Sunday, March 07, 2010

Into the semifinals

Buzz Peterson is glad to have his team in the Southern Conference Tournament semifinals, but he would have rather beaten any other team to have gotten there.

The Mountaineers eliminated The Citadel in last night’s quarterfinals, but Peterson doesn’t like having to play his close friend Ed Conroy, The Citadel’s coach.

“This game is not fun at all,” Peterson said.

Conroy was Peterson’s assistant at Tulsa, Tennessee and Coastal Carolina.

“Ed Conroy has meant so much to me and my family,” Peterson said.

How good of friends are they?

“When I took the Tulsa job, he drove my 125-pound dog all the way across the country and he’s allergic to dogs,” Peterson said. “When he got out there, you couldn’t even see Ed’s eyes they were so swollen…He’s a great loyal friend.”

Donald Sims, ASU’s junior point guard and the SoCon’s media player of the year, kept pouring in the points last night. He scored 30 against The Citadel.

Peterson said that his team has adjusted well to Sims’ role as chief scorer and has done a good job of getting the ball in his hands as much as possible.

“Ever since we’ve done that things have looked better for this ballclub,” Peterson said. “They respect him. He’s not one of these kids that walks around and talks about himself at all. He really complements his teammates very well.”

Quarterfinal surprises have been the norm the last two years in the SoCon Tournament, but that wasn’t the case this year.

The top four seeds all advanced into today’s semifinals. The last two years, teams without a first-round bye were a combined 4-3 in quarterfinal games. This time around, they were 0-4.

And, for or the first time in SoCon history, all four semifinalists have won 20 games or more. ASU is 21-11, College of Charleston 21-10, Western Carolina 22-10 and Wofford 24-8.