| Malachi Briscoe held the Gettysburg Bullets together until new head coach Matt Hunter was hired, days before practice began. Together, the Bullets bounced back from a slow start to win the Centennial Conference title. Gettysburg athletics photo |
By Ryan Scott
D3hoops.com
Often a senior captain will be described as a coach on the floor, that’s very rarely as accurate as it is with Gettysburg’s Malachi Briscoe. The 6-6 forward found himself in a difficult position when, on the first day of classes this fall, it was announced his coach, BJ Dunne, was leaving Gettysburg to become the new head men’s basketball coach at MIT.
“He told us before the official announcement was made, but it was still extremely surprising,” says Briscoe. “Two years prior there were rumors about the Hopkins job, so I thought it was only a matter of time, but when we made it through the summer, I thought he’d stay at least one more year. We found out the day after the freshmen moved in.”
A newly hired assistant coach, understandably, found other work, and there was nobody readily available to step in as interim. Adding complications, Troy Dell, the athletic director, had just been hired a month before. Briscoe took it in stride.
“Every emotion ran through me,” he recalls. “As a senior captain, I was thinking about the freshmen — they just arrived at Gettysburg, they don’t know anything yet. We called the whole team together at my apartment to bring reassurance to the guy that it’s a brotherhood that we have. No matter what happens, we stay close-knit. We set rules in place, decided what we’d do as a team. It was a whirlwind at the beginning.”
Briscoe met with the strength and conditioning coach to set up a schedule and made sure his team worked out regularly and got their court time in.
“We started playing pickup twice a week, like we normally do. We were lifting three days a week. We had to do gear ourselves. A bunch of gear came in, so we did that ourselves, handed it out to the team. I tried to run it how BJ ran it my three years before.”
The other coaches in the department offered assistance as needed, but “Coach Briscoe” kept the train on the track until Matt Hunter was hired at the end of September. Hunter left a more than capable assistant and former player, Jared Wagner, at York (Pa.), so they would not be in the same situation he was walking into at Gettysburg.
Says Hunter, “These last 48 hours [winning the conference tournament and preparing for the NCAAs] have been stressful, but that whole month my stomach was turning upside down and inside out more days than not as we worked through the process here.”
“It was all about timing,” he continues. “I had 13 years of great relationships at York College; it was very emotional, but Gettysburg is one of the top schools in the world and that opportunity is unique. It was a chance to do something new and create a new situation. My family didn’t have to move. That was a big thing.”
Not having a coach for most of the non-traditional period left those 10 available practice days wide open for Hunter’s arrival.
“We didn’t get to use any of them, though,” he says. “I started on the 6th [of October] and fall break started the 9th. The guys left town for a week and the day everyone got back, we had our first practice that night. We did some speed dating, but we all got to know each other in the gym.”
Three short weeks of prep for a new coach at a program that graduated five of the top seven minute earners, including three starters from the year before.
“This was a good year for a change,” says Hunter. “Roles were changing and with a large incoming class, the situation would have to be different no matter who was the coach. We’ve kept things very simple all year.”
And the challenges kept coming. Dunne also left a really tough schedule to navigate, including Randolph-Macon in the second game of the year. The Bullets showed up in a big way. Hunter played 10 guys 10 minutes or more trying to figure out what he had, they held RMC under 40% shooting, and had the lead with a minute to go, losing by just three points.
It was disappointing, but it was proof that the team had held together, they’d put in the work, and now, together, they’d tackle a long and difficult season.
There were certainly ups and downs. They took enough losses that an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament was out of the cards pretty early in conference season.
“We never thought about it,” says Briscoe. “One of our managers told me we won 10 in a row; I didn’t even know.” Hunter said the same: “I still don’t know how to get from my office to the locker room to the gym the fastest way. I was just focused on getting to the next game.”
Despite higher rankings and flashier NPI numbers from Centennial Conference foes Franklin & Marshall and Johns Hopkins, Gettysburg grinded out a first place seed in the conference tournament and an undefeated conference record at home — their only home losses all year were to Macon and Mary Washington.
“We love playing at Bream,” says Briscoe with a big smile, ‘Beat Hopkins’ visible on the whiteboard behind him. “It’s a great environment. We make a lot of shots in Bream. It’s awesome having the community we have in Bream every single night.”
The Bullets rode that advantage right into an automatic bid and a really satisfying culmination to a tumultuous season. The NCAA committee sent them back to Wesleyan, where Gettysburg played first and second round games in last year’s tournament.
“It’s definitely nice being able to go back to the same place — you know the gym already, you know the rims, you know the court. We’ll have an advantage that we’ve played there before,” says Briscoe. They’ll have to introduce it all to Hunter, but that’s fine, he says. “They’ve been introducing me to everything all year.”
The unfortunate ending to Briscoe’s season is that he’ll be on the bench for the first round game against NYU. He injured his wrist in the conference semifinal and was replaced in the starting lineup by freshman Reece Craft who, get this, decommitted from Swarthmore when Landry Kosmalski left for Campbell.
You couldn’t write a story like this, maybe because it would be unfair, certainly it wouldn’t be believable. Gettysburg has weathered the storm, though — maybe buoyed by the memory of an historic improbable victory just over the fence from campus — they’re locked in and ready to go. They’ll have two coaches on the sideline, leading the charge.