For Northern Kentucky’s Darrin Horn, no NCAA tourney ‘feels like a kick in the gut’
After Darrin Horn had been drenched with a Gatorade shower by his giddy players in the Northern Kentucky locker room following Tuesday night’s 71-62 Norse victory over Illinois-Chicago in the Horizon League Tournament Championship, the first-year NKU head coach reminded his team of something important.
“We’re not done yet,” Horn told his jubilant players.
After arguably the most chaotic and unsettling week in American sports history, it turned out the Norse were done.
Late Thursday afternoon, the NCAA announced that, in an effort to help contain the coronavirus pandemic, it had canceled the 2020 men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments.
Given the role that large crowds can play in spreading COVID-19, better safe than sorry is the responsible position for major American sports organizations to take now in terms of not holding live events.
Yet the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament is a dream killer for everyone who lost the right to participate. That loss is especially acute for teams like NKU in so-called “one-bid” leagues like the Horizon.
“I think it is going to feel like a kick in the gut,” Horn said Thursday afternoon when it seemed likely the NCAA tourney would not be played but before the announcement became official. “For me, it’s so different at this level. This is the (career) pinnacle for some guys.”
Horn especially dreaded the idea of having to tell his team’s seniors they would not reap the NCAA tourney bid they had earned. One of them, wing Karl Harris, is a graduate transfer from Northern Arizona.
“The only reason he came to our place is he thought ‘Man, I might get to play in the NCAA Tournament if I go there,’” Horn says of Harris.
Horn’s first season as NKU head man proved an unqualified success. The former Tates Creek High School star and Western Kentucky and South Carolina head coach bought the stock “NKU basketball” at a very high valuation.
In the three years prior to this, the Norse had played in two NCAA tourneys and one NIT.
That run of success by Northern Kentucky in its first three seasons of NCAA Division I postseason eligibility landed former Norse coach John Brannen the Cincinnati Bearcats coaching job.
Horn, 47, inherited a veteran roster used to winning. However, Northern did not return star forward Drew McDonald, who graduated in 2019, nor promising 7-foot center Chris Vogt, who followed Brannen to UC.
It was a tricky spot for a new coach.
“I think the thing that helped us, we made it clear to our guys from day one that we had tremendous respect for what they had accomplished and we weren’t looking to come in and change everything,” Horn says. “We wanted to build on what they had done and learn from them. They were the ones who had been successful in this league.”
NKU (23-9) finished second in the Horizon League regular season in spite of playing without its two best all-around players, senior forward Dantez Walton (16,1 ppg, 7.3 rpg) and redshirt junior guard Jalen Tate (13.9 ppg, 5.4 rpg), for 11 and 10 games, respectively, due to injuries.
“We kind of feel like we coached four different teams this year,” Horn says. “The one we started with; the one without Tate; the one without Dantez; and now the one with everybody trying to get healthy.”
It has been 12 years since Horn coached Western Kentucky on a Cinderella run to the NCAA tourney round of 16. He parlayed that success into the South Carolina job. In Columbia, he assumed a challenging coaching spot that has sabotaged many a career.
The Gamecocks job got Horn, too, as he was fired in 2012 after going 60-63 in four seasons.
Subsequently, Horn spent several years living in Lexington and working as a college hoops analyst on ESPN platforms, including the SEC Network. He returned to coaching as an assistant to Shaka Smart at Texas, the post from which he landed the NKU job.
“The word I use is thankful,” Horn says. “You are out (of coaching). I didn’t even know if I was going to get back in coaching at all, much less have a chance to be a head coach. Then to take over a program like (NKU) that was in pretty good shape and get to the NCAA Tournament in our first year, I definitely know how rare that is.”
Alas, in these tumultuous times, earning a berth in the NCAA Tournament will not yield actually playing in it for Northern Kentucky — nor for anyone else — in 2020..
“You don’t know you are going to get to play in an NCAA Tournament every year,”“ Horn says. “The most disappointing part for me is our guys who will never have this chance again.”
