Alvin Gentry wasn’t on the bench when Kansas played out in the boondocks at Western Carolina last week.
Instead, the KU basketball aide was about 100 miles to the northeast. Gentry was scouting future opponent Appalachian State, and he didn’t need a road map to find Boone, N.C., home of the Mountaineers.
That’s because Gentry went to school and played basketball there.
“I had the distinction of playing on the worst team in the history of the school,” Gentry smiled. “We went 3-23, but the year I graduated we won 25 and went to the NCAA tournament.”
This year’s Appy State team, which plays Kansas tonight, appears to fall somewhere between those extremes.
“They’re very young,” Gentry said of this year’s Appy State edition, “but they’ll be good in a couple of years. They have a lot of 6-5 and 6-6 athletic kids.”
Tipoff is 7:35 p.m. in Allen Fieldhouse. General admission tickets are available. There’s no live telecast.
Not only is Gentry facing his former school, he’ll also see his former boss, Tom Apke. Gentry served four years as an aide under Apke at Colorado before joining Larry Brown’s staff three years ago.
Apke took over the Mountaineers last season after being fired at Colorado. Appy State went 7-21 in Apke’s first year, but is currently on a three-game win streak after a season-opening 110-74 lambasting at Duke. The wins, all in Boone, have been over Methodist (108-85), Bluefield (83-63) and UNC-Wilmington (61-58).
Apke starts no seniors. He uses a lineup of three sophomores, a freshman and a junior. One of those sophs, 6-9 center Sam Gibson, is basically a freshman, though, because he sat out last year under NCAA Proposition 48.
Appy State’s punch comes mainly from the backcourt duo of soph Kemp Phillips and freshman Rodney Peel. Both are averaging in double figures.
Appalachian State, an NCAA Div. 1 school, has a solid basketball history. Preceding Apke as head coaches, for instance, were Press Maravich, Pete’s father, and Bobby Cremins, currently at Georgia Tech.
It was Maravich who plucked Gentry out of Shelby, N.C., and into the mountains of the western part of the state.
“Actually, coach Maravich signed my mom and she signed me,” Gentry reported with a grin. “It’s very, very cold there. It’s 3,800 feet in the mountains.”
Tonight’s game will be KU’s seventh in the last 11 days, and it comes on the heels of probably the Jayhawks’ best performance of the season, the 63-54 victory over St. John’s here Saturday night.
Kansas played so well in that one, particularly on defense, that it had to be a confidence booster, particularly after those depressing one-sided losses to Iowa and Illinois in the Maui Classic last week.
“I don’t know if we could have beaten Iowa or Illinois, but we would have competed,” Brown said after Saturday night’s win. “We were a lot more active defensively. We caused some problems for them.”
Kansas always seems to play better in Allen Fieldhouse – the Jayhakws have now won 50 straight there – but St. John’s coach Lou Carnesecca didn’t blame the noisy sellout crowd for the loss.
“Let me tell you one thing,” Carnesecca stressed. “The crowd did not beat St. John’s. The Kansas Jayhawks beat St. John’s.”
After tonight, KU’s punishing schedule swings the other way. Between Tuesday and Dec. 28, a span of nearly three weeks, the Jayhawks’ only scheduled games are against Rider here on Saturday night and at North Carolina State the following Saturday.
Notes
Brown said he received so much negative reaction to the gold uniforms the Jayhawks wore at Western Carolina that they’ll “never be seen again. I like them, but they’re history…”