Series: Out of the Shadow, Part 1, Davis Takes Over Fractured Program

This was a four-part series about the tumultuous decade that followed Indiana’s termination of Bob Knight in 2000. It ran just before the 2010 season, commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the first post-Bob Knight team. This story takes the reader through the days after the firing through the 2002 Final Four.

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It was Indiana’s nuclear scenario. The worst outcome the school could conceive for its basketball program.

School administrators feared for years it would happen. Then-athletic director Clarence Doninger recognized that he was presiding over a powder keg, and he could only hope that a spark never got close enough to set it off. Bob Knight, the IU basketball coach, was brilliant and virtuous but also combustible, traits that combined to make him arguably the most polarizing figure in the history of collegiate sports.

Doninger knew if there were anything unpleasant about Knight’s eventual departure, the situation would get bloody. The administration, the boosters, and the fan base would split, causing a rift that would take years to mend.

Doninger’s fears were realized on Sept. 10, 2000, when Bob Knight was fired.

Series: Out of the Shadow, Part 2, Following a Legend

This was the second part of a four-part series about the tumultuous decade that followed Indiana’s termination of Bob Knight in 2000. It ran just before the 2010 season, commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the first post-Bob Knight team. This story takes the reader from the 2002 Final Four to the end of Mike Davis’s tenure.

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Mike Davis sometimes wonders if he should’ve quit while he was ahead, if the best thing for all parties involved would’ve been for him to make the 2002 national championship game his last as the Indiana basketball coach.

Four years after leaving Indiana, he’s still as unceasingly and sometimes painfully honest and introspective as he was while he was at IU. Now coaching at Alabama-Birmingham, which is home for him in terms of both its location and level of scrutiny, he remembers his time as the Hoosiers’ coach fondly. However, he also remembers it as something he would be much better prepared for now than he was then, when every day was on-the-job training.

Series: Out of the Shadow, Part 3, A Shortsighted Hire

This was the third part of a four-part series about the tumultuous decade that followed Indiana’s termination of Bob Knight in 2000. It ran just before the 2010 season, commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the first post-Bob Knight team. This piece focuses on the Kelvin Sampson era

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Even four years after his part in the most devastating hire in the history of Indiana basketball, Rick Greenspan doesn’t want to say much about it.

Now in his first year as the athletic director at Rice, the former IU athletic director talks at length about the Mike Davis era and some of the administrative issues surrounding the athletic department during his tenure. But he’s still tight-lipped about how Kelvin Sampson came to be the head basketball coach at Indiana.

At first, he doesn’t so much as speak Sampson’s name.

Series: Out of the Shadow, Part 4, Return to Glory

This was the fourth part of a four-part series about the tumultuous decade that followed Indiana’s termination of Bob Knight in 2000. It ran just before the 2010 season, commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the first post-Bob Knight team.

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Tom Crean gets it. That’s what they all say.

The history. The tradition. The importance of recruiting in-state. The academic expectations. The integrity of the program. He understands what Indiana is and what it wants to be. He isn’t “one of its own,” which Mike Davis prophesied would be necessary for IU to heal itself, but he gets the point of Indiana, he knows how to sell it, and he doesn’t carry any baggage with him.

That and the fact that he’s been to a Final Four and coached one of the best players on the planet give IU’s administration reason to believe it has found the man to end its decade of discontent.

Series: The Rise, The Fall, The Rebirth? Part 1: The Day JMU Basketball Changed

This was the first part of a six-part series detailing the rise and fall of the James Madison basketball program. It won first place in the Virginia Press Association for sports news story and third place in the United States Basketball Writers Association Writing Contest in the Investigative/Enterprise Category. This is the introductory piece.

HARRISONBURG – No one saw it coming. Certainly not Lefty Driesell .

The celebrated James Madison University basketball coach was driving with his wife, Joyce, to their vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del. It was March 5, 1997, just two days after his Dukes had lost an overtime heartbreaker to Old Dominion in the Colonial Athletic Association championship game.

Driesell had already received oral commitments for both of JMU’s available scholarships and, with nothing pressing on his schedule, the 66-year-old Tidewater native was looking forward to some hard-earned time off.

But that was when the call came. The one that changed everything.

Series: The Rise, The Fall, The Rebirth? Part 2: Thanks to Lou, Pressure Built

This was the first part of a six-part series detailing the rise and fall of the James Madison basketball program. It won first place in the Virginia Press Association for sports news story and third place in the United States Basketball Writers Association Writing Contest in the Investigative/Enterprise Category. This is Part 2, which focuses on the Lou Campanelli years.

 

HARRISONBURG – Twelve years. That’s all it took for the James Madison men’s basketball program to go from baby to bracket buster.

In 1969, Madison College’s club squad was awarded varsity status and, by 1981, JMU was celebrating mid-major euphoria, winning a first-round NCAA Tournament game with an upset of a big-league opponent. It became a trend, with the Dukes pulling off stunners the next two years, too.

There were no real setbacks. No suffering. Just a meteoric rise from virtual non-existence to national recognition and respectability.

JM-Who, indeed.

Series: The Rise, The Fall, The Rebirth?, Part 3: JMU, Lefty, A Soured Romance

This was the first part of a six-part series detailing the rise and fall of the James Madison basketball program. It won first place in the Virginia Press Association for sports news story and third place in the United States Basketball Writers Association Writing Contest in the Investigative/Enterprise Category. This story is about the Lefty Driesell years and his somewhat surprising departure.

HARRISONBURG – Lefty Driesell swears that all is forgiven, that ending up at Georgia State was the best thing that could have happened to him and that he doesn’t hold any grudges for being fired by James Madison University in 1997 on the cusp of his 700th career victory.

But when initially asked this summer to comment on his nine-year tenure at JMU, his words betrayed at least a small bruise.

Series: The Rise, The Fall, The Rebirth? Part 4: Changing World Changes Dukes

This was the first part of a six-part series detailing the rise and fall of the James Madison basketball program. It won first place in the Virginia Press Association for sports news story and third place in the United States Basketball Writers Association Writing Contest in the Investigative/Enterprise Category. This part is about the changes in the college basketball landscape since the Lou Campanelli years.

 

HARRISONBURG – With Lefty Driesell , James Madison didn’t have to worry about finding a niche in the changing recruiting landscape. It didn’t really matter that the school was nearly two hours from a major city or that the nearest beach was four hours distant or that the area’s black population was tiny, all detriments to recruiting. Neither did it really matter that JMU’s home base was largely barren of Division I basketball talent.

“His personality,” former JMU president Ronald E. Carrier said, “was big enough to overcome all of that.”

Series: The Rise, The Fall, The Rebirth? Part 5: A Hero’s Unsuccessful Return

This was the first part of a six-part series detailing the rise and fall of the James Madison basketball program. It won first place in the Virginia Press Association for sports news story and third place in the United States Basketball Writers Association Writing Contest in the Investigative/Enterprise Category. This part is about the Sherman Dillard years and the program’s downfall.

 

HARRISONBURG – Put yourself behind former James Madison president Ronald E. Carrier’s desk in 1997 when Sherman Dillard came to interview for the school’s men’s basketball coaching job.

Dillard was intelligent, articulate, ambitious and dressed impeccably, exactly what an applicant for any job is supposed to be.

And his resume was strong. Although his record in three years at Indiana State was shaky (29-52), he inherited a program that was 4-24 the year before he arrived at Terre Haute, and the Sycamores improved every season during his tenure there.

Series: The Rise, The Fall, The Rebirth? Part 6: Lots of Losses, But Still Hope

This was the first part of a six-part series detailing the rise and fall of the James Madison basketball program. It won first place in the Virginia Press Association for sports news story and third place in the United States Basketball Writers Association Writing Contest in the Investigative/Enterprise Category. This part is about the Dean Keener era, which was heading into its second year at the time. Keener would later resign, apparently under pressure, just before the end of his fourth season.

HARRISONBURG – He’s 11-45 and he’s never won more than three conference games in a season. He’s produced two of the three worst seasons in James Madison basketball history, and his teams have never come close to advancing past the first day of the Colonial Athletic Association tournament.

Yet, that hasn’t cost Dean Keener any points with the people who built JMU basketball or with those who oversee it now. He’s impressed the program’s storied coaches, Lou Campanelli and Lefty Driesell , as well as current and past administrators.