Sports

St. Peter’s returns to NCAA tournament

Stay in the moment, John Dunne reminded his St. Peter’s Peacocks. Problem was, the school, an NCAA tournament team just three times in its history, hadn’t enjoyed many moments.

Favored Iona, a team that already had beaten St. Peter’s twice and was threatening to come back and do it again, turned the final four minutes of Monday night’s MAAC title game into “a century,” according to senior guard Nick Leon. That’s long, and yet perhaps not as long as a 17-game losing streak had seemed during Dunne’s first season five years ago.

“I was really at peace through the whole [Iona] game, never nervous, but I do have to say in the last two minutes, you just hope the moment wasn’t going to get too big,” Dunne said.

But of course, 20-13 St. Peter’s gritty 62-57 victory was far bigger than any of its players (not a guy over 6-foot-8); larger than the 3,200 undergraduate enrollment; by far dwarfing the tiny third-floor paneled head-coaching office, where the most ostentatious decoration is Dunne’s daughter Chloe’s fingerpainting.

“We tell [recruits] if you are looking for a lot of green grass, this isn’t the place,” Dunne said. “We’re not trying to sell bells and whistles.

“If you want to be around quality people who can help you succeed on the court and more important, off the court, this is the place for you.

“We’re not going to use you to get wins, you want to use St. Peter’s to get an education. That’s probably not unlike what a lot of coaches say. I don’t know whether they mean it but I know we do.”

Still, just because college athletics are supposed to be only a means, doesn’t mean that four St. Peter’s seniors — three starters and the sixth man — didn’t enjoy an end of all endings. After inheriting little in the immediate aftermath of Keydren Clark, two times the leading scorer in Division I, Dunne has just seen his first recruiting class nail the school’s first NCAA berth since 1995.

These players, who this season have held opponents to the second-lowest field goal percentage in the nation (.374), won six games as freshmen, 11 as sophomores, and as emergent juniors suffered a devastating first-round MAAC tournament loss to Rider. So two regular-season losses to Iona, the second a blowout just two weeks ago in Jersey City, were not going to intimidate seniors Leon, tournament MVP Jeron Belin, Wesley Jenkins, Ryan Bacon and Jordan Kostner, not after the dues they had paid.

“We didn’t want a quick fix with transfers or JUCO transfers,” said Dunne, a first-time head coach coming from an assistantship at Seton Hall. “We wanted to build with freshmen and that’s tough because freshmen don’t know want it takes on a defensive level.

“When you’re losing, the easiest thing for these kids is to transfer. There are too many outside people in their head telling them to leave,” he said. “These guys stuck it out and their families deserve credit for that.