McCormick: Winthrop party postponed

Almost two hours after High Point slipped past Winthrop for an 87-85 college basketball win Thursday night, the Panthers’ Millis Center home deck had been transformed by an army of college students into a dining hall.

Top-40 hits bumped over the speakers as the group cheerily laid out a floor lining, cranked the basketball goals up and out of the way, pushed the stands back and rolled out tables. The mood probably wouldn’t have been as lighthearted if High Point hadn’t survived two Winthrop shots at the rim in the last six seconds for an eighth straight home win against the Eagles.

More importantly, the Panthers’ victory forced a three-way tie for first place in the Big South Conference heading into Saturday’s regular season finales.

One of the Millis Center worker bees used a long hook to attach clusters of balloons to the rafters in advance of the admissions dinner the school was hosting Friday. Less than 120 minutes after High Point students rushed the court following the two Winthrop misses, the building still had the air of a party.

The Eagles’ party will have to wait.

A Winthrop victory would have clinched the school’s first outright Big South regular season title since 2006-07, the same year Gregg Marshall’s Eagles beat High Point 64-63, the program’s last win at the Millis Center. The Panthers students stormed onto the floor after Thursday night’s game as if they had just beaten Marshall’s 29-5 team from 2006-07, but credit to High Point staff for quickly roping off an alley for the visiting team to escape to its locker room.

“It was tough,” said Winthrop coach Pat Kelsey. “It was a tough locker room.

“I just told them, my hope is in a week and a half or so that we’re in a locker room that’s completely the opposite, but pointing back to this one. ‘That hurt, that hurt really bad,’ and we responded the right way.”

Winthrop has to do that Saturday on the road at Campbell. It’ll be an early look at the venue that will host next week’s conference tournament, and Saturday’s result will have an immense bearing on when and who the Eagles play at the spiffy Pope Convocation Center.

There are plenty of scenarios to parse through, but the most important objective for Kelsey’s team is to finish the regular season with a win against a Camels team that’s won four out of the last five to climb off the bottom of the league standings.

“We’re gonna prepare for a team that’s tough to prepare for in one day,” Kelsey said. “The challenge has been laid out for us. I’m interested to see how we attack it.”

Winthrop’s last six seconds against High Point Thursday night:

Before the attack, mental and physical rest and recovery was in order.

After Thursday night’s disappointment, Winthrop players, coaches and staff ate their customary Chipotle on the bus, then retreated to the Embassy Suites in downtown Winston-Salem. The players slept in until around 10 a.m. on Friday before the guys that saw the most playing time against High Point headed over to Wake Forest for ice baths and other athletic training treatment, Kelsey and assistant coach Mark Prosser drawing on their significant connections to the ACC school.

Winthrop’s basketball team will stay in Raleigh tonight, then head to Buies Creek - a town that isn’t blessed with extensive lodging options - Saturday ahead of the 2 p.m. tip-off.

Winthrop will have to show the same kind of resilience High Point embodied Thursday, especially after arguably the best player in its basketball history - John Brown - went down with a foot injury in the first half. He was having the kind of senior night - 19 of his team’s 38 points at the time of his injury - that was making for an easy assignment for the columnists writing about him seated on either side of me.

They were scrambling when Brown left the game suddenly, only returning to sit in the first seat on the Panthers’ bench behind a standing Cherry. But High Point dug deep and still won, a huge relief for coach Scott Cherry, whose team has struggled on the big stage. It’s a lesson the Eagles need to keep in mind against Campbell Saturday.

“We’ve faced adversity throughout the course of this season and every time these guys have responded,” Kelsey said while leaning against a cinder block wall after the game. “We were down 15 tonight in a tough environment, didn’t lay down, kept fighting and clawed back with a chance to win at the end, and that’s the advantage of no choice.”

How Winthrop men’s basketball responds to that no choice-situation in the next nine days will determine whether it’s the last ones dancing to top-40 hits on March 6 at the Pope Center, or again scurrying through a roped-off corridor to a hushed and defeated locker room.

This story was originally published February 26, 2016 at 1:24 PM with the headline "McCormick: Winthrop party postponed."