Shortly after the Presidents’ Athletic Conference men’s basketball coaches picked Saint Vincent to finish eighth among the league’s 10 teams, the Bearcats proceeded to lose their regular-season opener by 60 points.
Mt. Union, which began the season ranked No. 21 in NCAA Division III, made sure of it with a 110-50 victory on Saint Vincent’s home court, the Robert S. Carey Student Center in Unity.
“The returners are young, and that’s the makeup of the team,” Saint Vincent coach Terrance Smith said. “We have to figure out the best way to approach things. It’s a work-in-progress.”
No seniors or juniors appear on the 16-man Saint Vincent roster, which is made up of eight sophomores and eight freshmen.
It was just the season’s first game for the Bearcats, but it was a red flag for a team trying to find some traction. Saint Vincent was coming off a 3-8 record in an abbreviated 2020 season that was delayed by covid-19 restrictions.
But there are plenty of games remaining this year, a reminder to Smith of the seemingly endless number of possibilities for success. Time will tell, Smith said, whether the Bearcats can improve.
“It’s my job as coach to reach these players,” said Smith, a former Saint Vincent great now in his third season leading the team. “At a certain point, it’s on the players. But we’ve got to keep at it. The team was super young last season, and it’s pretty much the same thing this year.
“I still think we have the pieces. Whether or not we go out there and actually do it is another thing. When we don’t play well and we don’t trust one another as teammates and we don’t go as hard as we can go, against a good team, a seasoned team like Mt. Union, bad things are going to happen.”
Three days after that lopsided home loss, Saint Vincent found some traction and was competitive throughout in an 85-77 setback at Allegheny.
There were to be three more nonconference games for the Bearcats before the PAC schedule begins Nov. 27 with a visit from Waynesburg.
“Coming into the season, I felt like it would be good to be tested early,” Smith said. “There was no way for us to know how we would respond to that until we got hit in the mouth. It’s always good to see how your team responds. You can learn some things about your players and about yourself. You can always take a positive out of something like that.”
Smith said he told his team, following the Mt. Union game, that “this is the level we’re trying to get to.”
To his delight, they responded favorably, coming up just short with the eight-point loss in their next test against Allegheny.
Freshman guard Dominic Jennings scored 22 points in his first college start, shooting 8 for 13 overall and connecting on 6 of 9 shots from 3-point range.
A pair of double-figure scorers from last season — 6-foot-4 sophomore forward Anthony Dillard (12.2 ppg.) and 6-4 sophomore guard Nelson Etuk (10.6) — returned to the Saint Vincent lineup this year, but the Bearcats’ leading scorer and rebounder, Shemar Bennett, is gone.
The 6-6 Bennett’s departure has left a considerable gap to fill. He finished his senior year having averaged a double-double of 18.7 points and 10.2 rebounds.
“We’re going to try to improve on the things we need to improve on with the guys we have,” Smith said. “Some of it is effort-based, mentality-based. You’ve got to have a certain level of mental toughness. You can’t just shut down when you get hit in the mouth, and we had a lot of guys who did that (in the opener).”
The PAC included a quartet of Saint Vincent players on its list of “players to watch.” In addition to Dillard and Etuk, the others are 6-3 sophomore guard Osyon Jones and 6-6 freshman center Ethan Dunsey, a Thomas Jefferson product and the only former WPIAL player on the team.