MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Jim Matson]

It's not gonna happen this year, Ypsi!

Somebody at work was asking me about Wesleyan the other day.  It seems that quite a few people are aware that even though it was an exhibition game, playing Illinois tough was proof that Wesleyan is the rare "real deal."  Though I wasn't sure that I liked the fact that I ended up telling this guy how good the Titans are and what they really could accomplish this year...was I acting like a Wesleyan fan?  Ouch! Kinda like when George realized that he was actually shaking Potter's hand...

[cardinalpride]

As Q stated, the kids keep me busy (12 year old daughter, 19 month old son, and another daughter due 2/14), but I manage to keep up with the board.  Not much need for me to post when Q puts everything on here that is relevant and Mr. Ypsi puts everything on here that is irrelevant  in regards to the Titans.  I took the summer off due to frustration with the Titan loss to Hanover.  It made me wonder if this senior class would reach the level that Titan fans hoped they would.  I think they have, but only a trip to Salem can confirm that.  Merry Christmas to everyone.

Good to know that I can fill a vital role for you - otherwise you'd be forced to come on and post some of the irrelevant stuff!

IF the Titans can get by both Hanover and Puget Sound, I'm CAUTIOUSLY optimistic they really CAN run the table.  I realize that is NEARLY impossible to do in the CCIW, but I've raised my odds to 25% chance.  IF that happens, we can then discuss how they rank among the all-time great teams (e.g., the NP champions or the Jack Sikma teams), but that is a LONG way into the future.

The Hanover loss WAS one of the most devastating losses ever - I really thought there would be an IWU-UWSP showdown for the 'title' (even if it would come before Salem).  At least it wasn't a loss to an unworthy team.

Gentlemen, I predict North Central will upset IWU at their place!  Bringing back memories of 1990 when the great Robert Brown, Mike Roy, Alonzo Alexander, Mike Patterson, and Daryl Thompson roamed the Cardinal campus!!  That was the last year NCC was in the big dance and IWU returned the favor at our place after we blew a 10-0 lead to start the game!  Those were the good ole days!!!

CP

[Mr. Ypsi]

Jim,

Since I still only have it up to 25% , I know it is unlikely to happen, but I think it is more likely to happen than in any recent year.

Generally, you can focus on one or two players.  IWU has two first-team All Americans (Dauksas and Amelianovich) - but (watch out!) I'm not certain they will even end up the two best players on this team!  Freeman and Jones may be competing for CCIW POY by the end of the year.

This team may not have a Horace Jenkins or a Jack Sikma, but they MAY end up with people asking whether they are better than the perennial champion NPU teams, or the Jack Sikma teams - but that is MANY weeks into the future.

One thing that I DO know about this team - you can go down to #8 or #9 and barely lose a thing.  They are DEEP!

[Gregory Sager]

And Sager and Prikkel are having their traditional and festive "I bleed more North Park blue and gold than you do," tiff.  Awwwww, how cute!

Joe, you know what I stickler I am for tradition.

Incidentally, with regard to the CCIW Chat topic du jour, it should be footnoted to Dennis's story about North Park's '69 CCIW championship team that the legal drinking age in Illinois back then was 18. Never let it be said that those lads, now family men and captains of industry all, broke the law or that "the Chief" aided and abetted criminal behavior. 

Not much need for me to post when Q puts everything on here that is relevant and Mr. Ypsi puts everything on here that is irrelevant

Heh. Hey, Chuck, isn't it nice to know you have a role to play this year for IW?

Gentlemen, I predict North Central will upset IWU at their place! Bringing back memories of 1990 when the great Robert Brown, Mike Roy, Alonzo Alexander, Mike Patterson, and Daryl Thompson roamed the Cardinal campus!! That was the last year NCC was in the big dance and IWU returned the favor at our place after we blew a 10-0 lead to start the game! Those were the good ole days!!!

That was a great team, cardinalpride. It would've been an even better one if the Rochford kid (Pat or Pete; I can never keep straight which one went to North Central and which one went to Wesleyan, although the Wesleyan kid was a scrub and the North Central kid was a star in the making) hadn't blown out his knee against North Park in the crackerbox. I think it happened either that year or the year previous, but I don't think he ever played in another game.

I almost posted about that Cardinals team last week when it was rumored that Anthony Simmons had left school. It immediately reminded me that Mike Patterson (who was All-CCIW as a freshman and would've owned the league had he stayed at North Central), Alonzo Alexander, and Daryl Thomas were all simultaneously put on academic probation early in the '90-'91 season, stopping Bill Warden's juggernaut dead in its tracks as they went from 15-1 in '90 to 4-12 in '91. Even though Alexander and Thomas regained their eligibility (and Alexander would go on to win the CCIW's MOP award in '92), the Cards were never the same again.

[Gregory Sager]

Below is a link found in the Chicago Sun Times about Rick Harrigan.  He has come a long way since leaving Brother Rice overcoming many obsticles.  Its the story that people enjoy reading about other athletes.  Here is the link 

http://www.suntimes.com/output/campus/cst-spt-small15.html

Scroll down to the bottom factoid in that "Small College Notes" composite article that leads off with the story about Harrigan. The Chuck Martin who coached Grand Valley State to the D2 national championship in football this fall is the same Chuck Martin who used to be a starting guard for Millikin's basketball team in the late eighties. The reason why I remember Martin so well is because he was an incredibly hairy-legged individual, and one year when Jimmy Millikin was paying its annual visit to the crackerbox certain North Park fans -- whose names I will keep to myself and take with me to the grave -- would reach out and pluck hairs from the back of his legs when he'd inbound the ball. He'd turn around and look, but never caught anyone in the act.

This team may not have a Horace Jenkins or a Jack Sikma, but they MAY end up with people asking whether they are better than the perennial champion NPU teams, or the Jack Sikma teams - but that is MANY weeks into the future.

Sweet fancy Moses, Chuck. Remind me again how many times you saw any of the North Park national championship teams, or the Sikma Wesleyan teams. I must be getting it wrong, because I seem to remember that number being zero.

There is a new thread under Midwest Region. It was started by the Carthage SID. Apparently Carthage assistant coach Earl Trice died on Dec. 13 following a lengthy illness.

Although I didn't know the man, my thoughts and prayers go out to his family.

Thanks for pointing this out, Mugsy. I only had a few conversations with Earl, but he seemed like a terrific guy. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and to the Carthage community as well.

[cardinalpride]

That was a great team, cardinalpride. It would've been an even better one if the Rochford kid (Pat or Pete; I can never keep straight which one went to North Central and which one went to Wesleyan, although the Wesleyan kid was a scrub and the North Central kid was a star in the making) hadn't blown out his knee against North Park in the crackerbox. I think it happened either that year or the year previous, but I don't think he ever played in another game.

I almost posted about that Cardinals team last week when it was rumored that Anthony Simmons had left school. It immediately reminded me that Mike Patterson (who was All-CCIW as a freshman and would've owned the league had he stayed at North Central), Alonzo Alexander, and Daryl Thomas were all simultaneously put on academic probation early in the '90-'91 season, stopping Bill Warden's juggernaut dead in its tracks as they went from 15-1 in '90 to 4-12 in '91. Even though Alexander and Thomas regained their eligibility (and Alexander would go on to win the CCIW's MOP award in '92), the Cards were never the same again.

[/i]

GS, You're correct it's Pete Rochford.  If I'm not mistaken, that game at the "Park" was the lone conference game NC lost that year!  Pete never played basketball again for NCC.  He did have a promising career ahead of him.  Mike Patterson still holds the single game rebound record for NCC at 25.  He set that record in his freshman year.  As good as the individual talent is on this year's IWU team, man for man, I believe that '90 NCC team was better!  Probably even without Pete. 

It would have been a shame if Simmons were ineligible because he has a chance to be one of the top 4 or 5 post players to ever play at North Central.  That would include Mike McFadden, Dave Oberwise, and etc...I don't remember the center that played just before Mcfadden.  His name escapes me.  Help me out Greg...

CP

[Gregory Sager]

GS, You're correct it's Pete Rochford.  If I'm not mistaken, that game at the "Park" was the lone conference game NC lost that year!  Pete never played basketball again for NCC.  He did have a promising career ahead of him.  Mike Patterson still holds the single game rebound record for NCC at 25.  He set that record in his freshman year.  As good as the individual talent is on this year's IWU team, man for man, I believe that '90 NCC team was better!  Probably even without Pete.

That certainly was an amazingly-talented team, cp. Pete Rochford was one of the half-dozen or so best freshmen guards I've ever seen in the CCIW. He would've been a superstar, too.

It would have been a shame if Simmons were ineligible because he has a chance to be one of the top 4 or 5 post players to ever play at North Central. That would include Mike McFadden, Dave Oberwise, and etc...I don't remember the center that played just before Mcfadden. His name escapes me. Help me out Greg...

The year before McFadden showed up at the airplane hangar was my freshman year at the Park. North Central went 0-16 in the league that season. Probably best to forget everything about that team, cp.  But is Chuck Malm the player whom you're trying to remember? I don't know what position he played, but he's the only player from that era who makes an appearance in the Cardinals record book. He averaged 21.1 ppg for a team that went 2-24 on the season. He must've been a heckuva player, because I would imagine that he was the only Cardinal that opponents ever worried about.

If you're remembering great Cardinals post players of yore, you have to include Mike Bohannon on that list. He only played one season for North Central, 1986-87, but he was phenomenal. He was a kid from the western suburbs who got a scholie to play for D2 MSU-Mankato as a junior after two seasons at a juco. He hurt his knee, ended up with next to no playing time for the Mavericks, and came back home in disgust. A year later he walked into Bill Warden's office on a lark, and the next thing you know he's eating up opponents in the paint for the Cardinals -- including a monster game in the hangar in which the Cards handed North Park one of only two CCIW defeats they suffered in a season in which they went on to win the national title.

Towards the end of the year it was North Central's turn to visit North Park. The Chicago Tribune printed a big human-interest story on the front page of the sports section about Bohannon and his myriad travels. In it, Bohannon mentioned the fact that he was really gunning to play North Park again, not just because the Vikings were in first place a game ahead of the Cards but because his former coach and nemesis at MSU-Mankato, Dan McCarrell, used to coach at North Park. He hated McCarrell, and he used the fact that "the Chief" was linked to the Park as further motivation. He also was quoted in the story about how he was enjoying his last year of college, because he knew he'd have to graduate soon and go to work to support his infant son, Dustin.

Well, I guess I don't have to tell you that this newspaper article made the rounds on the North Park campus. On the night of the game, I watched Bohannon and the rest of the Cards enter the crackerbox an hour before game time to find about ten or twelve anti-Bohannon posters on the walls. They walked around the gym and read every one of them, laughing the whole time. During the game the NPC students were merciless. They rode Bohannon like a show pony. At one point someone in the student section held up a doll on the end of a stick, and all the students chanted, "We've got Dustin! We've got Dustin!" What the Parkers were doing to Bohannon was absolutely savage.

And Bohannon scored about 27 points and pulled down about 12 rebounds. North Park won the game, but Mike Bohannon forever earned my respect that night. He was the Luke Moo of his day. The more you rode him, the better he played.

[cardinalpride]

If you're remembering great Cardinals post players of yore, you have to include Mike Bohannon on that list. He only played one season for North Central, 1986-87, but he was phenomenal.

GS, I knew you would come through.  Bohannon is whom I speak of.  I forgot Mcfadden graduated before Bohannon got to campus.  I believe it was 84 or 85.  Obviously, I wasn't there to see those battles between the Park and NCC during their mid to late eighties, but I hear many of them were classics.  Who was NP biggest rival during those days?  Was it NCC, IWU, Augie...?

CP

[Gregory Sager]

The Park's biggest rival back then was Wheaton. Didn't matter that Wheaton, with a couple of exceptions, really didn't have good basketball teams at all from the time that they re-entered the league in the late sixties to the arrival of Bill Harris on campus in the early nineties. Nor did it matter that Wheaton was completely indifferent to North Park's collective animosity, or to basketball itself for that matter for most of the years I've been around. (It's a soccer school, and don't let Mugsy or Diehardfan tell you any different. If the Park keeps beating the Wheaties on the soccer pitch the way that they have over the past two autumns, our evangelical brethren in DuPage County will finally come around to reciprocating our ill will.)

It's been implicitly understood by all Parkers for generations that Wheaton was and is the ultimate despised enemy. North Park students got more revved up for Wheaton's arrival on campus than for any other CCIW team throughout the eighties and nineties, and they would go to the game at Wheaton en masse. In fact, for decades NPC students used to eat in the Wheaton dining hall before that game, and when I was there the unspoken rule was that you had to wear North Park clothing ... and you weren't supposed to use silverware, just to gross out Wheatie co-eds. You should've seen what happened the year that my brother's classmates pulled a Bluto Blutarsky and started popping scraps into their mouths from the discarded food trays on the carts that were waiting to go back to the dishroom. You could've heard the Wheaton girls' "EEEEEEWWW!"s all the way from the Billy Graham Center.

(I somehow doubt that it's a coincidence that, with the new CCIW tourney having pushed up the league calendar to include two weeks' worth of games in which most of the schools are on semester break, Harris has chosen to schedule his team's home game against NPU during those two weeks. Even as awful as the Vikings have been in recent years, I don't think he has enjoyed seeing so many Carlson Crazies polluting his gym with their presence.  )

Wheaton will always be NPU's biggest rival ... right up until the day when the Lord returns and asks the Wheaties why they picked the wrong school. 

The rivalry with Augie was very intense during the years they were coached by Mr. Exciteable, Jim Borcherding, right up to the mid-eighties. I think I've written about that in here before, with the assorted troubles the Park had with various Augie frat guys who would show up in our gym a bit overserved in the alcohol department. That tended to die out when Borcherding left, because their program nosedived and wasn't resuscitated until the Anderson/Cooper/Thompson teams of the early nineties. And even those teams didn't get good road support. But those late-seventies, early-eighties Augie teams did get great road support ... and they were outstanding, some of the best D3 teams I've ever seen, in fact. One of them, the '81 team, came within a hairsbreadth of winning the D3 national title, losing to Potsdam State in OT (and the loss came in the Carver Center, making it a doubly galling defeat for the Doggies). Augie was always a special grudge match for the older Park alumni, since many of them had finished their educations at Augie after attending NPJC (North Park became a four-year school in 1958). The march of years, the decline of Augie road support, and the growing irrelevance of the Swedish-American tradition on both campuses, took a lot of the juice out of the rivalry by the time the Augie program got good again under Steve Yount in the early nineties.

The rivalry with Wesleyan had that same intensity, but it was sustained longer. For fifteen straight years, like clockwork the Park won in the crackerbox and Wesleyan won at Fred Young. The only exceptions were 1980, when the Park swept the series, and 1981 and 1990, when the two teams won in each others' gyms. The two times that they faced off in the NCAAs, 1987 and 1990, the host team won (North Park in '87, Wesleyan in '90). The games were always a great contrast in styles; McCarrell/Djurickovic and Bridges had a lot of mutual respect, but their approaches to building teams and to coaching were very different.

The rivalry with North Central was shorter -- there was less than a decade's overlap in which both programs were annual contenders -- but it had a sharper edge than either the Augie or Wesleyan rivalries. The only brawl I've ever seen in a CCIW gym took place at the end of a game between fans of the Vikings and the Cards in the hangar in the mid-eighties. The police had to clear the gym.

But nothing tops Wheaton as far as NPU rivalries are concerned. As I said a couple of years ago, I was walking across the NPU footbridge over the North Branch of the Chicago River on the first day of freshman orientation (on my way to Charcoal Delights, of course!), and I saw that someone had put a sign on the bridge that read, "THANK YOU FOR NOT CHOOSING WHEATON". It was a joke, but it was not a joke, if you catch my drift.

And just think ... if I had picked Wheaton over North Park as my college choice (as I almost did) I not only would've been Hiker Jim's classmate, I would've likely had no knowledge at all that North Park people even cared about Wheaton. 

[CardinalAlum]

If you're remembering great Cardinals post players of yore, you have to include Mike Bohannon on that list. He only played one season for North Central, 1986-87, but he was phenomenal.

GS, I knew you would come through.  Bohannon is whom I speak of.  I forgot Mcfadden graduated before Bohannon got to campus.  I believe it was 84 or 85.  Obviously, I wasn't there to see those battles between the Park and NCC during their mid to late eighties, but I hear many of them were classics.  Who was NP biggest rival during those days?  Was it NCC, IWU, Augie...?

CP

I was fortunate enough to be around for the Bohannon team and the very strong 89 and 90 teams.  I remember an all out brawl almost broke out after one game against North Park.

CP,

You left Drew Hunter out of your post when talking about the great NCC team of 1990.  He could do it all.  Daryl Thomas was incredibly overrated.  He tried hard but couldn't catch a pass to save his life and couldn't shoot anything outside of 3 feet!

[tjcummingsfan]

Greg, I think we may be one conference championship in soccer away from firing the Wheaties up to near our level (because lets be honest they will never quite get there, not after decades of onesidedness).  If North Park is able to take Coach Bean's final shot at a conference championship away from him I imagine Wheaton fans will not be too thrilled with the Park.

[martin]

GS - I believe you made a slight error on the drinking age in Illinois back in the 60's and 70's (and maybe into the 80's - not sure when it was changed).  Surrounding states like Wisconsin and Michigan had a drinking age of 18.  Illinois was 19 for beer and wine, 21 for hard liquor.  If I remember correctly, no one checked id's very closely, if at all, back then.  I heard that some of my high school classmates (in Michigan) went into bars when they were 16 or so.  Not that I would have any first hand knowledge of such activity.

When I got to college, all of the sudden it was up to 19 for beer.  But no one at Jimmy's really checked - or so I heard.

[Jim Matson]

Greg, great post!  I feel like printing it out and bringing to the in-law Christmas Eve bash...

[Warren Thompson]

Is this a fabricated thing, based primarily on athletics? Or does it go deeper?

Does it have to do with academics? Theology? Evangelical feelings of "moral superiority" (for want of a better term) in one venue v. the other?

Does NPU begrudge Wheaton as Billy Graham's alma mater? Does Wheaton sulk because of NPU's several NCAA basketball championships?

Someone kindly clarify, please ....

[Titan Q]

I think that is the first time I've seen the term "penis envy" used on the Chat.  Interesting.