Winthrop won’t forget 2007. Will that NCAA win forever be Eagles’ one shining moment?
If you would walk into one of the long hallways that run perpendicular to the Winthrop Coliseum, you’d see it.
It’s a mural of players on the 2006-07 Winthrop basketball team jumping for joy. They’re wearing baggy jerseys and baggy shorts and those long, white socks that fashioned the era.
Everyone in this image and around it, from the most prolific coach in Winthrop’s history, Gregg Marshall, to the screaming fans that witnessed that special day in Spokane, Washington, were a minute or two away from the greatest moment in Winthrop sports history — if not in Rock Hill sports history — and their faces expressed the question that would give any sports fan goosebumps: “Is this really happening?”
In some ways, that moment feels further than it is. It’s been 13 years since Winthrop basketball’s first and only NCAA tournament win, a 74-64 victory over Notre Dame in 2007. But when something happens so grand that it feels out of body — when it’s actually “surreal,” as opposed to how the overused and rarely accurate sports platitude is normally used now — it’s no longer bound by time.
Last season, before the NCAA tournament was canceled, I spoke to several people who had a front row seat to that 2007 season’s madness. I spoke with Marshall. I spoke with Michael Jenkins, a guard on that team. I even called The Herald’s former and famed sports editor, Gary McCann, who drove with then-columnist Andrew Dys from Rock Hill to Spokane and documented their experiences together along the way. (The duo, who ended up capturing the Eagles’ historic win uniquely and properly like only a local newspaper could, made ESPN headlines themselves for their trip: “This trip is either inspired or crazy,” McCann reportedly said out loud in the car, which Dys wrote in one of his columns. “With Wyoming and Montana ahead of us, maybe stupid is better.”)
They all expressed how destined that season felt. How special that season, which is remembered for that one game, was.
A lot has happened in those 13 years since that game.
First, Winthrop’s 2007 run ended in the next round. Then Marshall, who’d flirted with leaving before, left for good. Then the program, which had real momentum — a real chance to do more than temporarily rise above its station — stumbled.
Selling out the Coliseum proved harder and harder. Student enthusiasm appeared to wane.
And even once success arrived again, with Winthrop hiring Skip Prosser protege Pat Kelsey as its coach, that success wasn’t met with the fervor it once would’ve been.
Winthrop basketball appeared to be still frozen in 2007, nursing a 13-year hangover from its highest high.
The question was, and still is: Will that NCAA tournament win be the Eagles’ only shining moment?
Perhaps I’m reaching. Perhaps I’m making too much of a moment I wasn’t there to see and too much of a win that was soon overshadowed by high school football state championships, Carolina Panthers partnerships and the like.
Plus, times are different now: Maybe in a pre-internet world, where fewer people and activities vied for Rock Hill’s attention, there’d be more local buzz about this year’s Eagles. Maybe in a post-COVID world, where more residents and students could actually buy tickets, people could properly fall in love with this team and these players and create a culture around Winthrop basketball beyond the one still centered on the past.
Maybe these 2020-21 Eagles, who have set program and Big South records, stand alone. Maybe, yes, this year’s Winthrop basketball team deserves more attention than it’s getting — but a victory Friday would change that.
Or, maybe, it’s a reasonable question — Will that NCAA tournament win be the Eagles’ only shining moment? — however uncomfortable it is.
Where the program is now, Winthrop, again, has a real chance again to rise above its station for good. These opportunities are rare. These 12-seeded Eagles, whether they know it or not, have a chance to put themselves on a similar pedestal — a chance to make Winthrop known for more than just one team coached by one man whose legacy is now perhaps forever tainted by allegations of abuse while he was at Wichita State. They perhaps even have a real chance at defeating their not-at-full-strength opponents in No. 5 Villanova.
But what happens then? Will the cycle repeat itself? Will Kelsey, like Marshall, move on — frustrated by how slow national basketball attention flows to Rock Hill and by how hard it is to captivate the local community’s fandom? Will an old guard and an old way of thinking overstay its welcome? Will murals be hung and fashions change while 2021 becomes immortalized, just like its preceding win was?
In so many words: Does the Winthrop basketball program, by vice of so many things out of its control, have a ceiling it won’t ever be able to break?
No one knows the answers to these questions. Perhaps questions are all they’ll ever be.
Or, perhaps, this moment will change everything.
March Madness: Watch Winthrop vs. Villanova
Who: No. 5 Villanova (16-6) vs. No. 12 Winthrop (23-1)
Region: South
Game location: Farmers Coliseum in Indianapolis
When: 9:59 p.m. Friday
TV: TNT
This story was originally published March 19, 2021 at 7:02 AM with the headline "Winthrop won’t forget 2007. Will that NCAA win forever be Eagles’ one shining moment?."
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