By Tony Moore
When Men's Basketball Head Coach Alan Seretti took the reins of Dickinson men's basketball in 2009 and the team went on to finish his inaugural season 4-20, even he couldn't have imagined that three short years later the team would finish 20-7, win the Centennial Conference (CC) Championship and earn its first Division III NCAA bid in more than 15 years.
"It has been an extremely rewarding season and Centennial Conference tournament run due to the struggles the program encountered our first year here," Seretti says. "The turnaround can be attributed to the hard work of all of our former and current players and the diligence of our assistant coaches both on court and on the recruiting trail."
That hard work paid off both for the team and for Adam Honig '14 and Gerry Wixted '15, who were named CC Co-Players of the Week after back-to-back double-doubles (racking up double digits in points and rebounds) in the tournament. To Wixted, the victory over longtime rival Franklin & Marshall College made the championship that much sweeter.
"We went into the final game of the regular season [against F&M] tied with them in the standings, and they beat us pretty bad," he says. "But that just let us get our nerves out. We had to go back to their place again for the CC tournament, and flip a switch—we win by 20. They're a rival and we wanted it really bad, and we just came together, played really well and got the job done."
"The only time previous to this year that we were able to win the CC title was in 1997," says Seretti. "And the 1997 team lost in the NCAA to Widener 70-62, so we've never won a first-round NCAA Tournament game."
From his viewpoint in the thick of things on the court, Wixted says Marietta is a different kind of team, but the Red Devils will be ready.
Published February 27, 2013