Winthrop basketball is favored to earn NCAA bid again. 5 notes from Big South media day
Last year, Winthrop head coach Pat Kelsey glanced at the preseason rankings presented at the Big South Conference’s 2019 media day event and shrugged his shoulders.
That’s all he could do. After all, although Kelsey expected his team to be good, he didn’t know the talent he had: He was grooming a team led by four freshmen and two transfers from the Division II ranks who hadn’t yet played a minute for Winthrop.
“I’ve never had anything like this before with so many new guys,” Kelsey told The Herald in an interview in November 2019.
A lot has changed since then — and a bulk of that change was highlighted on Tuesday at the Big South Conference’s 2020 basketball media day.
For one, the BSC announced that Winthrop was solidly voted the No. 1 preseason team in the conference — an unsurprising nod to the 2020 Big South tournament champions. And for two, Kelsey (for the most part) knows what to expect out of his roster this year.
“That’s what’s fun about what I do and my profession,” Kelsey told a gaggle of reporters on Tuesday morning. “Forrest Gump said, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates.’ Every year, that’s a fun thing for me is putting that puzzle together and solving that riddle. Last year was a ton of unknowns. I felt good about our talent level and our personnel, but it was such a new group. And it’s different this year.”
It’s different, of course, beyond team personnel and basketball strategy and whatnot: There’s a new, peculiar schedule Big South teams will have to play through. There’s the expectation that schedules will be disrupted mid-season, too, much like sports schedules have been for college football teams across the country. There are new, strict coronavirus protocols — and there’s a new, dire pressure to have them work. (Another season without an NCAA Tournament would be “devastating” financially for the Big South, league commissioner Kyle Kallander candidly said on Tuesday.)
So what is there to make of these differences between the 2019-20 and the 2020-21 seasons? And why, despite all that is different, are the Eagles expected to reign as champions again? Here are five notes to consider.
1. Winthrop returns Big South Freshman of the Year, upperclassmen
Winthrop was arguably the most talented team in the Big South last season — and a lot of talented players will return in 2020-21.
▪ DJ Burns: The Rock Hill native and York Prep alum was named the Big South Freshman of the Year last year and was announced to the conference’s preseason all-Big South first team on Tuesday. He averaged 11.9 points per game last year, second on the team behind now-graduate Hunter Hale.
▪ Chandler Vaudrin: Vaudrin, who transferred to Winthrop and sat out the 2018 season, was by many accounts the team’s leader in 2020. Winthrop’s 6-7, 210-pound point guard was also given preseason all-Big South first-team honors, and before coming to Winthrop, he gained national attention when he led the country in triple-doubles at Walsh (DII).
▪ Chase Claxton and Russell Jones Jr.: These two South Carolina-born sophomores, who’ve known each other well before arriving in Rock Hill, are two players that a coach like Kelsey is drawn to: Jones Jr. (5-8, 175 pounds) is an undersized but not-to-be-overlooked point guard, and Chase Claxton (6-7, 185 pounds) is an undersized forward who earned his coach’s trust because of his work ethic last season. Each of them started for a substantial part of 2019-20 while they were healthy. Jones Jr. tweaked his ankle during Winthrop’s game against Duke and missed a slew of contests because of that.
▪ Michael Anumba: Anumba started every game as a freshman and averaged 6.8 points and four rebounds a game as a sophomore. His teammates helped him harness a newfound confidence during last season’s 14-game winning streak, The Herald previously reported.
2. Winthrop optimistic about its ‘unknowns’
Chandler Vaudrin told reporters on Tuesday that Winthrop still has a few potential surprises on its roster.
“I mean, last year we didn’t get to see Josh Corbin. He redshirted and only played a couple games. Obviously he can shoot the lights out and has improved on the defensive end,” Vaudrin said. “We didn’t see Adonis (Arms) this year because he sat out as well, so he’s kind of an unknown for us. And my biggest thing would be Jamal King. He’s just been a beast on the glass for us this whole preseason. His mindset, the whole second half of the year last year and then throughout the summer this year and then during preseason, he’s just been an animal. I’ll just stop there because I don’t want to give too many of our secrets away.”
Here’s a closer look at the list of up-and-comers Vaudrin mentioned, plus the two freshmen Winthrop boasts on its 2020-21 roster.
▪ Josh Corbin: In the nine games he played last season, Corbin averaged 4.1 points per game, which included an 18-point performance in his team’s home-opener. Corbin wore street clothes and a boot after suffering an undisclosed injury right before the start of January, and he didn’t return the rest of the season.
▪ Adonis Arms: Arms spent most of his time during games with his sweatpants tucked into his socks, cheering on the rest of the team with Kelsey’s son, Johnny, at the end of the Winthrop bench. Arms had to sit out last season after transferring from Northwest Nazarene University, but Kelsey told The Herald in an early-season interview that Arms had the potential to be a Big South Player of the Year candidate once he suits up for the Eagles.
▪ Jamal King: King started coming into his own in the second half of his freshman season. He finished 2019-20 averaging 9.2 minutes and 3.3 points per game. Kelsey acknowledged last season how hard he pushed King, as well as his rookie counterparts, on the team’s quest for a conference championship.
▪ Freshmen Kelton Talford and Toneari Lane: Kelsey had a lot of positive things to say about Talford (6-7, 195-pound forward from Great Falls) and Lane (6-5, 210-pound guard from Atlanta) on Tuesday. One of his compliments? “They got huge ceilings,” Kelsey said. “And they have this unbelievable luxury of being a part of a veteran-led team.”
3. Odd Big South schedule affects everyone equally
Winthrop opens the conference season against USC Upstate on the road on Dec. 12 and 13, and then two weeks later, the team plays Campbell at home on Dec. 30 and 31. The Eagles will then go the rest of the season playing four games a week in this back-to-back style — just like the rest of the league will.
Commissioner Kallander expounded on why the conference schedule was set up the way it was on Tuesday.
“We probably went through double-digit models to try to figure out our schedule for this year,” Kallander said. “We finally landed on the back-to-back version of the schedule, which we think is the right place to be, the safest place to be, and we think it’ll serve our institutions well.”
Kallander also said that (there is) flexibility within the schedule to provide makeup games if seasons get disrupted due to positive COVID-19 tests, and he said the back-to-back games format limits testing (and thus reduces the cost of testing that league schools would have to pay).
“Generally, with high-risk transmission and indoor sports, the NCAA stipulates three times a week testing,” Kallander said. “There is a caveat, however, that if you’re playing just one opponent during the course of the week, you can reduce the number of tests to one PCR tests or two antigen tests on the day of the game. So there’s an opportunity there that if you’re only playing one opponent during that week, even if it’s back to back games, you can reduce the overall tests that you’re having to conduct.”
4. Non-conference schedule is ‘the most difficult’ in ‘history of our program,’ Kelsey posits. Could it prepare Winthrop?
Winthrop benefited from a grueling California road trip to start the season last year — the one that saw a one-possession loss to Fresno State before the team shocked the college basketball world and defeated nationally ranked St. Mary’s.
And this year, Winthrop hopes its tough nonconference schedule will be beneficial again.
Kelsey said Tuesday that his 2020-21 non-conference schedule “arguably, maybe, is the most difficult non-conference schedule in the history of our program.”
“Now, you’re not going to see a schedule filled with Power 5 teams and things like that because those games are just really hard to schedule this year,” Kelsey said, adding, “But almost every single team we play — now, you have to fact-check this — but all of them were 20-win teams last year. All of them finished toward the tops of their conferences.”
Looking at the non-conference games that have been announced to the public from Winthrop’s camp, Kelsey’s (pretty much) right: In what will likely be the biggest university-run non-conference event during the 2020-21 college basketball season, the Wade Tipoff Classic (Nov. 23 - Dec. 4) will include Seton Hall, Western Kentucky, UNC Greensboro, Winthrop, Arkansas-Little Rock, Duquesne, Southern Illinois and Prairie View A&M — and each of the participating teams finished with more than 20 wins last season, besides Prairie View A&M (which finished atop its conference but with 19 wins) and Southern Illinois (which finished with 16 wins).
The rest of Winthrop’s non-conference schedule hasn’t been released yet, Kelsey said.
“And the ones in December won’t be any easier,” Kelsey said. “So we gotta be ready. And I think the edge we’ve had in practice has prepared us for that.”
5. Miscellaneous storylines around the Big South that could impact Winthrop
▪ Longwood, which was picked to finish eighth in the conference’s preseason poll released Tuesday, will have a lot of talent to replace from last year’s team. But the young team has a lot of experience in redshirt junior point guard Juan Munoz — who’s entering into his fifth year in college and will take up the team’s leadership mantle this season.
Munoz opened up about his journey through two devastating, season-ending knee injuries in consecutive years on Tuesday morning: “It was way different from the first time just because I thought my rehab process the first time was the right way,” he said. “I thought I did everything right. I put in a lot of hours in the training room, on the court, just to get back healthy and to play. So it was really sad for me. I think the first three months of that (second) rehab process, I really didn’t attack it right just because I was in a different state of mind. I thought about giving up basketball as a whole. ... But I had the right people around me to help me stay focused on what I really wanted to do. And they all knew I loved to play basketball, so they all encouraged me to keep going.”
▪ Gardner-Webb is picked to finish fourth in the Big South, but head coach Tim Craft said the team’s Thanksgiving weekend schedule will give him a good idea of what to expect this season: Gardner-Webb opens play the night before Thanksgiving at Duke, plays at Florida State on Friday, then travels to Georgia for a Sunday contest.
“That’s three games in five days against teams from Power 5 conferences,” Craft said. “Our players want to play against the best in the country. When we’re driving back home from Athens to Boiling Springs, we’ll know a lot more about our team.”
Senior guard Jaheam Cornwall was named to the preseason all-Big South first team, and sophomore forward Kareem Reid was a second-team choice.
▪ Radford’s smooth, 2019-20 Big South Player of the Year guard in Carlik Jones transferred to Louisville this past offseason. The Highlanders come in at No. 6 on the Big South preseason poll.
▪ Former Johnson C. Smith standout and assistant coach Ed “Buck” Joyner Jr., in his 12th season as head coach at Hampton, said last year gives his young team something to aim for. In its first Big South campaign, the Pirates reached the tournament title game before falling to Winthrop. All but one of the starters from that squad is gone.
“This is the first time in my tenure that I have pretty much a whole new team,” said Joyner, nephew of current Johnson C. Smith coach Steve Joyner. “We’re a new team, but it gives our guys something to build toward. In basketball, you can walk into the conference tournament 0-29, but if you walk out 4-29, it’s a great season.”
Steve Lyttle contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 10, 2020 at 6:26 PM.
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