Dreams of the big dance: William & Mary's NCAA quest

Erik Brady | USA TODAY Sports

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. – History is more than a major at the College of William & Mary. The earthy essence of living history is ever in the air on this red-bricked museum of a campus that puts the colonial in Colonial Athletic Association.

Roll call here includes four U.S. presidents (counting George Washington's surveyor's license), four Supreme Court justices, four Speakers of the House – and zero men's NCAA basketball tournaments. Roll call of the 160 original members of NCAA Division I finds five that have never been to the Big Dance.

"When you are 322 years old, you've experienced most things," W&M President W. Taylor Reveley III tells USA TODAY Sports. "We've been in the path of two wars. We've seen times of great lushness and times of famine. But we have never made it to the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

"It's a pretty elite group that hasn't. West Point. Northwestern. William & Mary. And who else? Saint Joseph's?"

No, Saint Joseph's has 20 appearances. St. Francis Brooklyn and The Citadel are the other D-I originals that have never been.

"Well, it's a very elegant group," Reveley says. "And one that we would love to leave."

W&M nearly did leave it a year ago. With an automatic NCAA bid on the line, the Tribe held a six-point lead against Delaware with 1:20 to play in its conference final, only to fall behind 75-74 in the final moments. Marcus Thornton launched a potential game-winner that felt good when he released it, but it didn't fall. Maybe it had too much history on it.

William & Mary history begins in 1693, when King William III and Queen Mary II signed a royal charter for a college in Virginia Colony. Their successors might well have regretted it: Thomas Jefferson learned revolutionary ideas here.

"For a school with so much history," senior forward Tom Schalk says, "it would be a special thing for us to make a little history of our own."

This team is making some. The Tribe (16-9, 10-4 CAA) is tied for first in the conference. Thornton, a senior guard with 1,999 career points, will renew his chase of the school's all-time scoring mark Wednesday at Northeastern. Chet Giermak scored the last of his 2,052 in 1950, the oldest career scoring record standing in major college basketball – just as W&M's Wren Building is the oldest college building standing in the USA.

For all of that, the history that matters most to this team is making the NCAA tournament. The Tribe will have to win the CAA tournament to get there, three games in three days in Baltimore the first weekend in March.

It's a similar story for other members of the Forlorn Five. Northwestern (Big Ten), Army (Patriot) and The Citadel (Southern) are also-rans in their leagues, while St. Francis is alone in first place in the Northeast Conference. Each has a fan in Tribe sophomore swing man Omar Prewitt.

"I hope we all make it," he says, "so people can stop talking about it."

'Hold the vision'

William & Mary coach Tony Shaver finds himself in an odd position. He says he never talks to his players about this anomaly of history that is not of their making but that only they can change.

"I don't think it's their burden," he says. "It shouldn't be a weight on their shoulders in any way."

And so coach and players don't speak of the elephant in the locker room – or the gorilla on their backs, to mix metaphors and species – but everyone else talks about it. And if the Tribe enter the CAA tournament as top seeds for the first time, their NCAA quest will be a top story line.

"It'll be very visible, but we'll continue to talk about what's important to our team," Shaver says. "I always tell them, 'Hold the vision, trust the process.' It means hold the vision of greatness – of CAA titles, of being the first to go to the NCAA tournament – but we've got to trust the process every day to get better.

"Every practice is the most important practice, every game is the most important game. Hold the vision of where we want to go, and trust the process of how we're going to get there."

Thornton and Schalk are the opposite poles of the program. Thornton is a four-year starter and the CAA's preseason player of the year. Schalk has mostly played sparingly in four seasons but is contributing mightily of late, including a game-winning bucket at North Carolina Wilmington.

"Marcus is going to be one of the best who ever played here," Shaver says. "Tom is what our program stands for, the nuts and bolts of our team. He never complained when he wasn't playing and was ready to go when he got his chance."

The rest of the cast includes Prewitt, second-leading scorer at 13.6 points per game behind Thornton's 19.2, and Terry Tarpey, the CAA's leading rebounder at 8.3 a game who last month produced the only triple-double in W&M history – 18 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists against James Madison.

Prewitt's mother, Lea Wise-Prewitt, was an All-Southeastern Conference player at Kentucky and coached Centre College (Ky.) to Division III's Final Four, and his sister, Maggie, was a two-time All-America for their mother. Tarpey's sister, Kaitlyn, was 2008's Miss Teen America and was sixth in 2014's Miss America pageant. "She understands what it means to perform under pressure," Tarpey says.

Shaver understands it, too. He recalls his first news conference after being named William & Mary coach in 2003.

"Someone asked, 'Why would you take this job? It's a graveyard of coaches,'<TH>" he says. "I'd never heard that before, but it hits you like a ton of bricks."

There really is a graveyard on campus, not to mention a tradition of ghost stories. But a dozen seasons later Shaver remains on the job.

"So far – knock on wood," he says, laughing. "When you're a coach, your neck is always in the noose."

This the year?

Jim Kaplan, Class of 1957, is a school benefactor who played basketball here. The arena where the Tribe plays is named for him. And he thinks this season, at long last, is the one he has been waiting for. Never is a long time at a school old enough to trace its charter to the Crown.

"This place will erupt when it happens," Kaplan says, "and I'll be right there with them."

The players don't allow themselves to look that far ahead. They talk instead of "being in the moment," as Thornton puts it. But if you press them, they will allow how great it would be to be the first at this college of firsts.

"For sure," Thornton says. "It's what you dream about as a kid."

Kids also dream of game-winning shots. Thornton doesn't look back at the one that failed to fall nearly a year ago. "I have a short memory," he says of that jumper, which was a tad too strong and caught back rim.

"It just didn't go in the hole," Shaver says. "I don't want that to define Marcus or that team. But it probably continues to motivate him, and maybe the whole program, more than we really know. We don't talk about being the first, but I do think there's an underlying desire there."

Jay Colley, the team's radio voice for 33 seasons, has never rewatched the closing minutes of that game, though he has seen the last shot several times. "Gut-wrenching," he says.

Colley's first season was 1982-83, when W&M played in the finals of the ECAC South tournament, in pre-CAA days. "We lost in the last 15 or 20 seconds to James Madison," he says. "But we went to the NIT for the first time, and I thought I'd come to the mecca of college basketball. It was that easy – and we've been to the NIT all of once since."

That second postseason trip came almost three decades later, in 2009-10, when W&M won 22 games, including at Wake Forest and Maryland. The Tribe lost in the CAA finals that season to Old Dominion. They lost in the 2008 finals to George Mason and to Delaware in last year's final. That's three CAA championship games in seven seasons. They won two CAA tournament games in 18 seasons before Shaver's arrival – and eight CAA tournament games in the last seven seasons.

These are not numbers that Shaver knows by rote. "I'm not a good historian of anything," he says, "much less our program."

Reveley, though, knows a good bit of history. He's a leading expert on the Constitutional division of war powers between U.S. presidents and Congress and graduated from Princeton in 1965, the year Bill Bradley took the Tigers to the Final Four. "I know how a basketball team can galvanize a school," Reveley says.

He is a patrician president out of central casting – silver hair and silver tongue, a Roman numeral appended to his name. He lives in the President's House with wife Helen and, according to campus tradition, three ghosts. The Streak is one ghost he wants off campus.

"We almost got there last year," he says. "One shot that bounced off the rim, a demonically infested shot. So I think this is our year. Time to go. Time to get this particular monkey off our back.

"And once we get there, we'll develop a taste for it, and will want to go back – over and over again."