Kirkwood men’s basketball found the national championship formula

CEDAR RAPIDS – The junior college basketball experience can be fleeting.

Players have two short years to make their mark, while coaches must craft a cohesive unit from a roster that turns over after every season.

This short window was plenty big enough for Coach Bryan Petersen and the Kirkwood men's basketball team, who earned four come-from-behind victories in five days in Danville, Ill., punctuated Saturday with their first NJCAA Division II national championship since 1998.

'This team over the last month and a half has really shown me a will to win,' Petersen said. 'Probably the best I've ever been around.'

Petersen, 28, was a player for Kirkwood before starting for two seasons as a recruited walk-on at Iowa State. He was on the 2006 Kirkwood squad that fell in the national championship game, but now earns a title in just his third season as head coach.

'I know how much this program means to this school and to have success like that for this school was good,' Petersen said.

Petersen assembled a talented stable of players, including reserves who could start for many schools. Freshman guard Byron Harp came off the bench and scored in double figures in all four tournament games. The former Ankeny Centennial prep scored nine of his 15 points in overtime of an 89-83 quarterfinal victory over No. 9 Louisburg (N.C.), then tallied a career-high 22 points in the semifinal.

'All year long I've had confidence,' Harp said. 'I do it all the time in practice. I just had to go out there and do it. I just had a lot of confidence. It just hit me.'

The 77-66 semifinal victory over third-ranked Essex County (N.J.) was the most unlikely of the quartet. Kirkwood used a stunning 45-7 explosion to turn a 23-point deficit in the second half into a double-digit victory.

'When he has confidence and he's composed, that trickles down to the rest of us,' sophomore guard Nick Richards said of Petersen. 'If we play the way we're supposed to and not get out of hand and just get one stop at a time, we have to chance to come back. Which we did.'

Richards led the Eagles (31-4) with 21 points in the title game, an 83-76 win over top-ranked Triton (Ill.), which entered with a 30-game win streak.

'All year we've been saying how we're going to win it and a lot of teams probably say that at the beginning of the year,' Richards said. 'But to actually do it? … I can't really explain it.'

l Comments: douglas.miles@thegazette.com