The NCAA announced Sunday that the Hillsdale College Chargers will be the No. 1 seed in the Atlantic Region for the Division II Men’s Basketball Championship tournament. This marks the first time Hillsdale has been selected as No.1 in program history.
This year’s DII tournament field has been reduced from 64 to 48 teams due to COVID-19. The bracket is split up into eight regions made up of six teams each.
As the No. 1 seed in its region, Hillsdale earned a bye to the round of 32, and will await the winner of Mercyhurst University and Fairmont St. University on Sunday March 14, with a trip to the Sweet 16 hanging in the balance.
The team gathered at head coach John Tharp’s house on Sunday night to watch the selection show.
“I took their cell phones away at 9:15 p.m. on Sunday night with the idea that we were all together as our family.,” Tharp said. “To see our name come up as the one seed was cool. I’m proud of these guys and the work they’ve done.”
Sophomore forward Tavon Brown said that getting together was a great experience for the team.
“It was nice to be together and get our minds off of the loss,” Brown said. “It was good to be around each other and eat dinner together.”
The loss Brown mentioned came two days before Sunday’s selection show. The Chargers’ comeback attempt fell just short as they suffered their first loss since Jan. 2, falling to the Malone University Pioneers in the semifinals of the G-MAC tournament, 64-74.
“It was obviously tough, but that happens, not every game’s gonna go well,” sophomore forward Patrick Cartier said. “I can’t really point to one particular thing that we did wrong on Friday, I think it was a combination of a lot of different things. They punched us in the mouth. They were hitting a lot of shots and we weren’t.”
The Chargers trailed for much of the game, a unique situation for them this season. The lead was as large as 14 points in the second half, and sat at nine points with just under five minutes left to play.
That’s when Hillsdale really turned it on. Huge threes by senior guard Connor Hill and sophomore guard Cole Nau, and back-to-back buckets by Cartier, cut the lead to just one point as the clock dropped below two minutes to play. The Chargers, however, would not score for the remainder of the game, giving up a 9-0 run to end the game.
“We knew how talented they were, they’re very talented and they’ve been hot,” Tharp said. “They had a variety of guys that hurt us at different times throughout the game, and we self-inflicted some of those things on ourselves. We cut it to one with a couple minutes left, but I didn’t think our composure was good. I don’t think we handled ourselves quite the right way.”
Malone has now won 15 of its last 16 games, and is currently on a 10-game win streak. The team went on to beat Cedarville University in the G-MAC championship, earning an automatic bid to the national tournament.
“You’ve got to give Malone a lot of credit, they’ve really picked it up in the second half of the season,” Cartier said. “They’re gelling really good at the right time right now, obviously they went on to win the whole thing.”
Tharp said he sees the game as a possible learning opportunity as the team looks ahead to the March 14 game.
“We met Sunday afternoon to talk for a few minutes and to watch some film,” Tharp said. “They needed to see the bad of us, which is what we were on Friday, and we’re going to figure out if we’re going to get better because of it or not, I hope we get better because of it.”
Before the team made history with its tournament selection and was upset by Malone, it made even more history as the G-MAC regular season awards were announced.
Both Cartier and senior forward Austen Yarian made the All-Conference First Team. The fifth-year senior backcourt of Hill and Davis Larson both made All-Conference Second Team, and Brown was selected to the All-Defensive Team.
To top it all off, Cartier won G-MAC Player of the Year, and Tharp won G-MAC Coach of the Year.
“I think it was awesome just to see all of our guys get All-Conference awards,” Cartier said. “It was really cool and an awesome day for us. It’s just really a testament to all the work our whole team has put into this. I think everyone has done a great job filling their role and the coaches, week in and week out, have gotten us really prepared for our opponents, which has translated to a lot of Ws.”
The Coach of the Year award is Tharp’s second in a row, and he is the only coach in program history to win two conference COTY awards during his tenure at Hillsdale.
“I don’t flinch with that stuff to be honest with you,” Tharp said. “That type of award is something that’s really a team award, it’s a representation of what the whole team has done the entire year, since October. The players and assistant coaches make that award happen, I believe that.”
The team is in a unique situation in NCAA history. Unlike most years, with the reduced field, Hillsdale will have a bye for the first round, and won’t know its opponent until the night before the game.
“We’ve got to take care of figuring us out,” Tharp said. “It gives us time to get back to the basics and know where we’re at, that’s what our focus will be, it has to be about us and what we’re doing. We’ve already started to kind of look at these teams and figuring out the interesting things that they do, we’ve just got to get mentally tougher and physically tougher and focus on the things that we’ve got to get cleaned up.”
