A year ago, a basketball game between Florida Atlantic and San Diego State might have commanded all the national appeal of a church basement bake sale.
Ok, same for a month ago.
But on Final Four weekend, those very basketball backwaters took up half the marquee, the best evidence yet that long dormant forces within the sport — particularly in the high-traffic area known as the transfer portal — have rewired its traditional power grid.
For all of the long overdue change illuminated this weekend on the game’s grandest and most conspicuous stage, college basketball still has thousands of unseen layers in places 100 figurative miles from any Road to the Final Four.
“I hate basketball,” Linda Platt was telling me on the campus of LaRoche University the other day. “When we’re behind by seven or the score’s tied and there’s 30 seconds left, I hate basketball. I worry about them being disappointed in themselves. They try hard and they fall short. Same thing in academics. Some of the best teaching in the whole university happens in this building.”
We were talking in the Kerr Fitness Center, where the Redhawks’ locker room isn’t much bigger than a backyard tool shed, yet in the gym adjacent, the men’s team has hung five Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference championship banners to go with the women’s eight.
LaRoche plays NCAA Division III non-scholarship basketball, one of a thousand stars in a vast media wilderness where, at the sport’s most granular level, people care about basketball as passionately as they do anywhere. No one, I’d humbly submit, can care more about it than Linda Platt, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. in English and LaRoche’s director of college writing, as well as its co-chair of performing arts.
“It’s part of my teaching mission,” she reasons, having been joined at the hip to the men’s basketball program for better than two decades. “I’ve written and presented academically about basketball literacy. It’s like any other form of reading. And we actually use that term — reading plays, reading defenses — but it’s really sophisticated reading because everybody’s moving. It’s not sitting there on the page waiting for you to get around to decoding it. It’s allowed me to learn a lot about how kids learn and what works with them. And because I work with them in study hall and I see what they’re doing in class, I can see where there are gaps sometimes in their ability to learn.”
One of the study halls Linda’s forever run for the basketball team was in progress Wednesday of this week, nearly a month after the Redhawks’ season ended in the first round of the NCAAs. The learning and the rigor goes on, even if, for some of these guys, their basketball lives are over.
“I was 7 years old, playing at the LaRosa Boys and Girls Club and on the courts at Renzie Park, McKeesport, Pa.,” said Jordan Grayson of his basketball origin story. “In ninth grade, I was ineligible. My grades were bad. I wasn’t into school. I had to figure out what path to take. Basketball was the way. My parents — and my grandad especially — sat me down and explained that if I wanted to play this game, I had to get my grades in order.”
Grayson wanted to play this game and eventually set McKeesport High records for shooting 3’s. Wanted to play badly enough to get himself into Owens Community College in Ohio before transferring to LaRoche just in time for COVID, which shut down the sport for the 2020-21 season.
A senior sociology major who hopes to work with kids after graduating next fall, he’s still coming to terms with the jarring notion that basketball can’t do things for him anymore.
“It’s kinda tough,” he said. “It hasn’t really set in, but it’s kinda tough thinking about it. You put all this work in. Now it’s over. Now you’re going to the real world.”
That world will still present a relative handful of basketball opportunities for the people who’ll put their hands on the NCAA championship trophy Monday night and for some of their opponents and for some of the varied participants of the so-called Big Dance.
That doesn’t mean the people a basketball world away don’t love it just as much, even the ones who say they hate it.
“One game, I looked around and it occurred to me that I had taught two of the coaches on one team, two on the other and the referee,” Platt said. “Sports, in general, take what you give and then so often break your heart, which is what I mean by, ‘I hate basketball.’
“But I do it because what’s more important than these young men? They want to play basketball and I want them to graduate with an education, not just a diploma. I want them to be smart and articulate and to find themselves. I love how after three or four years of being on their backs about classes and grades, they graduate, which is both the proudest moment and the hardest one.”
If you’re going to hate basketball, do it like Linda Platt.
