Houma Navigation Canal bridge to close
January 12, 2010
Hilda Guidry Curole
January 14, 2010
Nicholls State men’s basketball coach J.P. Piper has seen many things in his nearly 20 years as a high school and collegiate coach.
Piper has won a state championship at the high school level, coached a 20-win team on the collegiate level and has a Southland Conference Coach of the Year award under his belt.
But coming into this season, the Colonels’ sixth-year coach was facing an obstacle he hadn’t yet tackled – coaching a team that does not have any seniors.
“It’s been an interesting challenge for us,” Piper said. “We were pushing for leadership early and we finally decided that we, the coaches, were the leaders … Some of the things we were pushing our players to take a stance on, we’ve decided as coaches to say ‘Step aside, I’ve got this.’ As coaches, we’re going to be the leaders in those situations where we have to be.”
Piper said his staff has done well in providing guidance to the team’s youth-filled roster throughout the season, but it’s still his hope that the core of the team’s leadership will come among the players.
“We haven’t stopped trying to develop leadership within the team,” Piper said. “We really want to be able to back away and let those guys take control on their own. That is a lot more powerful than having a coach tell you how to handle certain situations.”
Finding that balance has not always been easy this season.
The Colonels started the season losers of their first eight games with only one of those games – Nicholls’ Nov. 27 loss to Washington State – being decided by less than double digits.
But a lot of those struggles had to do with a brutal non-conference schedule that saw the Colonels take on prominent programs like Oklahoma, Washington State, LSU and Houston.
The Colonels have since won four of their past five games with a softer schedule.
Junior forward Anatoly Bose said that schedule will help the team in its quest to win the Southland Conference Championship.
“It’s going to help us a lot,” he said. “We’ve played such hard teams; it gets you more prepared for when the games are more important.”
Piper agreed with Bose and said critics should judge the Colonels based on the quality of their opponents, not their overall record.
“Our record is not indicative of how good this team is,” he said. “What I share with our guys is that the other Southland teams haven’t played the schedule we have, so of course our record won’t be what theirs is. Had we played their schedule, we’d probably have won more games, too.”
The Colonels have currently played the 28th most difficult schedule in the country. No other Southland Conference team has played a schedule in the Top 100 and the next most difficult schedule inside the conference is Texas A&M-Corpus Christi’s, which ranks as the 184th most difficult in the nation.
That schedule should kick into high gear again this week when the Colonels play a pair of conference games against two of the league’s best opponents.
On Wednesday, the team will travel to take on the University of Texas-San Antonio. The Roadrunners currently hold a 10-3 record and hold wins against Iowa, UC-Irvine and Houston.
The Colonels should have revenge in mind in that game as it was the Roadrunners who knocked Nicholls out of the Southland Conference Tournament last March and ended their NCAA Tournament dreams.
The team will return home for the weekend and take on rival Stephen F. Austin at noon. The Colonels and Lumberjacks went back and forth last season and were the two top seeds in the Conference Tournament. But the Colonels’ semifinal loss didn’t allow a showdown between the teams in the finals and SFA eventually won the tournament and made the NCAA Tournament.
Sophomore guard Fred Hunter said the games on tap have the team again hungry to chase the Big Dance – a goal they fell two wins short of last season.
“We can’t focus on last year as much, because we’re in a new year,” he said. “But we’re really thinking about it in the back of our heads about how close we could have been to going to the NCAA Tournament. We’re just looking to get to that same spot this year.”
Nicholls junior forward Anatoly Bose attempts a free throw in the Colonels’ 69-58 loss against Miami (Ohio) on Nov. 21, 2009. Bose is the Colonels’ leading scorer and is expected to be relied on heavily when conference play begins Saturday. * Photo provided by NICHOLLS STATE UNIVERSITY
