A Climb to the Summit

The airplane may have landed at Orange County’s John Wayne Airport early Wednesday afternoon but the Concordia basketball team remained above the clouds.

That is what winning the first National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics championship will do. The Eagles became the first Southern California team to win the nation’s oldest tournament with their 88-84 overtime victory over Mountain State (W.Va.) Tuesday night in Kansas City, Mo.

“I’m watching the highlights and I can see myself but it just hasn’t hit met yet,” said junior guard Chris Victor, who had a team-high 26 points in the championship game. “I don’t think any of us fully understand what we’ve done.”

The accomplishment is that much more notable in that it was Concordia’s first trip to the NAIA tournament.

The Eagles won a school-record 36 games, suffering only two losses to Azusa Pacific and one each to Westmont and The Master’s.

“I was really concerned with our lack of experience in this event,” said Coach Ken Ammann, a former Stanford player (1989-91) who is in his second season at Concordia. “We just set a goal on winning the first game and then our next goal was to get to the Final Four. After that, it’s anybody’s ballgame.”

Concordia’s national championship was so unexpected that officials of the 27-year-old liberal arts university in Irvine had only hours to prepare for a celebration.

It turned out to be more than anyone expected. The Eagles were greeted by several hundred students and supporters for a 45-minute celebration. Sales of championship T-shirts sold at a brisk pace at the campus bookstore.

“We’ve sold about 250 and I’m going to order another shipment,” bookstore manager Mark Siegert said. “I think we can sell about 700 of them by the end of the week.”

Before the season, Ammann used a dose of symbolism to provide a season’s worth of motivation.

In September, the team traveled to Yosemite National Park to bond into a unit, particularly for the nine newcomers to the program.

The main part of their stay was to ascend the park’s signature landmark, an 8,842-foot high peak known as Half Dome. The team made a 4,000-foot hike to the summit.

“It was a tough hike,” said sophomore center Tanner Luster, who had 19 points and a tournament-high 26 rebounds in Tuesday’s victory. “It took us about six hours to do it. But it kind of showed us how to set a goal and how to achieve it. We got to know a lot about each other on that trip.”

Azusa Pacific Coach Bill Odell was particularly happy for Ammann, who spent two seasons on Odell’s staff before taking the Concordia job

“Kenny has done a great job since he’s been there,” Odell said. “It’s tough to win five games back there. They had different guys step up in every game.”