When Kellen Tynes broke the all-time steals record for the University of Maine men’s basketball team earlier this season, he did it in front of a mostly empty arena.
Weather was to blame for that quiet showing in early February, with a poorly timed snowstorm keeping many fans at home. But as Tynes said when asked about the crowd size after that game, it wasn’t exactly a new experience.
“Honestly, I’m kind of used to it because our first couple years, no disrespect, we weren’t that good,” responded Tynes, a graduate student guard in his third year at UMaine. “So people didn’t really want to come watch us.”
How times have changed for Tynes and his Black Bear teammates. And that’s probably because they are doing something that a UMaine men’s basketball team hasn’t done in more than 20 years.
On Saturday, the UMaine men will play in their first America East conference championship since 2004. And with a win, UMaine would punch its ticket to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for the first time.
Coach Chris Markwood was a player on the 2004 team that last took Maine to the America East final, and as he has throughout the playoffs, he is working to keep his team focused on the game details rather than the history.
“You’ve got to stay locked into the details. Everybody around us is going to be focused on the result, trying to get to the first NCAA tournament, which I understand and I get that. It’s never happened here,” Markwood said Thursday. “But we’ve got to try to hunker down and block that out. And Just really lock in on the details that are going to get us the result, while everybody else is just focused on the result.”
It was that focus, along with an us-against-the-world attitude and a relentless defensive effort, that helped spur the Black Bears past three-time defending America East champion Vermont on Tuesday night in Burlington.
UMaine guard AJ Lopez drives against Vermont in a March 11 America East semifinal win for the Black Bears. Credit: Alex Weiss / UMaine Athletics
UMaine held Vermont to under 26 percent shooting from the floor, and won the turnover battle by a staggering 17-3. Tynes was once again at the center of that defensive effort, with the all-time program steals leader adding three more to go with 13 points and 13 rebounds against the Catamounts.
Tynes said Thursday that he was proud of his teammates for going into the tough atmosphere in Burlington and getting the win despite a lopsided recent history that has been decidedly in Vermont’s favor.
“But we know we’ve got one more,” Tynes said.
And it will be a big one, against the No. 1 team in the league.
UMaine will face Bryant University at 11 a.m. Saturday and would need to go through the top-ranked team in the conference in order to secure that bid to the NCAA tournament. The 22-11 Bulldogs beat the 20-13 Black Bears in both head-to-head matchups during the regular season, with scores of 80-72 on March 1 in Orono and 81-55 on Jan. 4 in Smithfield, Rhode Island.
Markwood said his team will need to be at its best against a “really good” Bryant team that has set the standard in the league all season.
Bryant senior guard Rafael Pinzon has led the scoring for the Bulldogs this year, averaging nearly 19 points per game. As he so often does, Tynes expects to spend a lot of time guarding the opposing team’s best offensive weapons.
“I just know that we’ll have a better chance to win if you can take the better players out of the game,” said Tynes, who recently won his third-straight America East Defensive Player of the Year award.
And while the UMaine men have never been to the NCAA tournament, Tynes has. He went to the big dance as a player at Montana State before transferring to Maine, and that experience is something Markwood has said the team will continue to lean on during this postseason run.
The buzz around this UMaine men’s team may have been building just recently, but the players have been quietly confident in their abilities for some time.
“It might be a surprise to other people that we’re in the championship game, but it’s no surprise to us,” Tynes said, explaining that the team has known they have the talent needed as long as they do the work and stick to the gameplan.
And as Markwood laid out Thursday, expect that gameplan to continue to start on the defensive end and include an emphasis on strong rebounding. Also expect Markwood and his team to continue to focus on that gameplan rather than the potential history swirling around Saturday’s game.
“It’s so easy, and it’s natural to get caught up in wanting the end goal, and then bypassing what’s actually going to get you there,” Markwood said.
But Markwood, who played his high school ball in South Portland before eventually finding his way back to Maine later in his college playing career after two years at Notre Dame, doesn’t ignore the magnitude of this moment either. He was asked Thursday what a conference championship would mean to him as a Mainer.
“It would mean the world,” Markwood said. “I’ve come back to this place multiple times. I came back as a transfer player, and I came back as an assistant coach after college. And then I came back again as a head coach. And all those times of me coming home, it’s been, ‘Can I help propel this program to a place it’s never been.’”
In just three years as the head coach in Orono, he’s helped the Black Bears earn that chance.
“And to have an opportunity to do that Saturday means the world to me,” Markwood said. “It means the world to this program.”
