One of the many questions surrounding the Binghamton University men’s basketball team after a whirlwind offseason was: Who will be Binghamton’s leader?
In the early season, it was head coach Kevin Broadus. When Pipe Dream visited a preseason practice, the only voices heard in the gym were those of Broadus and his staff. He spent most of practice barking orders at his team, seeking more effort during drills and sprints.
I looked next to the Events Center, to the men’s soccer team practice, and thought about the contrast in styles. Head coach Paul Marco’s players always demand responsibility for each other’s mistakes on the field. Watching them practice is an interesting experience; they scream at each other, and sometimes at themselves. Often Marco and his staff will go for stretches of time without needing to say much. When game time rolls around, the formula works. The Bearcats play as a team and derive their energy from each other. They’re cohesive because they respect and own up to each other.
After that basketball practice, I thought Binghamton would be in trouble this season. A dictatorship is no way to run a successful team in the America East, where the top squads usually have a player on the court who is an extension of the coach (think Jamar Wilson, Jay Greene and Mike Trimboli).
But a funny thing happened as the conference season began. The Bearcats slowly developed some leaders.
“It’s changed,” Broadus said. “Now guys are owning up to the things they do wrong. We’re not following anymore. I don’t have to come to practice every day and start off by saying, ‘I want X, Y and Z.’ It’s changed now. Guys are stepping up into their roles. They know what’s expected of them. They even lead me sometimes.”
Most encouragingly, there are signs that the Bearcats are feeding off each other’s intensity rather than Broadus’. Down 13 points in the second half against Hartford, Binghamton played a ferocious 10 minutes of basketball to win the game and storm back to the top of the standings. It wasn’t a halftime speech that won that game. It was simply that each Bearcat steal on defense energized all the players on offense.
It’s a growing process, and there are hiccups sometimes. Leading scorer D.J. Rivera left the bench in frustration as the Bearcats melted down against Boston University last week (he later told the Press & Sun-Bulletin that he suffers from leg cramps). Broadus benched Rivera and his backcourt mates Tiki Mayben and Malik Alvin for the start of the Hartford game, and the problem seemed to pass.
Will Rivera be the one to lead the Bearcats in the home stretch of the America East schedule? Broadus doesn’t see his team as having just one leader.
“It depends on which shape and form you’re asking,” he said. “Reggie Fuller is our leader, in a sense. David Fine is a leader. In terms of leading by example and playing hard, it’s D.J. and Reggie. In terms of being vocal, it’s David Fine and Reggie.”
But Fine doesn’t see much playing time, and Fuller can be too nice sometimes to get in his teammates’ faces. That’s where Rivera could be needed the most: not on offense or defense, but in the locker room.
The recent indefinite suspension of Dwayne Jackson for violating team rules tells me that the Bearcats still have a ways to go. When the players truly demand accountability from each other, that attitude won’t stop when they leave the Events Center. They need to know that breaking a team rule disappoints their teammates and not just their coach. That’s when the Bearcats will finally be cohesive enough to win the America East.