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ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Four teams remained heading into Sunday’s Southern Conference semifinals, and each had a unique makeup as a part of their DNA during the 2024-25 season. Each played to an identity all season, and at the end of Sunday’s games, there would be two left remaining that value many of the same character traits to define their respective basketball cultures even in an era of such chaos in college athletics, and in particular, college hoops.
For those in search of everything right about college basketball in a world where there is so much wrong with the sport, it can be found hidden in the Southern Conference.
While programs have played to an identity this season, it’s part of a larger culture being instilled by the four leaders in charge, who are all about the right things when it comes to building the complete man to go forth in life long after basketball is over.
For eighth-year Furman head coach Bob Richey, it’s still possible to have a program and culture with the portal and paying players, though he thinks it’s less about the money that you throw at the problem of replacing players who head to the portal.
“One thing I told myself during the off-season was I want to adapt but I never want to abandon,” he said. “ … I never want to abandon what I believe in as the core values as a head coach and we’ve done to win, and my challenge is I am always looking for purpose in this business. We coach players that we ask them to go make plays and we ask them to win games so the light shines good on us and sometimes it can be one of those situations like you can make it about you.”
“Sometimes in coaching right now, it’s like, ‘Man, I’ve got to make sure I have all this money.’ Well, the most money didn’t win this tournament this year, and it’s probably not going to keep winning this tournament,” he added. “That’s not going to guarantee you that the most money is going to give you the most wins, and that’s been proven in a short time in this era.”
For No. 1-seed and regular-season champion Chattanooga, its identity was a sum of parts and pieces that had been machine-like over the past two months prior to tourney and came into Sunday’s contest boasting a Top 30 offensive efficiency nationally, playing beautiful basketball under the direction of third-year head coach Dan Earl.
Earl, who was taking part in his 10th SoCon Tournament, won the league’s coach of the year honor for a second time, as he also claimed that distinction during his time as VMI’s head coach back in 2021. He’s one of the good guys of college basketball, and a coach that runs a program around the right things.
Chattanooga’s identity has been one founded upon its cornerstone star guard tandem of Trey Bonham and Honor Huff, who have been as good as any in mid-major basketball and are the latest electric guard duo to become household names to Southern Conference basketball fans.
The Mocs, like Furman, embraced key supplemental pieces in the non-DI ranks of the NCAA to fill in the gaps around the two team leaders in the backcourt. Guys like Garrison Keeslar (Walsh), Frank Champion (North Georgia College), Jack Kostel (University of Alabama-Huntsville), and a couple of DI transfers, in Makai Richards (Pacific) and Bash Wieland (Bellarmine), who suddenly made the Mocs a juggernaut when they began to hit on all cylinders.
The final piece would be Champion, who wouldn’t get healthy until early December, making his first appearance against Lipscomb in an 80-62 home loss to the eventual Atlantic Sun champions. Unfortunately for the Mocs Champion, who was the SoCon’s Newcomer of the Year and arguably the most impactful player to any team in the tournament, was injured in the lead-up practices to the tourney last week and wouldn’t be available for the Moc’s tournament run in Asheville.
They would need him in a 76-61 win over Mercer to reach the semifinal clash with Furman. However, he would be missed against the Paladins, who the Mocs defeated twice during the regular-season, as Champion factored in a major way in both of those wins, including a near triple-double in one of them.
Unfortunately, March also has no time for excuses due to injuries, which is a harsh reality of college basketball this time of year, especially in one-bid leagues. The Paladins survived to get an 80-77 overtime win over Chattanooga in the first semifinal of the evening.
During the postgame press conference, Bonham and Huff, the cruelty and suddenness of a defeat that you get this time of year in a one-bid league started to set in, as the reality of the loss and the sting of an uncertain future of playing together again sunk in.
Sure, the Mocs will play again in the NIT in the postseason, but that wasn’t the goal coming to Asheville, and the authenticity of their tears and love as brothers on the floor as well as off of it couldn’t be hidden from the media in the postgame, though each tried.
“To be completely honest. I mean, I can’t even be mad at the game. I look around the locker room … and then I look to my right, that’s my guy (Trey Bonham). I mean, I love him to death. So to not get it done for him, that hurts more than anything, honestly,” Huff said fighting back tears in the postgame press conference following the loss to Furman.
“(Honor Huff) is my brother. It’s hard. Like coach said, we’ve probably got more basketball, but the ultimate goal we fell short. But I wouldn’t trade the experience and the memories with (Honor) for anything. He’s going to be my brother until the day I die,” senior guard Trey Bonham added.
VMI came to Asheville as a dangerous seven seed, and they lived up to that identity and embraced a relentless approach on the defensive end, which made March hell for No. 2 seed UNCG in the quarterfinals before eventually running out of gas in the semifinals against Wofford, dropping an 85-65 contest.
Its identity was its defensive intensity for two days before facing a fresher group of mature Terriers in the semifinals in what might have been the biggest average age disparity between any two teams in the SoCon this weekend.
Sometimes the identity of a team can reach a deeper, more personal level and it can give others hope. The inspiring journey of VMI’s 2024-25 season touched its head coach the most, and while it served the broader purpose of gaining league-wide respect, it gave it’s leader new hope.
“I think we, these guys, have earned the respect of the rest of this league, and I think that we’re going to be a force to be reckoned with in this league moving forward. … These guys probably don’t know it, but they’ve changed my life. They’ve given me hope as a coach, and a lot of people didn’t think that we could build a program in this league. They didn’t think that we could raise the bar in this current landscape of college athletics. And we’ve proven people wrong and I’m just unbelievably proud. There’s not a prouder coach in the country than I am,” VMI head coach Andrew Wilson said following his team’s 85-65 loss to Wofford.
Sixth-seeded Wofford primary identity was a program founded upon retention and toughness, and though the regular-season probably felt unfulfilled to some, the Terriers’ performance in Asheville has been great and with one more win, a less-than spectacular regular-season would receive a just payoff.
Senior leader and Wofford’s diesel engine in the paint Kyler Filewich summed the Terriers grit and identity through adversity best in postgame following their 20-point win over the Keydets.
Wofford has relied on its maturity and leaders like Filewich, Dillon Bailey, Jeremy Lorenz, Jackson Sivills, and Corey Tripp as primary pillars of that leadership council this season, and now they have their eyes on the ultimate prize that you grind through a regular season to prepare for and play for.
Furman is a program that values retention and culture as much as any in the league, but when the Paladins lost 72% of their point production to the transfer portal from a year ago, it retained culture, values and principles that have made Bob Richey’s program as good as any in mid-major basketball during his eight-year tenure.
The Paladins have incorporated being doubted and overlooked as a part of an identity they play to each time they have taken the floor this season, especially in league play. Furman has also an identity founded upon finding ways to win games when there seemingly hasn’t been an easy way to victory, posting wins in 12 games this season in which it faced a second-half deficit at one point or another.
“Nobody had us winning this game. But then you look at the little thing to the left, and it says 24-8, and then today it says (25-8 after today), which means no team in the Southern Conference has as many wins as this group. But everybody wants to talk about everybody else for some reason, and that’s fine, but this team has embraced that, and the reason they’ve embraced that is because of the hard we went through,” Richey said following the Paladins’ overtime win over Chattanooga.
Furman’s PJay Smith Jr. was overshadowed for much of his first season at Furman after transferring in from Lee University prior to the 2023-24 season. He had to find his own identity and confidence within a team that consisted of players like Marcus Foster and JP Pegues, and it’s easy to get lost in the mix.
Furman’s story is also about guys like Garrett Hien, Ben VanderWal, Tyrese Hughey, and Davis Molnar, who are guys that were all part of that team that won 28 games two years ago, which included winning a SoCon title for the first time in 43 years, as well as one that won a historic 68-67 NCAA Tournament game over Virginia—the first NCAA Tournament win in 49 years, and while there was a lot of points production that didn’t return, what did were a lot of wins.
In Hien alone, the Paladins have 108 victories, and that is sometimes far more valuable to retain than the points you lose. Furman retained eight players, but most of the conversation throughout the off-season and even into the season was about the four it lost, rather than the key ingredients of what it retained.
Like Chattanooga, Furman went out and found pieces that connected the parts as one talented whole piece. It went after players hungry to win and play at college basketball’s elite, adding 6-11 Charles Johnston (Cal-State San Bernardino), sharp-shooting guard Nick Anderson (Barry), and the lone NCAA Division I transfer and a remaining key piece that has come up big for the Paladins this season, especially down the stretch, is guard Tom House (Florida State).
Four different identities of teams that survived to represent the SoCon at its penultimate stage have been a joy to watch play out over the course of the tournament, however, only two survived to get to play for it all Monday night.
And from there, Wofford came out alone with the auto bid beating powerhouse Furman, 92-85, behind a comeback performance.
The tournament we had predicted and talked about for much of the past few weeks didn’t disappoint. The final act saw a league that was among the most competitive in the nation featuring two of the most successful programs in the SoCon’s modern era.
