St. Francis is headed to the men’s NCAA basketball tournament, and the memories come flooding back.
I worked for the local Woke Gazette back in 1991, the only previous time St. Francis had made it to college basketball’s March Big Dance, and got to cover that team.
What a ride it was.
The St. Francis coach then was Jim Baron, in his fourth year at the school, having come from Notre Dame where he was an assistant. Baron was an earthy guy, not exactly a quote machine, but you could get an honest answer from him and he understood the necessity of being accesible and constantly selling the program.
Baron had arrived at Loretto, something of a coaching graveyard, with big goals – and he accomplished them. Baron knew if he could win at St. Francis, it would open doors for him. He was right. That success, at a relative backwater school, helped Baron land the head coaching job at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure, in 1992.
It’s taken St. Francis more than three decades to get back to the NCAA Tournament.
I will confess to knowing next to nothing about this season’s St. Francis team, although I did watch part of a regular-season game in which they played Maryland surprisingly close for a time. Seeing the championship game was on TV Tuesday night, I switched over during commercial breaks of Watters’ World on Fox News.
Every time I tuned in, both teams were missing shots and turning over the ball. Host Central Connecticut, which brought a 14-game win streak to the game, was a 10.5-point favorite, so I presumed the hosts eventually would take the win.
But, I got to watch the final minute of the game and saw St. Francis pull out the 46-43 win in what Red Flash coach Rob Krimmel told the postgame interviewers was a rock fight that set back offensive basketball.
While this NCAA bid would seem to be unexpected considering St. Francis is 16-17, expectations were high in 1991.
That 1991 team made home games in the Stokes Building social and athletic events. Altoona product Mike Iuzzolino, a transfer from Penn State, was a long-range marksman and heady floor general who averaged 24.1 points and four assists in his senior season.
The other main man on that team was 6-5 senior forward Joe Anderson, averaging 21.3 points and 6.3 rebounds. Anderson was a lean, mean, penetrating machine.
That St. Francis team went 21-7 in the regular season and won the Northeast Conference tournament with wins over St. Francis (N.Y.) and Fairleigh Dickinson.
Even though I covered a lot of St. Francis games that season, I missed the FDU title game due to a prior commitment to play in the Pittsburgh Class Championships chess tournament in Pittsburgh (I won my class!).
Baron, in his typical Brooklyn style, chided me afterward about my absence. As I told him at the time, we both won, so no big deal.
But even that NEC title was not enough to earn an NCAA Tournament berth. The Red Flash had to beat Fordham in a play-in game in Loretto to get that bid.
That game, I covered.
St. Francis won and then it was on to Salt Lake City, Utah, to face highly regarded Arizona, in the nightcap, an 11:30 p.m. or so start east coast time, which is bad news when you work for an AM newspaper.
The first game was between BYU and Virginia, a 61-48 BYU win. The center for BYU was 7-foot-6 Shawn Bradley, who set a then-NCAA tournament, single-game record with 10 blocked shots.
The 6-10 center for Virginia looked like a guard trying to defend Bradley,
There was quite a show between games. Arizona had a forward named Chris Mills, who had been part of a recruiting scandal involving an air freight envelope with $1,000 inside and adressed to his father that came open at an airport.
Kentucky ended up on probation and Mills ended up at Arizona. Because of this story, opposing fans took to waving money at Mills and, before the game with St. Francis, Baron’s brother – who looked a lot like Jim – was in the stands waving some bills.
I recall someone asking me – incredulously — if that was the St. Francis coach.
Baron knew his team was overmatched due to Arizona’s overwhelming size and talent, so he packed in his defense. This made a star out of Arizona guard Matt Othick, who averaged 10.5 points a game during the season, but on this night was left wide-open and hit for a team high 25 points, including nailing five of seven three-point tries.
Arizona led 43-29 at the half and the game was not as close as the 93-80 final, despite Anderson’s 29 points and 20 from Iuzzolino.
It wasn’t exactly time to hang black crepe paper, though, because, let’s face it, the St. Francis teams of the NCAA world aren’t really expected to beat the Arizonas.
At the time, I thought it was nice that a lot of good people at St. Francis, like tireless sports information director Kevin Southard, got to enjoy some time in the spotlight.
Just getting to that stage was a success story, an accomplishment this 2024-25 team now can share.
Sam Ross Jr's site 