I hope that you enjoy flipping through some of these pictures – I know that I enjoyed attending the Hawks’ games last season and I’m hoping for a better season next year. It’s a shame that a talented guy like Austin Tillotson decided to leave the team and the university, but if the kid didn’t feel comfortable in the program and wanted to go to a good academic school, then he has to make the right decision for him. And for Tillotson, that decision was to go to Colgate. If those are his reasons for leaving, I don’t think you can really blame him for making the move. Colgate is a nationally-ranked academic school while Monmouth has a modest ranking at a regional level. Colgate has about half of the enrollment that Monmouth has, so it seems to fit what the kid was looking for in his college experience.

Good for him – I wish him luck. And now, enjoy the pictures!

According to Rice the Hawks (2-10) had departed for the holidays prior to tip off.

“Our players already left, they weren’t here tonight,” Rice said. “They were already gone on break.”

“We didn’t come to play today,” Monmouth junior forward Ed Waite said.

Special thanks to The Hawks Nest blog on the Asbury Park Press website for the quotes. Coach Rice and Waite hit the nail on the head – those kids just weren’t into the game the other night. If you haven’t already, I suggest reading through the article that is linked to The Hawks Nest because in the comments section there is some discussion about how the pre-conference schedule might have impacted the players.

In short, these guys must be worn out.

Not only have they already played some 12 games, but they played against a high level of competition for the Monmouth program. In their pre-conference schedule alone, Monmouth played (and was beaten by) the following teams: Villanova, Virginia Tech, George Mason, Albany, Brown, Vanderbilt, Navy, and Rutgers. That’s some pretty stiff competition for a program that is coming out of a stifling stagnation from the last few years.

Most former athletes and sports types will tell you that you only get better by playing against better competition, but there’s only a little bit of truth in that statement. A team gets “better” by playing against better competition when one of two things happens. First, it raises the consistency and performance of the players to a higher level. Second, it elevates the program in the national perspective and allows them to bring in higher level recruits. There’s no way for us to know whether the latter has happened yet, but given the poor performance against Rider one might be able to argue that the former isn’t happening (yet).

Rider came into the MAC and beat Monmouth, 74 - 62

In fact, one might say that there is something about being consistently beaten by higher level competition that actually has a detracting effect on lower level teams. I guess we’ll have to see how the Hawks perform in the Northeast Conference before making that final determination.

And yet still, I think there is a lot of potential in this young team, their new coach, and their new system. There is at least hope in this system, which is something that was totally lacking over the last few years. Part of the problem that Coach Rice has to be running into is the fact that he hasn’t yet felt the impact of any of his recruiting efforts. At times the other night I got the impression that Rice was frustrated with his players checking out for Christmas before the game was over. Towards the end of the game it appeared like he was rotating his players in an effort to get at least one of them to up their game – and it wasn’t happening to any remarkable level at all.

Finally, aside from the poor end result I thought that Austin Tillotson played very well (he’s an aggressive player – as a fan I’m glad he’s on the team). Also, I thought that Jesse Steele had an okay game. Sure, it wasn’t as good as his performance against Fordham University last week, but the entire team played well against Fordham so it was easier for Steele to elevate his own play.

Here’s looking forward to a “W” on January 5th when the Hawks take on Mount St. Mary’s at their next home game. And here’s looking forward to much better scheduling next year – only two home games before the new year? Really?!

The Monmouth Hawks won their home opener over the weekend

The first thing that I noticed was that the people who actually attended the game were excited and into the action. According to various reports there were slightly over 1,800 people in attendance (which means the arena was slightly less than half full) and I’m sure that the young men who were playing for Monmouth enjoyed actually hearing the fans cheer for them when they scored. Remember, by some brilliant stroke of scheduling genius (sarcasm) the Hawks played NINE away games to start their season. Imagine playing 9 away games where there are just a handful of your fans in the stands if any at all. Not smart… And on that topic, Monmouth will only play 2 home games before January 1st this season. Last season, they played 6 home games plus an exhibition game before the new year. The year before they played 5 home games before the new year. Something about scheduling just 2 home games before the new year doesn’t sit right with me as a season ticket holder; not to mention that there are only 12 scheduled home games last year as compared with 15 last year (16 with the exhibition) and 14 the year before. But aside from the head-scratching scheduling, as a season ticket holder and team supporter I’m more concerned with the kids on the team. Up until Saturday night, these kids player this season with nearly no fan support. I’m sure that they enjoyed the standing ovations, chants, and cheers that the fans gave them throughout the game on Saturday night.

And those guys deserved every little bit of the support, too.

The team was led by Jesse Steele’s outstanding performance (which earned him NEC Player of the Week honors) where he scored “18 points while contributing six assists, five boards and a steal.” That quote was from the linked article, which I suggest you read when you get a chance.

Two more comments about Saturday night’s game and then we’ll call it a day for this entry. First, I was very encouraged by the new Head Coach King Rice and his style of motivating his players. Whereas the previous head coach opted to hoot, holler, and yell at nearly every player during what seemed like every second of the game, Coach Rice was cooler, calmer, and more collected than his predecessor. And this may sound like an odd comment to make after only watching one game under the new coach, but it appeared like the players were more confident in their game plan. In other words, it seemed like the dramatic decrease in the constant yelling and screaming coming from the bench made the players more confident in doing what they do best – play basketball.

After the last two seasons of Hawks basketball it was nice to see confident Hawks players for a change.

Second and finally, I have two comments about The Varsity Club. I missed Coach Rice’s post-game speech in The Varsity Club because the two dopes that I went to the game with didn’t want to hang around too late after the game was over. We had a small housewarming party to get to after the game and these two guys acted as though their entire lives depended on running out the MAC and getting to that party. Granted, we did wait around for a little while upstairs to hear Coach Rice talk, but the coach must have been held up doing something downstairs. So, about 30 minutes after the game ended we left The Varsity Club because the dopes that I went to the game with ramped their bitching complaining up to an absurd level. That said, what I heard about Coach Rice’s speech was all positive. The word is that he was very sincere and very thankful for the fans who came out and supported the team.

The second comment about The Varsity Club was that the pregame food preparation was not that good – at all. For starters, for the second time in the last few weeks The Varsity Club was serving chicken on the bone as the main entree and a very weak side dish (pierogies). I’m a firm believer that if you’re serving a large group of diverse people, then you can’t have one (or two) main entrees that feature a meat stuck to a piece of bone. You can have baked chicken on the bone, but then you have to also serve a pasta in red sauce or a tray of sandwiches or something. You can’t just have meat on the bone (cue jokes from my roommates on that comment). But what was more disturbing was that they ran out of food about 45 minutes into the pregame meal! Sure, they brought some more food out about 15 minutes before the game started (including meat that wasn’t stuck to a bone), but I was a little surprised that they didn’t anticipate the demand for space in The Varsity Club for the first home game. All anyone had to do was talk to any of the season ticket holders and they would have realized that there was a huge demand for one of these damn home games already. Of course there were going to be a lot of people in The Varsity Club! I submitted my comments to the gentleman who runs that show up there and he was very cool about it and admitted that they just underestimated the demand for the pregame meal before the game.

Understood. It happens.

Here’s looking forward to the next home game on Thursday, December 22nd!

Finkel at his best

That thought went through my head watching the game tonight. The wheels fell off of the whole thing tonight and it wasn’t fun or exciting to watch most of the game.

Amid all of the doom and gloom, I really feel bad for the student athletes who are out there giving it their all for the entire game. With four students suspended, Monmouth is down to an eight man team. That’s tough for any team to overcome, I don’t care who they are. However, over the last few home games I’ve noticed that there’s something missing from the Monmouth team – there’s a spark missing, there’s an excitement missing, there’s an aggressive determination to win at all costs missing – hell, there’s a student cheering section missing!

Something’s not right in West Long Branch.

Something needs to be done. I don’t know what because I admit that I don’t know enough about running a Division 1 basketball program to know how to bring in what’s missing. But I do know enough to know that these games are getting sadder and sadder.

You can get all of the stats for the game on the official Hawks website. There are 32 pictures of the game below. Enjoy!

Mike Myers Keitt on defense

I’m not into the blame game so I don’t know if it was a coaching issue or the fact that the Haws are down four players in their rotation or whatever. What I do know, though, is that the team simply got outplayed tonight. Look – sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and tonight, the Hawks appeared to be outplayed by a decent Sacred Heart team. I have to stress, though, that the Pioneers were a “decent” team – not the type of team where you have to call someone up and tell them, “Oh my God! These guys are AMAZING!!!” But a decent team nonetheless.

So far this season, what I’ve found interesting while watching the Hawks is that they tend to play to their competition’s level. When they played against Villanova they had moments of real greatness where, as a fan in the audience, I was extremely impressed. When they played against Quinnipiac the Hawks looked like they should have been ranked the number one team in the conference. And just 48 hours after that great performance against the Bobcats, the Hawks played down a little bit (sure, exhaustion had to play into it, too) and they wound up getting routed at home in front of more than 850 fans.

By the way, 850+ fans in bad weather – nice showing!

The Monmouth Hawks website has some quotes from after the game and I think Head Coach Dave Calloway hit the nail right on the head with this one about the poor defense tonight:

We were just not good enough on the defensive end. I thought we scored enough points, but we gave up too many. We gave up 51 points in the second half and you aren’t going to win many games if you give up that many points.

Here’s hoping that things turnaround for the Hawks – and soon. I’ve got 32 pictures from the game below for you to peruse through at your leisure. I kept the same close up/larger style that I had in the Quinnipiac pictures since I thought that they looked pretty good. I hope that you enjoy them!

Who knows?

Jesse Steele and the Hawks on defense

In any event, I do have some thoughts on last night’s game. First, I can’t tell you enough how impressed I was with the Monmouth players after all of the crap that they’ve had to deal with in the last week.

I think that Quinnipiac might have been a little bit better conditioned than some of the Monmouth squad, but the Bobcats also had the ability to sub in more players more frequently. Although, I’m not sure if it was such a bad thing that Monmouth didn’t have a large pool of players to draw from on the bench. At some point last night it seemed like there was some cohesion and energy among the five active Monmouth players and part of me wants to believe that was because they were able to play together for longer periods of time. However, there was one point when Mike Myers Keitt – Monmouth’s leading scorer last night – motioned to his bench that he needed to be taken out for a moment.

But what do I know? I’m just a guy sitting in the crowd.

Tony Graham at the Hawks Nest has a good review of the game with some quotes from all of the gang. For example, since Monmouth missed five foull shots in a row, most folks who watched last night’s game came away saying, “What was the deal with those foul shots at the end?! Come on, Monmouth!” Well, Head Coach Dave Calloway addresses the foul shot issue on the Hawks Nest:

“If you make three more foul shots along the way it’s a different game,” Calloway said. “There’s lots of things we did well in the game but there’s lots of things to work on.”

And the coach is right – you sink those five foul shots in a row and Monmouth wins 75 – 73. But playing that type of second guessing game probably isn’t the most productive use of one’s time. Kevin O’Rourke over at the New Jersey Newsroom’s Pressbox put up some additional quotes from Coach Calloway including:

“We’ve had a lot of games that have gone that way this year, down to the last possession and you come up one short, one possession short,” Calloway said. “We’ll look back at the tape tonight and re-hash some of those possessions, especially the last couple of minutes. If we could have done one thing better, we win the game.”

That seems like a better use of time and efforts, don’t you think? And maybe someone can figure out how in the world Monmouth had 17 turnovers last night. Aside from those foul shots, if the team doesn’t turn the ball over so much, then you have a completely different game. Or, as one the assistant coaches kept yelling last night – if the opposition doesn’t score on the turnover, you essentially negate the impact of turning the ball over. Monmouth wasn’t able to prevent Quinnipiac from scoring on some of those turnovers and do you know what that gives you? A heartbreaking loss at home.

Anyway, below are some 44 pictures from the game last night. And hey – I normally adjust the pictures to be 800 pixels on their largest side (i.e. the pictures are never larger than 800 pixels on any one side). This time around, I tried taking pictures in a slightly different style with more zooming and less wide shots. Also, I adjusted the settings on the pictures so that the largest side is now 1024 pixels. In other words, if you’re looking for a little more detail than usual, these pictures should give you what you want. Let me know if you like the changes and I’ll keep this style of pictures for future home games. Enjoy!

Jesse Steele on defense

Your best review of the game including post-game quotes from the Hawks head coach Dave Calloway and some of the players will come from Tony Graham at The Hawks Nest. Here is a quote from Jordan Davis that appeared on The Hawks Nest after the game tonight. I think Davis’ quote pretty much sums up the game tonight:

“We just never give up,” Davis said. “We keep fighting and we keep fighting. Today was a perfect example. We came back and finished it up.”

I have a bunch of comments that I’d like to make about this game on a variety of topics, but I’m exhausted and I have to be awake early in the morning to get to work. The two comments that I’ll make right now before I turn in, though, is that Phil Wait had a monster game tonight and I use the term “monster” because I think tonight was the first time that I saw him really dominate on defense. Here’s a guy who is some seven feet tall and the idiots on Bryant’s squad were dumb enough to run directly into him. If I’m not mistaken, that happened twice and both time the poor fool that ran into him fell on their ass with no foul called. The second time it happened I said to my buddy, “That’s what happens when you run directly into a brick wall.”

Here’s hoping that Wait has more performances like he had tonight against the rest of the Northeast Conference competition.

The second comment that I’ll make is that I love when the Hawks get focused and aggressive in their play. Going into the second half, I think it was obvious to any fan watching that something changed in the team’s play. As a guy who played sports at a highly competitive level, I’m always looking for that type of aggressive and diligent performance from the athletes. Sometimes it’s hard to find that with the Hawks (especially during the first half of their home games). However, the Hawks that played in the second half of tonight’s game were focused and aggressive and it showed. They outscored Bryant 36 to 9 in the last 18 minutes of the game.

That’s something to be proud of and the Hawks should be proud of their performance in the second half tonight.

Below are some 36 pictures from tonight’s game. Sorry, no captions right now since I’m rushing to get to bed. I’ll try to come back tomorrow with some additional thoughts on the game embedded within this post. Check back tomorrow after 5pm to see if I have any additional thoughts and some of the captions for these pictures. In the mean time, enjoy!