ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — He first used this word the night his team knocked off UCLA in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.
St. Bonaventure coach Mark Schmidt called his group, including himself, “a bunch of misfits.”
He meant it as a term of endearment.
For years now, the Bonnies have succeeded in the Atlantic 10 with underrecruited and undervalued players and coaches. Since 2012, Bona has the third-highest win total and fourth-best winning percentage in the conference. It’s done that without a single top 100 player, without a multi-million dollar practice facility, without anything even approaching a top-end budget.
Eleven years and three months since taking the job — three straight 20-win seasons, two trips to the Big Dance and one Atlantic 10 Tournament title later — Schmidt has an unmistakable identity in place at St. Bonaventure.
Dayton’s “True Team” persona took hold the year it dominated the league despite a depleted roster that, at one point, left it with six scholarship players. Rhode Island had an identity under Dan Hurley characterized by physicality and toughness.
Bona has its own: teams that continue to win as the perennial underdog.
“We may not be highly recruited, we may not be in the magazines as top 100 players, but it doesn’t matter,” Schmidt said in an hour-long interview with the Olean Times Herald in late June. “It doesn’t matter what it says in the magazines; the games are played on the court.
“That was our whole thing, with the coaching staff and the players. We take it as a challenge … that maybe we can’t get that top 100 player, maybe we don’t have the best facility or the best locker room or the biggest city. But what we have, we’re going to make the most of it. That’s what we’ve done.”
The symbol for that mentality, the culture now firmly in place within his program, is the building itself.
“I feel the Reilly Center on game night, there isn’t a better place in the country,” Schmidt said. “Now, when it’s empty, it’s not the best-looking facility, but on game night there isn’t a better place, and I think our players take on that personality.
“Our players and our coaching staff take on the personality of this community — hard-nosed, blue collar, a work ethic. That’s what we try to do. Our guys may not be the prettiest, but at the end of the day, it’s about getting the job done.”
With such an attitude, and an extended penchant for winning, there almost comes a feeling that no matter what a program lost, it’ll continue to be successful. It’s a mindset that defined banner programs Dayton and VCU for years.
Bona has had so much success in the last four years, accumulating 86 total victories and at least 10 league wins in each campaign, that it’s beginning to creep into that territory.
Given what they have back — two all-conference-caliber players in Courtney Stockard and LaDarien Griffin — and how the recruiting class came together this spring, many fans believe the Bonnies will keep rolling along next season.
But this is a team that loses two of the greatest guards in school history, a pair of near-2,000-point scorers, and will have more new faces than returning players.
Is it fair to put those kinds of expectations on such a new-look group?
“It’s great to have that enthusiasm, but you can’t expect the freshmen to be Jay (Adams) and Matt (Mobley),” Schmidt said. “Jay and Matt weren’t Jay and Matt as freshmen.
“The future is bright, because I think we have good young talent, but it’s good young talent. It’s young, it’s inexperienced. That’s why I’m saying our veteran guys need to take that next step.”
In those last four years, Bona’s success, of course, hinged largely on its backcourt. From Marcus Posley to Adams to Mobley, it always had one, if not two, All-Atlantic 10 guards.
Now, it has one guard with A-10 experience, rising senior Nelson Kaputo, another, UNLV transfer Jalen Poyser, who’s undoubtedly talented but unproven in this league, and a handful of question marks.
And Adams and Mobley aren’t the only key losses, Schmidt pointed out.
“Losing Idris (Taqqee) is a big deal, too,” he said. “(He did things) the ordinary fan doesn’t understand.
“Idris took all that flak — he can’t shoot, he can’t do that — but the sucker won 86 games in four years. He was always around the ball, he was a guy you could trust. His leadership is going to be lost just as much as Jay’s and Matt’s scoring ability.”
Next year’s Bonnies might not exude the same kind of no-doubt feel last year’s team had, but there are still any number of reasons to be excited about their prospects. And with no run-away league favorites, there’s still very much an open path to the top four.
And though there’s a clear culture in place, their collective memory will be short.
“We can’t worry about what happened last year,” Schmidt said. “Like I told the team a month ago, we’re 0-0. Last year’s not going to help us. What people are saying about us is not going to help us. The only thing we can worry about is how well we prepare in the summertime for the preseason. We can’t worry about what people are saying good, bad, indifferent.”
His case in point?
“Everybody thought we were terrific going into last year,” he said. Expectations were high, then we lost to Niagara and everybody jumps off the bandwagon. So you can’t worry about what people say, you just have to go to work every day.
“Give our guys credit, since we’ve been here, they’ve come to work every day and gotten better. It’s good that people feel like we have some good players, but now we’ve got to go out and prove it.”
More than wins and losses, more than another 20-win season, they have to continue playing their version of St. Bonaventure basketball, Schmidt said, the kind they’ve played whether they’ve been 15-15 or 26-8.
This is how he’s always described it: That, no matter what, the people who come out to games get their money’s worth. When they walk to their cars in the blistering cold after a mid-January game with Saint Joseph’s, “they know the team has given everything.”
“And that’s what we’ve done,” Schmidt said. “The thing I’m most proud of, wins and losses, whatever — it’s those people when, they leave the arena, they’re proud of the product that was put on the court.
“We lose against Davidson in triple overtime, there’s not one person that can walk to the car and say, ‘We didn’t get our money’s worth,’ and that’s what we try to do. I’m proud of how we’ve done it.”
(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at jbutler@oleantimesherald.com)
