The ultimate Cinderella, Coe men’s basketball team relishes its spot in the NCAA tournament

CEDAR RAPIDS — The NCAA has a sick sense of humor.

Coe College’s men’s basketball team Cinderella-ed its way to the American Rivers Conference tournament championship over the weekend, the sixth seed that won three games on the road over a week. It’s part of the NCAA Division III national tournament for the first time since 1976.

That’s 47 years.

The Kohawks theoretically had 63 possible first-round opponents, and were sent to St. Louis to play Washington University on Friday night. Some irony there.

Cruel irony, considering Washington’s head coach is Pat Juckem. He was the guy who preceded Bryan Martin as Coe’s head coach.

“I’ve got nothing but love for Pat and respect for him and everything he did here,” Martin said. “Just pretty ironic that the NCAA put us together. We knew it was a possibility, for sure.”

Martin has won his fair share of games in 11 years as Coe’s coach, yet the last three might just be his biggest. Certainly that 93-86 victory this past Saturday at Loras has to be tops.

Senior forward T.J. Schnurr poured in 36 points, as Coe shot 65 percent from the field.

Two nights earlier, Coe beat second-seeded Dubuque, 78-73. Two nights before that, it beat Nebraska Wesleyan, 78-60.

Again, all those games were on the road.

“We’ve got tough kids,” Martin said. “The one thing about them is they’ve shown no quit throughout the year. We knew we had a young team coming in, so there were growing pains as expected early in the year.

“We really struggled offensively about the first quarter of the year. We finally got our offense going about halfway through the year, got the chemistry going and had a nice run where we won six out of seven.”

Then the Kohawks lost a starter to injury and subsequently five A-R-C games in a row through late January and early February. Three were one-possession games.

With its season on the line, Coe edged Wartburg by a point Feb. 15. That and an ensuing win over Nebraska Wesleyan to end the regular season clinched the final spot in the conference tournament.

“Credit goes to the guys,” Martin said. “They kept believing in the message we were giving them. We were still playing pretty good basketball, even through that two-week (losing) stretch. They kept showing up to work and kept getting better every day.

“They kept believing that we needed to play our best at the end because that’s all that matters. It all just kind of came together at the right time. The Kohawks got hot when it mattered.”

Coe ended up with two first-team all-conference players in Schnurr and junior guard Cael Schmitt, a former Dubuque Wahlert prep who Martin calls the best player he has coached at Coe. Schmitt was the American Rivers Conference’s Defensive Player of the Year.

“He’s able to guard positions one through four,” Martin said. “He can really lock up good players in our league, really did that all year. Then he just continues to take his offensive game to another level.

“He’s kind of done that all three of his years.”

Martin and his staff have recruited the Metro a lot in their time here, and successfully. There are eight kids on the roster from Cedar Rapids, Marion and Iowa City schools, including the coach’s twin sons Pearson and Evan.

Though they haven’t gotten much varsity playing time, that still makes this run to the NCAAs special for the coach and his family. Coe takes a 16-13 record into its Friday game.

Washington is 19-6. The winner of that game plays Sunday against either North Park (Ill.) or Sewanee (Tenn.) for a trip to the round of 32.

“We kind of joked that we’ve been playing with house money,” Martin said. “We’ve kind of been in tournament mode since two weeks before the tournament, so we’ve been used to that win-or-go-home mentality in a sense.”

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