To some basketball purists, Indiana’s Bob Knight and DePaul’s Doug Bruno stooped to conquer last weekend.
Both coaches, taught by some of the game’s greatest teachers that man-to-man defense is the only defense, resorted to zones to earn key victories.
Knight’s Indiana men edged Northwestern and its dominating 6-foot-11-inch Evan Eschmeyer because Knight assigned two defenders to shadow Eschmeyer while the other three Hoosiers deployed in a zone that tried to defend against the other four Wildcats.
Bruno, with a nudge from his assistant Ed Collins, put his best defensive player and best athlete, 6-0 sophomore Sylvia Blakeslee, at the point of the 3-2 zone that produced victories over North Carolina-Charlotte and St. Louis.
“We had no chance to play Eschmeyer with any kind of standard defense,” Knight said. “I hope my mentors in this game were looking somewhere else.”
Knight’s mentors include Fred Taylor, his coach at Ohio State..
Bruno’s mentor at DePaul was staunch man-to-man advocate Ray Meyer. Meyer wasn’t disturbed that his protege had used the zone in Alumni Hall.
“That’s OK,” Meyer said. “I used the zone many times.”
“Yes, Coach Ray used zones when he had ham-and-egg players like me playing against teams like Marquette with Jim Chones,” Bruno said. “But my players are not ham-and-eggers. They’re very good players. It’s just that the zone was right for Charlotte.
Charlotte knocked DePaul out of the Conference USA tournament last year and beat the Blue Demons in North Carolina earlier this season.
“Charlotte’s coach, Ed Baldwin, likes his players to run his patterns,” Bruno said. “So, in the last game, we worked very hard at taking them out of their patterns. Then, when we did that, their players felt, `Great, we can’t run coach’s plays, so we’ll just play one-on-one and take it to the hole.’ And they beat us with their athletic ability.
“I felt certain the zone would help us beat Charlotte. After Charlotte, maybe our players thought the zone was their magic lamp. It wasn’t magic against St. Louis, but it helped us make some stops at the finish.”
Blakeslee applied pressure against the opposing point guard. Guards Tracy Krumrei and Anne McDonald, playing the wings out front, edged into the passing lanes and picked off steals. Lenae Williams and Jeanene Novick, zoned on the baseline, defended effectively.
Will Bruno have his Blue Demons play zone at Marquette on Sunday or in the upcoming Conference USA tournament in New Orleans?
“It’s in our repertoire,” Bruno said.
Crowded house: More than 30,000 fans, including a capacity crowd of more than 16,000 in Champaign, will watch Illinois’ last two regular-season games Friday night at Wisconsin and Sunday at home against Iowa.
“I remember walking up the stairs in Huff Gym and seeing maybe 800 or 900 people there,” fourth-year coach Theresa Grentz said. “That annoyed me. I thought, `I’ve got to change this . . . to fix this.’ “
Big game: Josie Cole, Illinois-Chicago’s sophomore guard from Washington High School, played a huge role as the Flames snapped a nine-game losing streak and edged Wright State 52-50 in Toledo, Ohio.
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Cole, who did not play as a freshman and missed the first nine games this season with a shoulder injury, scored nine of her career-high 19 points in a 15-3 run when the Flames charged from a 10-point deficit late in the game. Her final point broke a 50-50 tie.