Saying a Bitter Farewell to Basketball

His chin resting on his hands, Joe Jones sat in Saturday’s post-game news conference dejected.

The night before, he had watched his team grind out a lackluster victory over Harvard—and he hadn’t been satisfied with the performance. Then on Saturday, the Lions faced Dartmouth, which came to Levien Gymnasium with an abysmal 2-9 record.

It was their chance to put things right and complete their third weekend-sweep of the season.

On top of it all, it was Senior Night.

Brett Loscalzo, Kashif Sweet, Ben Nwachukwu, Mack Montgomery and—one of the finest players in the program’s history—John Baumann stepped onto the Levien Gymnasium floor for their last game in their light blue jerseys.

Across the court stood the inexperienced, underperforming, and undersized Big Green. If Columbia could have had its pick of teams to play on Senior Night, short of the Washington General, Dartmouth would’ve been one of its top choices.

And still, two hours later in the media room, deep within the corridors of Dodge, Jones was shaking his head. He was upset Columbia had lost 63-48. Worse yet, he was upset that the seniors, his first recruiting class here, had let themselves down.

The urgency the Lions so desperately lacked against Harvard was again conspicuous in its absence. But in front of a packed house getting its last-ever look at this team—the best Columbia has seen in over a decade—the seniors should have been able to feed off of the crowd’s energy and turn in a memorable performance.

Instead, they allowed the Big Green to own the game, failed to find their touch from the perimeter, and blew easy plays inside.

But Jones said that on personally-significant nights like these, it’s always hard for a coach to strike a balance between playing up the significance of the night and treating it as just another game.

“It could backfire on you,” he said. “You try so hard to win your last game and you’re so emotional about it, you don’t go out and do the things you need to do. I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist. We just didn’t do the things we needed to do to win.”

Montgomery and Baumann had 11 and 17 points, respectively, with four rebounds each, but that did little to mask a generally uninspired showing from the class of 2008. Still, Jones never felt his team gave up.

“It just didn’t happen for them,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t play well, but these guys never quit. At halftime they were into it—they wanted to take it and win.”

For the past couple of years, the expectation, at least among people who follow the team closely, was for the team to come together when this class reached maturity. This year’s squad was supposed to mount Columbia’s first real title run in years.

In the best-case scenario, they’ll finish 9-5 in the Ivy League. To do so, the Lions will need to sweep Princeton and Penn on the road for the first time since World War II. At worst, they’ll end up 7-7, a record that might once have looked decent, but now just seems like a missed opportunity. This crop of seniors had helped Jones change expectations.

In all fairness, however, the seniors’ farewell was just one horrible game in what has otherwise been the finest season in recent memory. But nothing is set in stone yet.
The Lions have one more road trip—to Princeton and Penn—which will have a major impact when it comes time for the season’s final assessment.

So the class of 2008 will have one more chance to go out on a high, this time at the mecca of Ivy basketball, no less—Philadelphia. And, come 10 p.m. next Saturday night, there will be several ways to figure out how they did. One is to read the lines.

The other is to peek inside the media room—Jones’ demeanor will tell the whole story of the seniors’ swan song.

Joshua Robinson is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and political science.