is a "pass first" player who averages 1.5 assists per game. "To have two on the same team that have scored that much and not been just simply a �scorer' is one of the reasons we've had a lot of success," says Goodwin.
Four of the seniors enrolled at Capital together in 2005, while three others joined the program as transfers over the next two seasons. Since they've been playing together the past two seasons, the septet has amassed a 50-10 record and earned two NCAA bids. They provide a pool of veteran leadership that Goodwin has had to call on many a time. Capital is a notoriously slow-starting team, and they've trailed at the half in 11 games this season. Although the Crusaders have come back to win an impressive 10 of those games, this weakness has not escaped the notice of the coaches. "We're not the most excitable team sometimes," the head coach says; "that can be good and that can be bad. We don't come out strong, and as we advance, that can come back to haunt you. But this team doesn't panic, I can tell you that. We've had a number of wins this year where we've come back from deficits."
Capital is also 4-0 in overtime games this season, including its first-round 80-77 victory against Thomas More, which was Goodwin's 250th win as a head coach. In his 15 seasons at the helm in Bexley, Goodwin's teams have averaged nearly 17 wins per year, winning three of the program's 10 OAC titles and participating in four NCAA tournaments. The three-time OAC Coach of the Year stands to become Capital's winningest head coach early next season.
The Crusaders generally win with offense, scoring just under 80 points per game and ranking among the top 20 teams nationally in field goal shooting both overall and from beyond the arc. Their up-tempo style leads to some frenetic games, as the Crusaders surrender nearly 71 points per game, and they rank in the bottom third of D-III teams in giving up three-pointers, but they can play defense when it's needed. Against Wooster, the second-best three-point shooting team in D-III, Capital extended the defense and contested the long-range shooters. The result was that Wooster was limited to seven three-pointers on just 13 attempts, which is three makes and ten attempts below their average. On paper, it looks like a questionable strategy, as it allowed Wooster to exploit the middle and shoot better than 50% on the night, but in the long run it took the Scots out of their comfort zone and was probably the difference in a razor-thin victory.
Although, like the Wooster game, Capital's wins sometimes look less than impressive on paper, the fact remains that the only three teams have bested them this season. All three have been OAC opponents, and all of the defeats took place on the road. Stahl thinks that playing so many nail-biters in the rugged OAC has positioned his team well for the tournament. "I've been in close games pretty much ever since I've been here," he said. "In the OAC, every game is tough -- you've just got to battle it out."
The battles will continue for the Crusaders this weekend. They'll have to win two more games on an OAC opponent's floor, one of them potentially against the team that's handed them half of their defeats this season, if they want to accomplish that final goal and earn an elusive championship.
Only then will they be satisfied.