By Woodrow Carroll
Former Plano High basketball star Brad Korn will be coaching in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament this week, although probably not for long, given the formidable road ahead. Still, that in no way detracts from Korn’s achievement.
Korn, who guided the Plano Reapers as a player to a fourth-place finish in the 1999 Illinois High School Association (IHSA) Class A boys State tournament, is in his third year as head coach of the Southeast Missouri (SEMO) Redhawks.
The SEMO Redhawks (19-16) were face the Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Islanders (23-10) in a First Four play-in game Tuesday, March 14 in Dayton, Ohio.
The winner will play No. 1 seeded overall University of Alabama. Let’s just say that if SEMO wins two games in this year’s tournament, the world will take notice!
The SEMO Redhawks, who call Cape Girardeau, Mo. home, are a member of the 10-team Ohio Valley Conference that includes Eastern Illinois and Southern Illinois-Edwardsville. The key to SEMO’s NCAA tournament berth was obviously winning the OVC tournament championship. The Redhawks ended 10-8 in the Conference before storming through the OVC tournament capped off by a 89-82 title-game victory over Tennessee Tech Saturday, March 11.
For SEMO, the trip to the NCAA finals marked the first time since 2000. For Tennessee Tech, the wait has been much longer!
In 1963, Tennessee Tech qualified for the NCAA Tournament and faced Loyola University Chicago. The final score? It was111-42 in favor of the eventual national champion Loyola Ramblers.
Korn is in his third season at the school which is his first head coaching assignment at the collegiate level. After his high school days at Plano, Korn played college ball at SIU-Carbondale.
• Conference tournaments assure at least one team from each Div-I conference will be represented in the Big Show. These tournaments vary to a certain degree in their formats. In the Big Ten Conference all 14 teams are involved. In the Mid-American Conference, the top eight in regular season are in the 12-team MAC to tournament in Cleveland.
• The Northern Illinois University men finished seventh in the MAC race, which earned NIU a match up with No. 2 Kent State. Good news for the NIU Huskies who handed the Golden Flashes an upset 86-76 defeat in DeKalb in January. The bad news: Kent State was out for revenge.
Revenge is what Kent State found by beating Northern Illinois, 76-57, in the MAC tournament quarterfinal last week. The Northern Illinois men closed with a record of 13-19 and found a degree of reflected glory when Kent State knocked off regular-season MAC champion, Toledo, 93-78, in the tournament championship game.
How good is Kent State (28-6)? Check out the Kent State-Indiana game Friday, March 17. A meeting between a Big Ten team and a MAC side always has appeal, given there is regional overlap in both conferences.
Strange results for Northern Illinois this season. Ten of the 13 Huskies’ victories were by double-digit margins. Northern Illinois was 5-4 on the road in MAC and 4-5 at home.
• North Carolina, which finished runner up to Kansas in last season’s NCAA Tournament, elected to pass on the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) when left out of this season’s NCAA tournament. Not the best of moves. Reminds one of Notre Dame’s passing on lesser football bowl games in the past.
Things eventually got out of hand for the Fighting Irish in bowl-game appearances. Between 1995 and 2007, Notre Dame played in nine bowl games that has varying degrees of prestige, and the Fighting Irish lost all nine games!
By going with the NIT, North Carolina could have made a few friends and, by winning the tournament would prove the Tar Heels belonged in the NCAA tournament.
Wisconsin will play Bradley in the NIT and Michigan will play Toledo, each Tuesday this week.