Even though the NCAA tourney has been canceled we can still hear from the players/coaches who were good enough to make it. On Tuesday Hofstra beat Northeastern 70-61 in the CAA tourney title game to earn an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. The Pride lost to the Huskies in last year’s CAA tourney but bounced back this year to claim the school’s 1st NCAA tourney bid since 2001. Earlier today HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to speak with assistant coach Mike Farrelly about what it feels like to make the NCAA tourney as a coach in 2020 after making it as a player back in 2001/2003.
You played basketball at St. Joe’s for Coach Phil Martelli, where your teams made a pair of NCAA tourneys: what is your favorite memory from your prior tourney experience? Just watching the selection show with my teammates. We did not get an auto-bid but assumed we would get an at-large bid so we just had to wonder what seed we would be. To see our team’s name pop up on the screen is something that I will never forget.
You now work for Coach Joe Mihalich: what makes him such a good coach, and what is the most important thing that you have ever learned from him? He is an unbelievable person and his biggest strength is as a great motivator. He gives our guys the confidence to do things that they might not have thought they could do before. He is a veteran who knows how to run a program and how to deal with any situation.
In the 2019 NIT you had a 6-PT loss to NC State: what did your team learn from that game that helped them this year? I remember that Jalen Ray had an open 3 in front of our bench toward the end of the game that would have cut their lead to 1. It was a great learning experience for us. They got a ton of offensive REB (19) as both teams missed a lot of threes while testing out the experimental 3-PT line. It was a road game in a tough environment, which I think helped us this year when we won on the road at UCLA back in November.
You lost back-to-back 2-PT games in mid-January but have won 12 of 13 since then: how were you able to turn things around in the middle of conference play? Both of those losses involved our opponents shooting an airball toward the end of the game and then putting the ball in the hoop right before the buzzer. I think it allowed us to to really re-focus. We played hard against Charleston and knew that we would get to play them again in February, and Delaware was 1 of our worst transition defense games of the year. It showed that every game really matters and that you have to be solid possession by possession: it does not always come down to the final play of the game.
Your team is top-20 in the country with 78.6 FT%/37.4 3P%: what is the key to being a great shooter? A couple of things. You need to shoot the ball the correct way: using the right form, keeping your elbow in, etc. Then you need to build your confidence by shooting it the right way over and over and over and getting reps in before and after practice. Not everyone is a good shooter when they 1st come to college but if they put in the work they can become an unbelievable shooter. FT shooting is about pure confidence: Coach Mihalich likes to say “Tough kids make FTs”.
Last week SR PG Desure Buie won the CAA Leadership Award and was named 1st-team all-conference: what makes him such a great player/leader? He is such an amazing story. He did not play much as a freshman and we brought in some other PGs to compete with him. To see him take the reins of our team 2 seasons ago and eventually make it his team has been great. Everyone loves/respects him so he can yell at his teammates when he needs to and put his arm around them when he needs to. He kept developing as a player and took an extra step this year as a senior in both workouts and games.
In the CAA tourney title game last Tuesday you had a 9-PT win over Northeastern to clinch the title: how were you able to overcome a halftime deficit, and what was the feeling like in your locker room afterward? We have had tough games with them all year: we needed a buzzer-beater to win at Northeastern and overcame a huge deficit against them at our place so we knew that it would be a battle. It was not a big concern to be down 2 PTS at halftime: we were just worried about getting better shots by trying to get some steals/rebounds on the defensive end. I felt like I was on Cloud 9 to get the win and it is something that I will never forget it.
The Pride have not made the NCAA tourney since 2001: what has the reaction been like since you returned to campus? It has just been a weird situation. Hofstra was shut down this week so there are no students on campus but we had a lot of great supporters in DC with us. It is just devastating that we cannot play in the NCAA tourney next week. We were probably not going to win it all, which means that we would have lost our last game of the season, but this way at least we get to go out with a great victory and an unbelievable feeling.
What kind of seed do you think that you deserved? I think that we were going to a 13 or 14 seed, which is often what our conference champ gets. Not a lot of schools in our range have a road win at UCLA on their resume but we would have had an opportunity to beat someone really good.
Any thoughts on the impact of the coronavirus on college basketball this month? Certainly it is very scary and I am glad that steps are being taken to be cautious. In my heart of hearts I hoped that playing in front of 100-200 people would be enough to go forward, or postponing it to “April Madness” would be an option, but the way things developed in the NBA the night before and then to wake up and see all of the conference tourney games getting canceled meant that the situation was heading in a bad direction. It was a rough night last night and it has been a rough morning today: we put in so much work this year and our seniors will never get that chance again. The NCAA tourney is the biggest thing in our lives: I do not know if people understand how important it is to us.