ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 5, 1997 TAG: 9703050074
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Jack Bogaczyk
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK
Hoops d'oeuvres:
The 44th ACC tournament, opening Thursday at the Greensboro (N.C.) Coliseum, may be the best basketball gathering in league history.
It's not because of the six NCAA Tournament berths the ACC will receive Sunday. That's already happened six times from 1986-96. However, for the first time in history, the ACC has five teams with at least 20 victories entering the ACC tournament. Sixth-place Virginia has 18.
The league has finished nine seasons with five teams at 20 or more victories, but those numbers have included the ACC tournament and NIT and NCAA play. In 1979-80, six of eight teams finished with 20 or more victories, including UVa (24-10), which won five en route to an NIT title, and a Bill Foster-coached Clemson club (23-9) that reached the NCAA West Regional final.
If Duke, Wake Forest and North Carolina avoid first-round ACC upsets, it wouldn't be a stretch to see the ACC get three of the top eight seeds - a No.1 and a pair of 2s - in the NCAA bracket. Clemson, if it beats Maryland in Friday's quarterfinal opener, could get a No.3 also.
The only time the ACC has had four of the top 12 NCAA seeds was 1985 (UNC and Georgia Tech with 2s, Duke and N.C. State with 3s, but no No.1s).
MAROONED: Few basketball programs on any level have a more impressive streak than the Roanoke College women, who open play in their eighth straight NCAA regional tonight at the Bast Center against Thomas More (Ky.).
In Division III women's hoops, only two schools - St.Thomas (Minn.) and St.John Fisher (N.Y.) - have longer active NCAA streaks (11 years) than coach Susan Dunagan's program. Marymount (Va.) and Washington (Mo.) also begin their eighth NCAA in a row tonight.
The Maroons have 11 consecutive 20-win seasons, averaging 23 victories in those years, but what they'd really enjoy is more NCAA success. Roanoke has won more than one game only in 1991, when it went to the sectional championship (final eight). That team was 28-2 and owns the school and ODAC records for victories. The Maroons (25-2) need three wins to reach that number and the sectional title game again.
NO SHOWS: After Bill Foster's goodbye game at Virginia Tech on Sunday against Xavier, the retiring coach took note of a Cassell Coliseum season-high crowd of 8,233, with the students on spring break.
``It's by far the best crowd we had all year, and it's unbelievable we had it without the student body,'' Foster said. ``If we can get the students as fired up as the alums are, we could get this thing cookin' because it made a difference, believe me.''
Tech's average home attendance this season, from game estimates, was 5,200. That was the third-worst turnout in Cassell's history, dating to 1961-62. For Foster's first two seasons at Tech - 10-18 teams in 1991-92 and '92-93 - the averages were 4,615 and 4,432, respectively.
It turns out the students aren't even using many of the tickets they pick up. About 4,900 seats in Cassell are reserved for students. For the five home games the university used electronic ID card readers this season, the Tech ticket office reports the student ticket pregame pickup was an average of 2,231. Of those, only an average of 1,165 went through the gates to the games, meaning only 52.2 percent of the tickets picked up were used. That figure was pretty consistent through the five games, too.
HEY, MACK: Headed to his sixth NCAA Tournament in a decade and fourth in five years, Mack McCarthy of Tennessee-Chattanooga is on the verge of a coaching record that has lasted 50 years.
The Virginia Tech alumnus and former Hokies assistant coach has 241 victories in 12 years with the Moccasins, two shy of the Southern Conference record for coaching victories set by Maryland's Burt Shipley from 1924-47. The only coach in conference history with as many NCAA bids as McCarthy is West Virginia's Fred Schaus, who had his six from 1955-60.
PLAY IT AGAIN: The five-game Hill City Shootout on Feb.22 at the Vines Center attracted a crowd of around 3,700 to Lynchburg on a busy hoops weekend. Pete Lampman, executive director of Roanoke-based Virginia Amateur Sports, said the organization hopes to bring some of the nation's top schoolboy teams to the region again.
``We thought it was fairly successful,'' Lampman said. ``We'd like to bring it back, but we would try to get a local team or two involved to boost the crowd.'' Lampman said VAS would consider the Roanoke Valley for a future hoops event, ``because it's a larger market to draw from,'' but said the support from Lynchburg and host Liberty University ``was outstanding. They really helped us a lot.''
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