IUPUI heads to Horizon League tournament with five players but hopes for a better tomorrow | Opinion
INDIANAPOLIS – It’s almost March, and absolute madness: IUPUI basketball will play its Horizon League Tournament opener Tuesday night at Oakland with five players.
Not five scholarship players, or even five healthy players. Just, players. Five of them. Total.
What happens, I’m asking IUPUI coach Matt Crenshaw, if someone fouls out?
“We’ll play a box,” he says, and I’m starting to laugh, because I know where he’s going.
“Not a box-and-one,” he says. “Just a box.”
Now Crenshaw is laughing, a deep sound like rolling thunder that starts somewhere back in December, back when the craziest, zaniest story of the 2021-22 college basketball season began. Back when the thunderclouds started to form over a program that has seen nothing but rain for years.
IUPUI basketball's five-man roster
Before we get to the genesis of this story, a story as hard and unforgiving as the Old Testament, let’s start with the names:
- Mike DePersia, 5-11 junior guard from Cherry Hill, New Jersey
- Nathan McClure, 6-4 junior guard from Houston.
- B.J. Maxwell, 6-5 senior guard from Austin, Texas.
- Boston Stanton III, 6-5 freshman guard from Denver.
- Chuks Isitua, 6-11 freshman center from Lagos, Nigeria.
That’s who will represent 12th-seeded IUPUI (3-25, 1-16 Horizon) on Tuesday night. That’s 39.7 ppg, combined. That’s 36.9% shooting from the floor, and 28.9% from 3-point range. That’s 171 assists, and 236 turnovers.
That’s all, folks.
A program gutted by apathy, neglect
It takes years for a program to reach this point, years of apathy, even neglect.
IUPUI basketball has dealt with both since the program was created in 1971, two years after the school opened in downtown Indianapolis. In those days the Jaguars were an NCAA Division III school playing at “The Jungle,” an on-campus arena that seats 1,200, but as the enrollment grew and the television money in college basketball grew, the greed of the state school system grew.
IUPUI became an NCAA Division I member in 1998, and moved into the 6,800-capacity Indiana Farmers Coliseum on the Indiana State Fairgrounds in 2014. There were some good years under Ron Hunter, including a spot in the 2003 NCAA Tournament, the school’s only appearance, but Hunter left for Georgia State in 2011 and the slide started.
Since then the Jaguars have gone 108-224, though there was hope entering the 2019-20 season. Jason Gardner, the 1999 IndyStar Mr. Basketball winner from North Central who starred at Arizona, was coming off his best season of five, a 16-17 mark with a returning roster that included Franklin Central’s Marcus Burk, who would contend for the national scoring championship; Elyjah Goss, who would contend for the national rebounding title; Jaylen Minnett, who would become the program’s career leader in 3-pointers; and Camron Justice, a charismatic former Mr. Basketball winner from Kentucky and a senior guard coming off an All-Horizon second-team season.
Two months before the 2019-20 season began, Jason Gardner was arrested on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated in Hamilton County. He spent the night in jail, was released on his own recognizance on Aug. 27, 2019, and promptly resigned from IUPUI.
That’s when this whole thing really began, with the arrest and resignation of Gardner, the emergency promotion of assistant Byron Rimm II, and then two years of purgatory. Citing a system-wide hiring freeze, IUPUI parent schools IU and Purdue wouldn’t give the Jaguars the go-ahead to hire a full-time replacement for Gardner for two years, so Rimm stayed as interim coach for 2019-20 and 2020-21.
The Jaguars won seven games in 2020 and eight in 2021. Justice was long gone, having transferred to Western Kentucky, and after the 2021 season the Jaguars’ top three scorers left with eligibility remaining: Burk (21.7 ppg in 2021), Minnett (16.4 ppg) and Goss (11.1 ppg, 11.6 rpg).
IUPUI hired Matt Crenshaw, a former Jaguars point guard and assistant coach who had spent the previous three seasons at Ball State. It was April 13, 2021.
By then the transfer portal had been thoroughly scavenged. IUPUI’s roster was full anyway, its 13-player scholarship allotment taken, when players began leaving:
Dimitri Georgiadis, a 6-9 power forward, transferred to Virginia Tech to switch sports and become the world’s tallest tight end. Acton Shirley, a 7-0 center, transferred to San Diego Christian College. Sawyer Stoltz, a 6-9 forward from Huntington, Ind., didn’t go anywhere; he stayed at IUPUI for its Kelley School of Business.
That left IUPUI with 10 players.
“And then we started getting hurt,” Crenshaw says.
One 'healthy' player needs surgery
The IUPUI men’s basketball team leaving Indianapolis for its Horizon League opener at fifth-seeded Oakland will pull out of downtown in a rental. These are arrangements made months ago, and back then the Jaguars had ordered a large bus typical of such trips.
“But we’ve downsized,” Crenshaw’s telling me, and I’m asking him: Into what, a Chevy Cruze?
Crenshaw’s laughing some more, deep and rumbling, because what else can you do?
“That’s what it feels like – get a (GMC) Yukon, and we’re there,” he says. “No, we just got a smaller bus.”
Since Jan. 22 the Jaguars have been playing with six players after injuries that started in October with Ball State transfer Zach Gunn’s torn ACL. IUPUI went into its final regular-season game, Saturday against Green Bay, with those six players. It was Senior Day, moved to The Jungle because the Farmers Coliseum was being used by the Indiana Fuel, and a seemingly winnable game. Green Bay was having a rough season as well, entering with a 4-24 record.
Then this happened:
A loose ball, less than three minutes into the game, near the feet of second-leading IUPUI scorer and playmaker Bakari LaStrap (8.0 points, 2.5 assists per game). A Green Bay player dives for it, sending both to the floor. LaStrap is grimacing, but he gets up. He tells a teammate he’s OK.
“I started to feel better,” Crenshaw says, “but then you see a limp, and at the next dead ball he hobbles off. That’s when reality sunk in.”
Down to five players.
And not even five healthy players. Isitua, the team’s only frontcourt player, needs foot surgery. Doctors say his issue now is one of pain tolerance, that he cannot exacerbate the ailment by playing on it, so Isitua continues to play.
“He has surgery scheduled in two weeks,” Crenshaw says. “If this was normal season, with a full roster, he’d have had surgery and be redshirted. He’s in extreme pain.”
Green Bay, which entered The Jungle on an 11-game losing skid, beat IUPUI by 26 points. Now the Jaguars head to Oakland for the Horizon League Tournament, where they will play a zone to avoid foul trouble, and milk the clock on offense to limit possessions.
“No quick shots,” Crenshaw says, “unless it’s a wide-open layup.”
The end is nigh, but the future is brighter. IUPUI, which hadn’t signed a player from the great basketball state of Indiana in four years, has two of them in Crenshaw’s incoming class: the high-scoring, high-flying Jarrard twins – Armon and Ahmad – of Mount Vernon.
No state recruits in four years is another sign of the neglect, the lack of vision and care, for the IUPUI program, but things are changing. Behind the scenes, some of the most powerful movers and shakers in town – you’d recognize their names – are trying to raise money for an on-campus arena.
And IUPUI has a coach who cares, a 2004 alum who will head north with five players and take on a 19-11 Oakland team that beat the Jaguars 78-45 in December when IUPUI had 10 players. After the season ends, whenever that is, Matt Crenshaw will start the rebuilding process. But he’d like some help: yours.
“We want people to understand that even with what we’ve dealt with, we’re still competing, and we still need support for the future,” Crenshaw says. “It’s Indianapolis, and there are a lot of schools around here – Butler, IU, Purdue – but everybody still can support us, too. We can do great things and make the city proud. We just need a little support.”
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.