GARRETT WAIT
Sports Editor
The basketball season has been such a rollercoaster ride this year for both the team and its fans that I don’t know what to think just yet. I was one who bought into the hype. This was supposed to be our year, the year we get back to the NCAA tournament and maybe even wreak some havoc on somebody’s brackets.
I guess that’s why they play the game.
Experts can tell us who will be good on paper, which teams have talent, which teams are supposed to have the players who have been in this type of position before and should have what it takes to bring a team to the great heights of college basketball.
But all the experts who were looking at our team were wrong. They’re still getting it wrong, actually. On ESPN.com this week, they were saying that Saint Mary’s is one of the top-five “bracket busters” because they play in a tough conference with Gonzaga and Pepperdine.
We shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as these two teams, at least not this season. Everything that a good, veteran basketball team like ours should do, we haven’t done.
Pepperdine players should be way more consistent than they are. It seems like we can’t get a solid performance out of more than two players in any given game. It seems like this team leans on Glen and Alex a little more than they should. Sure, they’re both great players, NBA-caliber players even, but they can’t do everything in every game.
Some of the things we can’t really help. It seems like the injury bug has bitten this team for three-straight years. My freshman year it was Devin Montgomery and Glen McGowan. Last year it was Jarrad Henry.
This year, Jesse Pinegar and Derick Grubb, both of whom would probably be starting, have gone down for significant stretches of time.
This team just seems too shell-shocked every time an important player has a bad game. We don’t have anybody who has stepped up in the past two games for McGowan, who apparently has lost all use of his hands and feet, which had been his best assets prior to the Santa Clara debacle.
I’m not sure what needs to be done, whether more shuffling of the line up will take care of the problem, or if I’m just underestimating the extent and damage these injuries in our frontcourt has done.
I haven’t quite given up on this year because anything can happen in the West Coast Conference tournament, but I’m not going to try to make the case that we should be picked as an at-large team for the tourney.
However, if things don’t start turning around, I’ll feel bad for the players, the coaches and the entire basketball staff. This was supposed to be a year of celebration for them; the year things finally came into place. Now they just have to avoid being embarrassed at home by Gonzaga and LMU.
I hope the season turns around. Hope is all we really have left. But just as Andy told Red at the end of “The Shawshank Redemption,” so I tell you all. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.
02-03-2005
