Ken Davis sat in his living room on Monday, watching Appalachian State on its way to a title.
The men’s basketball team clinched its first Sun Belt Conference championship, and more importantly, the first NCAA Tournament berth for the program in 21 years and only the third in the school’s history.
His phone started to buzz with 15 minutes remaining in the game, and he looked down to find himself in a group text. The starter of the chat? Bobby Cremins, the former Mountaineers head coach under whom Davis served as a student manager.
“You talk about memories flooding,” Davis, 64, said.
That was the case for many Mountaineers fans, from the moment App State beat Georgia State, 80-73, to cap a stretch of four wins in four days that included two overtime victories. The championship came after a regular season in which App State lost six of its last seven games.
Naturally, some fans harkened back to the school’s previous NCAA trips.
Cremins led App State to its first, a Southern Conference championship year during the 1978-79 season. Davis, who graduated from App State in 1980 and earned his master’s the following year, ultimately followed Cremins to Georgia Tech as a graduate assistant.
Davis said he looks at the game with a coach’s eye. And he said on that front, there’s no way the Mountaineers should be here. But he saw a team that played harder than their opponents, a trait that can carry a team at the right time. He drew similarities between Cremins’ team and this one. For starters, a short bench that leaned heavily on a few – for example, four players played 34 minutes or more in the Sun Belt title game – but it was also the way the team just wore down Georgia State.
““I relate what Coach (Dustin) Kerns is doing to what Coach Cremins did back in the ‘70s,” Davis said. “They have bought into his system. And when players buy into a system, and they believe in that coach and that system, they’re going to perform.
“So I would say, yeah, I’m surprised, but I’m not surprised because of how they reacted and adjusted to his system.”
Trevor Owens hopped into the App State fan base at the right time. A student from 1997 to 2003, he saw three 20-win seasons. He saw the program move from Varsity Gym, in the center of campus, to its current home at Holmes Convocation Center in 2000. That stretch hooked him.
“I just remember trying to keep my balance at Varsity Gym because those bleachers were rocking because they were so excited about their basketball team back in the day,” Owens, 41, said.
The App State program saw other bright spots, but for the better part of the 2010s, it remained stuck. The Mountaineers had one winning season during that stretch, a 16-15 season in 2010-11. Owens called the results and sparse crowds disappointing, especially with the intense passion he saw during his time at the university.
That changed with Kerns, hired in April 2019. He authored a winning season, 18-15, last year before this season’s 17-11 campaign. Two years of progress have helped a program overcome nearly a decade of struggles. And the season included struggles, too: a COVID-19 pause stopped the Mountaineers during conference play for two-plus weeks.
The team traveled back to Boone on Tuesday, welcomed back into by a socially distanced gathered. That followed a night on which fans took to King Street and celebrated. David Jackson said he could hear fireworks in his neighborhood the moment the game ended, lasting for roughly 20 minutes.
Jackson’s perspective on this moment is unique. The play-by-play voice of the Mountaineers from 2000 to 2016, he’s now the president/CEO of the Boone Chamber of Commerce.
This is going to bring national exposure to App State and Boone. And any positive attention, he said, is wonderful during a time where a pandemic is still ongoing.
But it’s also the next installment of special memories for a fan base. Students, those who celebrated in the streets last night and the fans that have populated home games, have a new high point. One that, like the other two berths in the Big Dance, will resonate.
“I remember everything — I’m serious,” Jackson said. “I remember everything because that’s what these moments do.
“They make you soak it all in and pay attention to little details because of the magnitude of it all.”
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