Playoffs Another Test for UCSD : Amid Classes, Tritons Prepare for NCAA Basketball Tournament

At UC San Diego, they approach the NCAA basketball playoffs a little differently. March Madness means not staying up all night in study groups.

UCSD, embarking on a third consecutive trip through the Division III playoffs, might be as excited as its Division I counterparts, but the players still are nonscholarship students coping with mechanical engineering midterms as well as the rigors of tournament time.

“It’s tough to get my kids out of the library,” Coach Tom Marshall said this week. “I had to write a letter to get two kids to practice this week--we had to get midterms rescheduled.”

Last year, the Tritons reached the round of 16. Marshall doesn’t know what he’ll do if his team, ranked third nationally, makes the Final Four. “The Final Four is during finals week,” he said with a grin. “When finals week hits at UCSD, everything shuts down.”

That could be about the only thing that would shut down the Tritons this season. They’re 22-4 and winners of their past 17 games. Having earned a first-round bye, they play host Saturday night to a Cal Lutheran team they’ve beaten twice this season. The Tritons haven’t lost a regular-season game to a Division III team in 2 1/2 years.

But thanks to the limitations of the Division III format, the playoffs will be no cakewalk for any of the teams in the West and Great Lakes regions in UCSD’s bracket.

Because Division III playoffs lack the big TV money payoff of Division I, teams are grouped geographically to cut down on travel.

UCSD’s grouping includes the Nos. 1 (Calvin, Mich.), 3 (UCSD) and 4 (Wooster, Ohio) seeds and six of the top eight. In Division I, top-ranked teams are scattered throughout the nation and given favorable early matchups.

“We’ve got to play awfully well,” Marshall said. “Whoever comes out of that bottom bracket has done a job. It’s a bear.”

Advancing through the tournament also taxes a coach’s ability to scout and adapt to an opponent. Unlike Division I--where seemingly every team is on cable or available by satellite--Marshall can’t turn on the tube to chart an upcoming game.

“If we go past this round, the next step is the winner of Wooster-Otterbein,” Marshall said. “Their conference won’t share tape, and since they began playing conference games in the middle of December, the closest tape I can get of them is probably end of November. My team as changed a lot since then, so I assume they have too. It can become a real hassle to collect any information.

“Since we’re independent and played a couple Division I teams, you can probably get a library on us. The NCAA is considering a tape exchange once the playoffs start. That’s something that really needs to be looked at.”

But that’s a battle for a later date.

For now, Marshall and the Tritons are looking at Cal Lutheran, winner of the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference at 15-11 and a team that likes to run, featuring the nation’s leading Division III scorer, Jeff DeLaveaga, and his 29-point average.

Cal Lutheran also features a bruiser in the middle, 6-foot-6, 240-pound Simon O’Donnell, who averages 15.4 points and 7.2 rebounds. Cal Lutheran averaged 81 points per game for the season and 85.8 in SCIAC games.

UCSD counters with a balanced attack that beat Cal Lutheran, 67-65, here in December, and 83-71 in Thousand Oaks in January. The Tritons have thrived on the medium-range jumper and have outshot opponents this season, 51.8% to 43.8%. They have made 44.6% of their three-point attempts.

Marshall characterizes the Tritons as confident and intense in facing Cal Lutheran, though aware it’s tough to beat a team three times in a season. “If DeLaveaga goes for 40, we’ve got trouble,” he said. DeLaveaga, a 6-foot 4 guard, averaged 21 in the previous games.

Both earlier victories were accomplished with 6-6 junior Andy Swindall starting at forward. He since has been lost to a torn knee ligament.

“That’s a big loss. We matched him with O’Donnell,” Marshall said. “(Rick) Batt and (Brad) Halte will have to keep a big body on him.”

However, Marshall and several players stressed that thanks to the team’s depth and adaptability, the loss of Swindall has not been devastating.

The Tritons’ all-around maturation has surprised Marshall, who didn’t expect the team to be as strong as last season, when nearly every starter was back and Tim Rapp set several school scoring records, leading UCSD to a 23-4 record.

“I was hoping to squeeze into the (NCAA) tournament with 18, 19 wins,” Marshall admitted. “We were pretty good coming out of the gate. We were up at the half at (Division I) Boise State (a 82-70 loss) and I began to think we might have a good group. We play well as a group.”

The Tritons have no particular star--junior Chris Moore leads in scoring at 16.5 points a game, Batt averages 13.2, John Spence 10.6 and Erik Johnson 9.5--but five different players have been high scorers during the season and five players have led in rebounds.

Point guard Darvin Jackson said the team began to believe in itself after playing at Washington, a 77-53 loss that was more competitive than the score. That was the Tritons’ last loss.

“Going into the season it was a little bit unsure where we’d be. We knew we had potential. After we were 6-4 everybody became confident in their game,” said Jackson, a senior premed student.

“We have six, seven, eight (players) contributing each time we come out on the floor. Last year everybody focused on Tim Rapp. Now you have to shut our whole team down.”

Jackson, the school record-holder in assists, said of the loss of Swindall, “The scenery’s a little bit different looking into the hole from my point of view but Brad (Halte) is doing the job, he’s contributing. Everybody is pretty much playing a role.”

With Swindall out, much of the inside load falls on Batt, a 6-foot-7 senior who averages a team-high 6.6 rebounds and shoots 65.3% from the floor. He reiterated Jackson’s point about the team’s versatility.

“The lack of depth (due to Swindall’s injury) will hurt but we had enough depth to begin with that we’ll continue,” he said. “The difference (from last season) is we’re more team-oriented. Last year it was always Tim Rapp. I think our defense has improved--we’re a little quicker, a little more intense. When teams want to match up with us, there’s no one guy to shut down.

“It feels good out there, it feels like we’re a good team. Everybody’s happy.”

Marshall said that while the school’s academic standards might be a strain on the team, the players’ intelligence can be a distinct advantage.

He said, “We run what I call a controlled pro set. I’ve stolen a lot of Dick Motta’s stuff, we run a lot of (Princeton Coach) Pete Carrill’s stuff: If we can break, take the opportunity. If the numbers are against us, pull it out and look for the quick hit. Then we have our motion set, so it’s really three stages.

“We run a ton of stuff. It’s hard to scout us because we run so much stuff. We can do that because the kids are bright. We can experiment and do all kinds of things because the kids pick it up so fast. I think we confuse people--we run the same set, then explode into something different out of it. The kids are proud of that.

“They’ll watch games on TV and say, ‘Coach, (some nationally ranked team) ran the same set every time. We run 40 offenses.’ We run a lot of picks, screens. That kind of stuff works with our kids.”

Having reached the upper echelon of Division III, Marshall and his players say they know what it takes to navigate the tournament. If the Tritons win Saturday they have a good chance of remaining at home for the second and third rounds next Friday and Saturday. The Final Four will be played at Wittenburg University in Springfield, Ohio, March 20-21.

“Two years ago at Nebraska Wesleyan we were up at the half,” Marshall recalled. “We played, essentially, six kids and the lack of depth caught up with us. . . . After that we went about trying to recruit to double up at positions. Last year was a good indication of that. We’re playing 12 kids, at least 10 every game.”

Marshall also said people are surprised at the high skill level of the good Division III teams. “People don’t understand how good Division III has gotten,” he said. “The kid I’m recruiting was going to Division I 10 years ago. The teams that reach the Final Four could beat a slew of Division I teams on the lower end of the spectrum.

“You see all kinds of teams, styles. That’s fun.”