By Jerry Briggs
Special for The JB Replay
Over the next 72 hours, a college basketball oddity becomes a reality for the North Dakota Fighting Hawks and the UTSA Roadrunners.
The Fighting Hawks and Roadrunners men will play Friday night in San Antonio at the Convocation Center and then will turn around and play again Sunday afternoon in Grand Forks, N.D.
For UTSA coach Austin Claunch, it’ll be an experience that brings back memories of his first year in college coaching.
A dozen years ago, he worked on Paul Hewitt’s staff at George Mason University when the Patriots made the finals of the College Basketball Invitational. For the title, they faced off against the Santa Clara Gauchos in a best-of-three series.
The Gauchos won, two games to one, in a series spread out between the West and East coasts. Santa Clara won at home in California in Game 1, before George Mason rebounded two days later to take Game 2 in Fairfax, Va. Two days after that, playing in Fairfax again, the Gauchos beat the Patriots 80-77 for the championship.
“We went to Game 3 and I remember feeling, like, ‘Man, I don’t know how NBA teams do best of seven,’ ” Claunch said earlier this week. “It’s just insane. You feel like you watched the same personnel clips. You’re trying to find new things to talk to your team about. Back to back (games this weekend) won’t feel quite like that, but it’ll be a quick turnaround.”
Originally, North Dakota and UTSA were scheduled to play the first game of a home-and-home on Nov. 9 in San Antonio. But the game was called off, postponed in the wake of weather that prevented the Fighting Hawks from traveling through a flight connection in Denver.
Last week, the teams solidified the make-up for Friday night, the 13th, in San Antonio, which would be followed two days later by the game at Grand Forks. A game that had been on the books all along. So both teams, today, are preparing to see a lot of one another this weekend.
“When you’re playing a good team, you got to be locked in,” Claunch said Monday. “It’s going to be 80 minutes of really competitive basketball. This is a really important week of preparation, and right now we’re just worried about the first (game).
“We’re not worried about Sunday. We got to take care of home court this week and hopefully go 1-0 this week as we move into Sunday and hopefully start the (new) week off the right way.”
Records
North Dakota 4-6
UTSA 3-5
Coming up
UTSA at North Dakota, 2 p.m.
Notable
Two UTSA players to watch this weekend are guard Tai’Reon Joseph and forward Jaquan Scott. Two of the better athletes in the program, Joseph and Scott could spark the Roadrunners if they can find consistency. Joseph sat out the team’s first seven games with an eligibility issue and Scott missed three recently with a leg injury.
Joseph has shown in practices that he is one of the most explosive athletes on the team. A 6-foot-3 guard, the transfer from Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., is a player capable of leading the team in scoring on certain nights.
In his first game of the season last Saturday at Arkansas, he sparked the team in the first half with a steal and a breakaway dunk. He finished with four points, two rebounds and three steals in 21 minutes. Joseph struggled with his shot, hitting only two of six from the field and zero for two on 3-pointers.
Scott, a 6-foot-7 transfer from Mississippi State, exploded on Dec. 3 at Saint Mary’s for 14 rebounds off the bench. He had eight offensive boards against one of the best rebounding teams in the nation. Against Arkansas on Dec. 7, his playing time was limited to 16 minutes because of foul trouble, and he finished with only four rebounds.
Eye on North Dakota
North Dakota basketball dates back to the 1904-05 season. For most of their history they have played and made their name in NCAA Division II, notably in the 1960s under head coach Bill Fitch, who had an All-American center named Phil Jackson.
The program started its transition to Division I in 2008 and became a full-time member in 2012-13. Another transition came in the change of nicknames. The school elected to drop the Fighting Sioux nickname in 2011 and went without one until 2015, when they became the Fighting Hawks.
Another milestone was reached in 2017 when North Dakota reached the NCAA Division I tournament for the first time. Playing as a No. 15 seed, they played Arizona in Salt Lake City and lost 100-82. Currently the Hawks are in their seventh season in the Summit League and their sixth under Head Coach Paul Sather.
Treysen Eaglestaff (18.3 ppg), Mier Panoam (13.6, 5.4 rpg) and Amar Kuljuhovic (11.3, 6.8) rank as the Hawks’ top players. They lost 80-57 on Wednesday night at Utah Valley to open a stretch of three games in five days in three different cities.
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