Last time, William Nelson let his players down.
This time, they failed him.
In 1995 the Farragut coach arrived at the University of Illinois’ Assembly Hall with superstars Kevin Garnett and Ronnie Fields, yet managed to lose to Thornton 46-43 in the quarterfinals of the Class AA basketball tournament.
Thornton was a talented team in its own right, but Nelson–then a second-year head coach–has since acknowledged that his inexperience probably cost Farragut the game.
Nelson returned to the Elite Eight on Friday at Carver Arena, wiser as well as 9 years older. This time his team was the underdog, playing defending champion Peoria Central on the latter’s home turf, and this time it was his team that was poised to spring the upset.
It didn’t happen, mainly because Farragut’s guards ignored Nelson’s pleadings and treated Ollie Bailey as though he were Kukla or Fran instead of one of the top inside threats in the state. That oversight helped Peoria Central escape with a 42-40 victory and a semifinal date Saturday with Carbondale.
Carbondale dismissed Simeon 65-46 in the day’s first quarterfinal despite trailing by a point after three quarters. The reason, according to Simeon coach Bob Hambric, was similar to what sank Farragut: a failure to communicate.
“It wasn’t a difficulty in finding shots, it was a difficulty in people following directions,” Hambric said in explaining his team’s defeat.
The result was a quick end to Chicago Public League title hopes in the first quarterfinals since 1934 in which the league had more than one participant. Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan made that double play possible when he gave up the Public League’s guaranteed berth in the Class AA Elite Eight last year and sent his teams into the regionals like everyone else.
The next time he tweaks the CPS curriculum, however, he may want to add a class in listening skills, with a section on following directions.
Nelson, no doubt, would agree. His game plan was sound: Get the ball to Ollie, he reminded his players early and often. But his guards, perhaps blinded by the bright Elite Eight spotlight, took matters into their own hands in the fourth quarter instead of exploiting a foul-laden Central team by pounding the ball inside to Bailey, who had 16 of his 18 points in the first three quarters.
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The result was a series of miscues, including a charging foul and four turnovers, that turned a 39-34 fourth-quarter lead into a loss. It seemed almost symbolic that one of the few times Bailey got his hands on the ball late in the game, there was one second left and he was 90 feet from his basket.
A couple of very questionable foul calls that went against Farragut didn’t help matters, but had its perimeter players taken care of business–and Bailey–Nelson finally would have exorcised the demons of ’95.
“All we had to do was be patient,” said Nelson, too classy to try to pin the loss on the officials. “It seemed to work well for the first three quarters. We just needed to continue to do that.”
Afterward, Peoria Central coach Chuck Buescher and its All-America guard, Shaun Livingston, had the look of men who had avoided jail time despite having committed the crime.
“I feel very fortunate to win and feel very badly for him,” Buescher said of Nelson. “That was a hard game to lose.”
No one was more relieved to win than Livingston, who scored only seven points on 2-of-11 shooting and had three turnovers. “I’m just happy we get to live and play another day,” he said after rightly expressing his thanks to his teammates.
Simeon won’t get that luxury, an outcome Hambric called self-inflicted. The tide turned against his team, he said, starting late in the third quarter when his players strayed from the patient half-court offensive system that got them this far.
“We did a lot of things to ourselves,” Hambric said. “In essence we beat ourselves.”
Nelson most definitely could feel Simeon’s pain.
“You’ve got to be disciplined to move on to the next round,” he said.
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