North Carolina produced 2020’s only national championship in men’s college basketball
When Mike Apple was summoned to a hospitality room at the NJCAA Division III national championship on the Thursday morning that the sports world shut down. He assumed the worst.
His Sandhills Community College team was the No. 1 seed, 31-2 heading into the quarterfinals, and the inevitable cancellation would deny it, at worst, a 50-50 shot at the title.
Thirty-six hours later, Sandhills cut down the nets after a third straight comeback victory and 18th straight win, the last college basketball team to be crowned champions of 2020 in a season cut short by the new coronavirus.
“It’s a huge accomplishment to win a national championship in a year when most teams aren’t winning a national championship,” said forward Evan Davis, who is from Raleigh and went to Garner High. “I won one when most people didn’t get that opportunity.”
Three days later, after returning to an empty campus in Pinehurst and then dispersing themselves, Apple and his players were still trying to make sense of it all.
“It’s been a whirlwind, man, since Friday, but we’re still very happy,” Apple said. “Under the wire is a very good way to say it. We were on pins and needles as to whether or not we were going to be able to get it in. It kind of worked out that we’d be able to get it all done by Friday.”
The NJCAA Division III tournament, for non-scholarship junior colleges, may be the hardest college basketball tournament to win, with more teams eligible than any other. Sandhills had just won its second in nine years. And that wasn’t even the notable part.
The Flyers had arrived in Rochester, Minn., in time for Tuesday night’s banquet. At that time, sports everywhere were proceeding as planned. When Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 and the NBA suspended play Wednesday night, suddenly everything was up in the air.
The next morning, the eight remaining coaches learned that the community-college presidents had decided, as long as the teams were already in Rochester, Minn., and basically stuck there given the difficulty of getting home on commercial flights, they would finish the tournament, but as quickly as possible. Even then, there were rumors that the two schools from Texas might have to pull out, which would have ended play.
Not everyone was so fortunate. The Wake Tech women’s basketball team won its regional on March 7 and qualified for the Division II NJCAA championship in Port Huron, Mich., as the 12th seed, starting March 18. They never even got on a bus.
But Sandhills got its chance. The quarterfinals were held Thursday as scheduled, but the semifinals and finals were both held Friday. The consolation games normally played were canceled entirely.
That gave Sandhills 48 hours to win three games and a national title. And while circumstances changed quickly elsewhere — the Power 5 conferences started shutting down their tournaments around noon Thursday — they played on.
“I was just kind of worried about what the coronavirus was really doing for everybody,” said guard Elijah Idlett, who is from Cary. “I didn’t know what was really going on. I just saw that all sports were being canceled. On ESPN, watching players getting sick, all this stuff was canceling, it just made me feel like, ‘Wow, we might be the only team to win a national championship this year.’
“It was the best feeling I had in a long time. The emotion I had when I found that out, I didn’t even really know what to think. We just had to go out there and play. We had what we wanted right in front of us.”
Even then, it wasn’t easy. The Flyers trailed in all three games, coming back to beat Herkimer (NY) Community College, 66-55, in the quarterfinals — a defensive struggle, the lowest-scoring game of the season for Sandhills, the highest-scoring team in the country — and starting Friday with an 84-76 road win over host Rochester Tech.
Being the No. 1 seed had its advantages; the Flyers played at 11 a.m. Their opponents played at 1 p.m. Two hours of extra rest was a lot for a team that routinely scored in the triple digits, even under these conditions.
“We were still thinking, they’re giving us the opportunity to play, we might as well win,” Davis said. “Focus on these games and get them over with as fast as possible.”
The final put the two best Division III teams in the country on the same court, and it did not disappoint. Mohawk Valley (NY) had won 18 straight. The Flyers were winners of 17 in a row, their two losses coming to junior colleges that offer scholarships. And after trailing by as many as seven in the second half, Sayaun Dent scored the final two of his 27 points to ice the 93-89 win and start the celebration.
Even then, the Flyers couldn’t change their commercial flights home. They spent Saturday in Rochester sequestered in the team hotel, then had a 2 a.m. wake-up call Sunday for their 6:30 a.m. flight from Minneapolis.
Finally, Sunday afternoon, the team returned to Moore County with a police escort from the county border, but to fans in cars honking their horns instead of gathering in celebration, to a campus already deserted. The parade is indefinitely postponed.
“We’re definitely going to have to wait a while until we can celebrate,” Idlett said. “Right now, I’m just doing some homework. But the celebration is definitely going to go on whenever this goes away. It’s something I’m going to think about and enjoy the rest of my life.”
The players scattered to the winds, not knowing when they might see each other again. Junior-college players are always the last to get college offers; who knows when the recruiting cycle might turn to them now. Apple, though, is thankful just to have the chance.
In a basketball season cut short, the Flyers were the not only the last team standing, but the last team standing on a ladder.
“I just felt so bad for the NCAA guys,” Apple said. “We were learning while we were up in Rochester of the fact there would be no high school champions this year in the state of North Carolina. I’ve got a bunch of friends of mine playing for those things. My heart went out to them that they’re not going to get a chance to get that done. I know when I was a basketball player in high school or college, what it meant to play for a state or national championship. That’s tough. I felt so bad for those folks.
“At the same time, we just felt so fortunate to be able to be given a chance to do that. We wanted to take full advantage, and our guys did that. That we were down in all three games and rallied to win at the end speaks volumes of all our guys.”
The NCAA basketball tournaments were canceled that same Thursday that the Flyers learned they would play on. The spring sports championships quickly followed. On Monday, the NJCAA canceled all of its remaining basketball tournaments and spring sports, and the last major college conferences followed suit Tuesday, leaving Sandhills as the last champion crowned, maybe anywhere.
This story was originally published March 17, 2020 at 3:00 PM.
