Winthrop has won despite enormous pressure. Now the stakes are even higher
Jayon Babb felt the pressure. How could he not?
On the nights in between Winthrop’s back-to-back conference games, the junior student manager for the men’s basketball team was up late with the rest of the coaching staff. He rarely got much sleep those nights, he told me in January. At the time, the stakes were high for an unbeaten Winthrop team that was starting to get national attention. Every game was a chance for the Eagles’ run to end.
Among Babb’s manager responsibilities, on those in-between-game evenings on the road: He would take blue tape and outline a full-sized court in the ballroom of the hotel Winthrop was staying in — so Winthrop coaches could visualize and run through the adjustments they wanted to make for Game Two of whatever series they were in.
“(Head coach Pat) Kelsey has always told the managers to tape down the courts, but the thing is, this year, I’m the only one who’s allowed to travel,” Babb said. He added, “If I forget to do something, or don’t do something, I feel like that could be the difference between winning and losing.”
In retrospect, so much of Winthrop’s season was defined by these high stakes. The Eagles, who play in the quarterfinals of the Big South tournament on Monday and are heavily favored to win it all, have prevailed through enormous pressure this year.
Consider that pressure for a moment.
Winthrop is in a one-bid league and is far and away the best team in it. Perhaps no Big South team in the conference’s young and modest history has drawn so much love and ire. That is, besides the Winthrop team of 2006-07 — the one that won the program’s only NCAA tournament game and, as The Herald’s former sports editor Gary McCann once put it, “wore a bull’s-eye as big as the Winthrop Coliseum.”
Consider that pressure further, though, so that you account for this year’s wildness: This team was born from a lost “opportunity of a lifetime” in 2020. It was asked to walk off the court — after winning the 2020 Big South tournament and earning its place in Spokane, Washington or Tampa Bay, Florida or wherever it was going to be sent to play in the NCAAs — and the only advice it was offered to assuage its disappointment was maddeningly simple to say and hard to do: “Win again.”
So, admirably but unsurprisingly, the Eagles started winning in 2020-21. (Well, continued winning, technically.) They picked up accolades and records and milestones, so many that watching and covering their rise felt like a redundant practice.
And yet, instead of seeing that pressure fade with every win, it intensified. The nation’s longest winning streak was thrown on the line. The stakes got higher: Instead of playing for a Big South regular season title and a favorable seed in the conference tournament, Winthrop had higher hopes to manage and a justifiable complacency to fight.
There was also this opportunity for relevance the program didn’t want to squander: Winthrop was vying for Associated Press Top 25 consideration, which could’ve provided a path toward earning an unprecedented at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. But Winthrop was also reaching for conversational relevance, too — something that, when you consider Winthrop’s business model being one that attracts and retains students, is invaluable.
(Again, amid all this, I remind you that the Eagles were running through a collection of back-to-back series — a gauntlet most successful Division I college basketball teams this year never knew, and one that hit the 11 Big South teams hard: There were 21 total series sweeps in conference play this year. Winthrop accounted for eight of them.)
When the Eagles lost, and watched UNC Asheville storm the Winthrop Coliseum in elation on Jan. 29, a lot of that pressure vanished — for real this time. The team was finally hit hard enough to get a proverbial chip on its shoulder. It could focus on itself. Later, even more pressure was shrugged off when, before the team stepped on the court against High Point (four games left on its schedule), Winthrop clinched the Big South regular season crown and the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament.
Finally, maybe, a break.
The respite is over now. We’re here. The lights are back on. Those back-to-back series are hopefully gone forever, but now one misstep could end all this team has done — knock it out of a trip to the NCAA tournament; out of the running for all the perks that come with said trip; out of receiving its due consideration as one of the best basketball teams the city of Rock Hill has ever seen.
The pressure one of Winthrop’s student managers referred to is back. It’s new but familiar. Brutal but thrilling. And now the stakes are even higher.
It’s a shame that what Winthrop has overcome to get here might be forgotten if it doesn’t finish the job next week.
Then again, perhaps it’s always been this way.
This story was originally published February 28, 2021 at 7:01 AM.
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