BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) -Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim didn’t hesitate: Orange center Arinze Onuaku won’t play Friday night against Vermont in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
“He’s still very sore,” Boeheim said Thursday. “He’s getting better. He’s being treated. He’s still got pain when he puts pressure on his leg, so we’ve been practicing and playing and thinking that he would not be able to play tomorrow night. Beyond that, we still don’t know.”
Onuaku crashed to the floor with an injured right quadriceps last week in the waning minutes against Georgetown in the quarterfinals of the Big East tournament.
“The hardest thing is this is my senior year, this is my team,” said Onuaku, the school’s career leader in field-goal percentage (64.9) who averages 10.7 points and 5.2 rebounds. “To not be on the floor with them is tough.”
Onuaku said he is without pain and the swelling has gone down. It was apparent when he walked courtside during the team shootaround at HSBC Arena, laughing and joking with assistant coach Rob Murphy after signing some autographs.
nce is going to carry us,” said forward Wes Johnson, the Big East player of the year. “Him being on the sideline and being the leader is going to help us. If we keep winning, he’ll eventually get back.”
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STAYING POWER: DePaul, Seton Hall and Iowa are already hiring, and a few other schools are sure to be in the market for a new coach in the coming weeks, too.
One guy they can forget about calling? Oakland coach Greg Kampe.
In a profession where a five-year stop is practically a lifetime, Kampe is in his 26th season at the school in Rochester, Mich., a suburb of Detroit. Only four other active coaches have longer tenures.
“It really comes back down to the grass is always greener on the other side,” Kampe said Thursday in Milwaukee, where his 14th-seeded Golden Grizzlies were preparing to play third-seeded Pittsburgh in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
“I come from Defiance, Ohio – little town. My dad put fertilizer on his yard and he tried to make it as green as he could make it,” Kampe said. “This is my job; not to chase other jobs, but to do my job as best I can. And I really view that my job is to make Oakland a special place.”
Kampe would be an attractive candidate to many schools. He’s won 58 percent of his games (445-322) at Oakland, which moved to Division I in 1999, and has eight 20-win seasons. Oakland’s 26 wins this season are a school record.
s their second appearance in the NCAA tournament; they won the opening-round game in 2005 before losing to top-seeded North Carolina.
“When I’m done with this thing, I hope that people think it’s a special place that kids want to go there,” the 54-year-old coach said. “And we won a lot of games and we won them in the right way with good people and with good kids.”
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BIG RED JOKE: Those Cornell guys are smart. Funny, too.
Guard Louis Dale, center Jeff Foote and forward Jon Jaques were hamming it up before their news conference Thursday and agreed that whoever took the first question would give an answer so far off base that everyone in the room would question their Ivy League schooling.
It worked.
The opening question was about balancing education and basketball, and the response?
“Well, we had a tremendous ride in. The police escort was fun. I think we’re a very good team, a very capable team. It’s really anybody’s game,” Foote said.
The trio smiled through their little prank as they received some puzzled looks from the audience. Dale didn’t let the joke linger, though. He jumped in just as Foote finished and got the session back on course.
“I’ll just cover for Jeff real quick,” he said. “I think we find a way to balance it out pretty well, just time management, focusing on that.”
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oaches is well represented in Jacksonville, Fla., where Temple’s Fran Dunphy, Cornell’s Steve Donahue and Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan are leading three of the eight teams.
“What we should probably tell the audience is anybody from Philly that sits in the stands thinks they’re a coach,” Ryan said. “Have you ever met anybody from the area that didn’t think they could coach?”
Dunphy and Donahue, close friends who worked together at Penn before winding up at their current schools, said it’s difficult to avoid falling in love with college basketball while growing up in a city that’s produced so many successful coaches.
“I feel great pride that I’m in that group. You can’t give me a better compliment than to say I’m a Philadelphia guy who came from Philadelphia and coached the way they coach, whatever that is,” Donahue said.
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BIG SKY TOURNAMENT: There’s a large subset of coaches with University of Montana connections in the first round of the NCAA tournament:
– The Grizzlies, coached by former player Wayne Tinkle, play New Mexico.
– Old Dominion, led by former Montana coach Blaine Taylor, beat Notre Dame.
– California, led by former Grizzlies coach Mike Montgomery, meets Louisville.
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has led the Spartans into the tournament. Michigan State and Utah State are both playing in Spokane, where Heathcote now lives.
“Jud Heathcote is the godfather of what has been going through Montana,” Morrill said. “I heard from all those guys this weekend, including Jud, who calls and gives me grief.”
Morrill is taking another path down memory lane in Spokane. He played for two years at Gonzaga, and was an assistant coach there, but doesn’t expect any transfer of loyalty.
“I’m too old, they don’t remember me,” Morrill said of the Bulldog fans.
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EMBARRASSING NICKNAME: Utah State guard Pooh Williams got a little embarrassed when asked about his unusual name. The product of Federal Way, Wash., is formally known as Earnest, but even his mother doesn’t call him that.
“I had caramel skin color and was real, real fat,” Williams said, when pressed for an explanation on Thursday. “She used to call me her pooh bear and it stuck with me and a lot of guys teased me about it.”
Williams has averaged 8.8 points for the Aggies this season.
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AP Sports Writers Nancy Armour in Milwaukee, Colin Fly in Milwaukee, Fred Goodall in Jacksonville, Fla., Mark Long in Jacksonville, Fla., and John Wawrow in Buffalo, N.Y., and Associated Press Writer Nick Geranios in Spokane, Wash., contributed to this report.
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