Business as usual for High Point despite unusual underdog status

High Point has been favored most of season en route to Big South title, but Panthers now take on Cinderella status against Purdue. (Photo by Jaden Daly/Daly Dose Of Hoops)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — With 29 wins and a Big South Conference championship under its belt, High Point is not your typical Cinderella.

Yet here are the Panthers, about to don the proverbial gown as the No. 13 seed in the Midwest regional, taking on last year’s national runner-up Purdue in their NCAA Tournament debut. But despite the different circumstances this week, head coach Alan Huss did find a positive in the underdog label thrust onto his team.

“It makes you have a mental edge,” he said Wednesday, one day before High Point tips off against the Boilermakers. “I think that’s the one advantage we have (as) we move into this space. We’ve been on edge all season. If we don’t have our best stuff, we’re walking into an environment, we’re walking into a team and it’s one of the biggest games on their schedule, so I think that’s helpful for us.”

“I’ve been in one-bid leagues and the pressure’s real. We were down 15 points in our conference championship game. I would have been the worst coach in the world and they would have been the worst team in the world had we not got it done and still had 28 wins. That’s the world we live and coach in, and hopefully it’s prepared us for another pressure-packed situation tomorrow.”

Like many mid-majors, Huss has built his success through the transfer portal, relying on it to get each of his three leading scorers—Kezza Giffa (junior college), Kimani Hamilton (Mississippi State) and D’Maurian Williams (Texas Tech)—while also developing younger players the likes of sophomore center Juslin Bodo Bodo. In the case of Hamilton and Williams, Huss was able to use prior evidence to get the inside track.

“We recruited (Hamilton) all along the way at Creighton,” Huss recalled. “I wasn’t the lead recruiter on him, but I watched him a number of times in club basketball, high school. He had almost no meaningful game experience at Mississippi State, but I was able to think back to a long evaluation that was a little bit more traditional. D’Maurian Williams had success prior to going to Texas Tech and falling out of the rotation. I would love to tell you that I had some equation that everyone else doesn’t have, but it was dumb luck probably in both those situations that we had something we could lean on.”

Williams and Bobby Pettiford, who won a national championship at Kansas, are two Panther seniors who also have the crutch of NCAA Tournament experience on which they, too, can lean to help their teammates understand the magnitude of what lies ahead. But at the end of the day, even with a team that played for a title 11 months ago lining up across from it, High Point knows its next contest is just another game.

“We just keep the same approach every game,” Williams said. “We practice hard all year, so we just keep that approach.”

“Obviously, there’s more at stake,” Huss admitted. “It’s one team goes home at the end of the day, but at this point, it’s not about Cinderella. Once the ball goes up, it’s about trying to win a basketball game, trying to be solid in all aspects and all phases of the game, and we’ll try our best to do those things.”