JOHNSON CITY, TN—As the delirium halted for a second and High Point wrapped a number of team pictures on the half court logo of the Big South’s championship floor, Flynn Clayman appeared to be antsy to move from the back row of High Point’s team photo to a more suitable place.
Clayman had yet to win a conference championship and navigate all that comes with it as a Division-I head coach, but he’s been through this enough times to know what was next in this ceremony.
“Let’s cut down some nets,” Clayman said aloud to his team.
The prior half an hour had included Clayman sharing what he calls a special embrace with High Point forward Cam Fletcher and his team walking around with a trophy. In the moments following, Clayman’s team would experience putting its sticker on a ticket to March Madness and going through his biggest press conference to date. This was the climax, though.
This is what Clayman’s team winning 91-76 over Winthrop to secure the program’s second-consecutive Big South championship and becoming the first team in Big South history to win 30 games earned it. This is what it dreamed of since Clayman’s introductory press conference and its first day of summer practice in June.
The moment in which Clayman was about to experience was what High Point president Nido Qubein envisioned when the school’s decision makers made the choice to hire Clayman after Alan Huss opted to bolt for the coach in waiting position at Creighton.
“I'm very proud of our coach,” Quebin told Basket Under Review. “Our coach took over a team that was almost nonexistent and he was able to recruit people in the last minute and put together a great team–which amazes me how they can build the kind of camaraderie and teamwork when people come from different places now with a portal and all that, things are a little different. I’m very, very proud of him.”
Clayman’s reflex as he thinks up how this title came to be is crediting his administration and the role it’s played in all this. The High Point head coach says his program has more support than any other in the league, and he’s right. Quebin–who was given the chance to place High Point’s logo on its figurative March Madness ticket–says basketball has always been important to the university, but that the new arena the school has built as well as results the program has experienced have legitimized it to the school’s fanbase.
Quebin and company are among the rare groups of mid-major school leadership that pay for students’ travel expenses–including plane tickets and hotel rooms–so that they can travel to support the program. Over half of the lower bowl at Freedom Hall was occupied by people wearing purple as High Point got the job done on Sunday, and it was noticeable. He says his school's philosophy on student travel shouldn't be as rare as it is.
When High Point’s players were handed the trophy, they waved it towards the crowd that was gathered at midcourt. When High Point star Terry Anderson walked up the stairs to cut the net and yelled “back to back, man,” he was publicly embraced. When he was commended for his loyalty to the program and his 18-point performance in the title game, he was received to the sound of “Terry, Terry!” chants.
“This is like my second home,” Anderson said. “All I wanted to do my whole life is win, so that’s why I came here.”
Anderson is among the multitude of great individual stories on this team who can now say that they’ve won–in his case, he’s done it twice in a row. Fletcher’s journey has taken him to Kentucky, out of Kentucky, forced him to figure out what’s important to him and has tasked him with performing while grieving. Fletcher and Anderson won on Sunday, though. So did High Point guard Rob Martin–who fell short in the OVC final a season ago as a member of SEMO and came here to pursue a championship. Sunday, his story came to fruition as he placed the Big South trophy on the table of the media room as he walked into the press conference.
There’s no greater story that came to fruition on Sunday than the one that Clayman authored, though. The High Point head coach is a former Division-II player and a former grad assistant at Southern Utah. Now he’s doing something that he dreamed of as he bypassed school to March Madness as a kid, something beyond his wildest dreams.
Clayman is dancing. He couldn’t help but to get choked up as he addressed that reality.
“No chance,” Clayman told Basket Under Review in regard to the idea that he could’ve imagined he’d be leading a team into the NCAA Tournament. “I just tried to do the best job I could every day, and to be where I am now, I mean, I got to thank so many people. It's too many to talk about right now, but just truly grateful.”
It may have been surreal in the moment for this High Point team, but this has always been within reach for this program. All it had to do to make this happen was go out and take it while navigating just about everyone in the league’s best shot as well as the pressure that hung over it.
High Point was the Big South’s preseason favorite, it’s the league’s highest-resourced team and had the regular season to back its expectations. The program coasted to a regular season title and lost just one game throughout its conference slate. It was never guaranteed an at-large bid, though.
It had to take care of business, and it did on Sunday. It took withstanding a big early-second half run from Winthrop–which delivered High Point’s only regular season loss–but this program did it.
“It’s always special,” High Point forward Owen Aquino told Basket Under Review in regard to the win. “It's always a dream come true again. In my mind we're not done, I want to go there and win a game.”
Whether High Point can do that once it’s in the national spotlight is yet to be seen, but its entire body of work and the context that’s contributed to it has to be considered. Quebin says the university–by nature of its success–has always had pressure on it, but it’s able to navigate it. Sunday was a microcosm of that.
High Point led Winthrop for 31:34 on Sunday and never succumbed to the pressure that Winthrop applied once it picked up its offensive pace and silenced the crowd in purple a bit. It was always ready for this, though.
Clayman told Basket Under Review that every game this season has felt like an NCAA Tournament game because of the expectations surrounding this program and what it could ultimately achieve. The High Point coach believes that his team was more well equipped not to flinch because of the tolerance it’s built up all season.
“The pressure, that’s made them, the pressure, it feels so good,” Anderson said. “When you don't have pressure, you don't try your hardest, you know? So when you have pressure, you just feel like you have to do 100% every time.”
The thing about High Point; whichever power-five team it matches up will have to beat it. It won’t give any game away.
Clayman’s team is No. 5 in the country–as well as No. 1 in the Big South–in offensive turnover rate with a 13.1 mark and is No. 4 in the country in offensive steal percentage, per KenPom. The turnovers it does commit rarely come from Martin–who averages 3.6 assists a night relative to 1.5 turnovers. No player on the roster turns it over more than 1.8 times a night. That’s this group’s superpower.
“Man, that’s huge,” Martin told Basket Under Review. “That’s been huge for us and we’ve been doing that all season.”
The ability not to turn it over is impressive in a vacuum, but High Point is significantly more dangerous because of the way it controls possessions as a whole. Clayman’s group plays at the No. 62 tempo in the country–meaning that it can end the game with significantly more possessions in which it puts it on the rim if all goes to plan. That does deflate its raw turnover numbers to No. 16 in the country. It’s also No. 5 in the country in defensive turnover rate and No. 2 in the country in defensive steal percentage.
That appears to make this group significantly more dynamic in the Round of 64.
How the numbers will shake out when this group faces a power-conference team with more athleticism than they’ve previously seen has yet to be determined, though. High Point will have to buck some trends when it gets to the Round of 64 as a result of its numbers in games against top 200 teams.
High Point is averaging 11 turnovers per game against its best competition and is forcing 11.2 turnovers per game by its top 200 opponents. It’ll likely have to make more of an impact in the turnover battle in the NCAA Tournament if it’s going to pull off an upset, but it feels as if it can. That’s how this group is built.
“That’s gonna give us a chance when we get to the dance,” Clayman said. “That was a big part of what we tried to do in the portal and with guys that we recruited. It's try not to turn the ball over and force turnovers on the other end.”
High Point lost Juslin Bodo Bodo–who averaged 8.4 rebounds per game–to Baylor via the transfer portal last offseason and hasn’t appeared to make up for that loss entirely.
Clayman’s team is No. 228 in defensive rebounding efficiency, No. 6 in the Big South on the defensive glass and No. 111 in the country in offensive rebounding efficiency. The marks don’t appear to be all that surprising considering the Panthers are No. 329 in the country in average height, per KenPom.
Don’t tell it that it’s not going to be able to hold up, though.
“We’re more than ready,” Aquino said in regard to the frontcourt as it pertains to the NCAA Tournament. “We’ve got to go back home, start watching film, start getting ready. And let's see who we play.”
High Point will have to be better in the Round of 64 on the glass than it’s been, though. It’s lost five of its six rebounding battles against top-200 teams and has lost by an average of 5.3 rebounds per game against that level of competition. Its interior defense has suffered as opponents have the No. 219 two-point distance against it.
Similar NCAA Tournament efficiency profiles to High Point's:
High Point is among the upper-tier mid-majors that have yet to face a power-five program as a result of scheduling trends that are increasingly unkind to mid-majors ranked in the top 200. As a result, its 30-4 record and top 80 NET Ranking won’t be able to save it from a difficult draw.
As it stands, High Point is a projected No. 12 seed by our bracketology at Basket Under Review and on the Bracket Matrix. The Tournament Index considers High Point equivalent to the eighth-weakest No. 12 seed from the past 12 tournaments (49 total teams). It would rank as a middle-of-the-pack No. 13 seed (24th out of 49 in power rating) over the same time frame.
The TI projects an average of 0.23 wins for High Point given its projected seed and strength. It’s not letting that define it as it heads to the Big Dance, though.
“We just going out there, compete, play hard, play for one another and have each other’s backs,” Martin said. “We just play High Point basketball, man. We do those things. I feel like the score will take care of itself.”
