‘I hurt for them’: A promising Drexel season comes to an abrupt and sudden end

WASHINGTON — Luke House was talking and Zach Spiker’s eyes were shut, the Drexel coach doing his best to hold in what he was feeling.

“I can’t even imagine a better team to be around and I can’t imagine a better coaching staff, a better head coach,” House said, and you could see the muscles on Spiker’s face move.

“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” House continued. “I loved coming to play every single day, coming to practice. It was a joy for me.”

Was.

It was hard to believe for most of Sunday that House, Drexel’s leading scorer, an Archbishop Carroll graduate who came to Drexel after starting at the Division II level, would end the night using words in the past tense to describe his time at Drexel. He had poured in a career-high 28 points on a career-best seven made three-pointers. His team had a lead for more than 40 minutes. It led by 12 with 7 minutes, 32 seconds to go.

But some time later, House’s final three-point attempt, a desperation heave in the second overtime, missed long. A Drexel season that began with so much promise, that featured 13 conference wins and seven more out of conference — the first 20-win season at Drexel since 2012 — ended with an abrupt and sudden thud. The Dragons, seeded second, were bounced from the Coastal Athletic Association tournament in its quarterfinals against seventh-seeded Stony Brook at the Entertainment and Sports Arena.

“Some years,” Spiker said, “you think, ‘Hey, can we get through this game or not?’ I thought we had a team that could be here Tuesday night.”

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Zack Duffy, Drexel’s director of basketball operations, would occasionally send a text to a Drexel basketball group chat, a running countdown of the days remaining until Tuesday night’s CAA championship game.

“I think we’ve had a group that’s worked with Tuesday night in mind,” Spiker said. “Not Sunday.”

And so there was a raw, anguishing pain on the coach’s face, and in House’s posture as he sat at the podium, staring aimlessly ahead as his coach spoke.

“It sucks and it is abrupt,” Spiker said. “It feels worse because it’s raw and it just happened.”

There was “a lot, a lot of pain” in the Drexel locker room, Spiker said. Pain because it was over. Pain because of how it happened. A Justin Moore dunk gave the Dragons a 12-point lead with 7 minutes, 32 seconds to play. Drexel in four minutes had bumped a six-point lead to a dozen and it seemed like the Dragons would escape the quarterfinals with a victory, even after Amari Williams, the three-time CAA defensive player of the year, went down early in the second half with a left leg injury.

Garfield Turner played hard and at times well in Williams’ stead, but finished the game minus-7 in 30 minutes of action. Williams came back sporadically late in the game, but was nowhere near the defensive deterrent he’s used to being. Stony Brook took advantage. Aaron Clarke, a guard who led the Seawolves with 27 points and hit the game-winner in double overtime, got to his spots. So did big man Chris Maidoh, who scores seven points per game but tallied a career-high 25, including two huge dunks inside with a hampered Williams trying to protect the rim.

“We always talk about strong faces through adversity, and that can come in different ways,” Spiker said. “I told our guys today, some stuff is going to probably happen. We have to deal with it. Could I have predicted that the three-time defensive player of the year went down with the injury and only played whatever the minutes was?”

This is March, a month made famous in this sport because trying to predict any outcome is a waste of time.

“Tournaments are crazy. They’re wild,” Spiker said. “The two-seed didn’t make it [to the semifinals]. The four-seed didn’t make it. You look at other tournaments, the one-seed is out in different tournaments. We’re on the painful side of it, but also it’s the beauty of it.

“I can talk about the game, but I can tell you my heart is with our guys, and I hurt for them.”

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This Drexel team, so deep, so versatile, so experienced, so built to win a tournament like this, has battled through adversity for a while. The Dragons in recent years have dealt with injuries and lost games in just about every way possible. Then, three months before the start of this season, forward Terrence Butler died by suicide.

All of those things were probably racing through Spiker’s mind Sunday night. Barring an invitation to a postseason tournament, a Drexel season that had so much possibility was over, gone. And it felt so sudden, so unbelievable.

“When you’re doing life and you go through what these guys have gone through ...” Spiker said, his voice trailing off, tears coming to his eyes.

“It’s just been an honor to coach them and I’m very proud of them.”