Across campus the sentiment about men’s basketball is, let’s just say; baffling. People are asking what is happening? We’ve never had a season like this?
Basketball success is relatively new for the men since they went to the NCAA Tournament in 1992 under Alan LeForce.The Bucs went on a 10-year drought that saw no NCAA appearances and sunk to a low fifth place finish in four of those 10 years.
Take a closer look and see that ETSU did not start winning again until the 2000-01 season under former coach Ed DeChellis.
That season the Bucs headed to play Wake Forest in the NCAA Tournament in Tampa, Fla., following a 20-11 overall record, five of those losses came in the Southern Conference.
Go even further back and one will notice in DeChellis’ first season ETSU was only 7-20 and went 11-16 the next season. ETSU didn’t have a Tim Smith during those listless seasons.
With a guard like Smith how can anyone ever count the Bucs out? Forget his 4-of-18 shooting against Central Michigan and remember he is still second in scoring in the SoCon.
Last year’s banner season for ETSU was not all Smith all the time. In the season opener at Houston he was 2-of-11 with 13 points. Smith was 4-of-10 in ETSU’s win on UNC-Wilmington in their fourth game. Game 5 2-of-9, Game 6 4-of-7 and in their seventh game last year at Clemson Smith was only 2-of-16 with 10 points.
In fact, Smith did not really get going until around February, near the end of the season. Fans just did not notice because we had other players to take up the slack.
He misses a lot of shots, but he is improved even over last year’s totals — not by much but it’s something counting the departure of two key seniors. In the Bucs’ first seven games last season he definitely was not averaging more than 17 points per game.
A friend of mine and I were remembering the 2003 SoCon Tournament. The whole campus barely knew ETSU played basketball until the SoCon Championship.
“They didn’t have that great of a season and no really came to the games,” said Kari Ratliff an ETSU basketball fan. “All of the sudden they were in the finals of the SoCon Tournament and everyone took notice. That first year was a total surprise. That season didn’t look great in the beginning either.”
Really the test does not start for the Bucs until they head to Appalachian State for their second SoCon game Jan. 5. From that date on ETSU will be playing an all SoCon schedule with the exception of Bracket Buster Saturday Feb. 19.
The scores do not give the tale of the tape. Our last two losses have been close and if ETSU could get the imaginary lid off the basket, we might win.
“The final score does not tell us anything about the way the game went,” Ratliff said. “The truth is that we are not that bad. I’m impressed with Dillion Sneed. He seems to be one of the most versatile on the team.

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