City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of our 2016-17 season coverage, which will run for the six weeks preceding the first official games of the year on Nov. 11. To access all of our high school and college preview content for this season, click here.)

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It had been a tense few years around Delaware basketball.

Though the Blue Hens won 25 games and a Colonial Athletic Association championship during the 2013-14 season, making the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 15 years, the program was in ruin by the end of 2015-16, a seven-win season highlighted by a 15-game losing streak.

Head coach Monté Ross and staff were released in March, but with both an interim school president and athletic director, the team had to undergo an agonizingly long wait to find out who would take over the program. It wasn’t until new AD Chrissi Rawak was hired on May 13 that the end was even in sight, but it took another two weeks for them to hire Notre Dame assistant Martin Ingelsby, the most obvious choice for the job the whole way through.

At that point, it wasn’t clear whether Ingelsby would have enough scholarship players to field a starting five; would-be junior Kory Holden and fifth-year senior Maurice ‘Mo’ Jeffers had already transferred, and redshirt sophomore wing Chivarsky Corbett had announced his intentions to head to Texas-San Antonio.

Without any signed recruits, the roster situation was dire.

Luckily, Ingelsby was exactly the coach the players were hoping for. Redshirt sophomore Eric Carter had spoken to his former AAU teammate and close friend, Fighting Irish sophomore guard Matt Farrell, and gotten nothing but glowing reviews.

“I wanted [Ingelsby] from Day One,” Carter said. “Cnce he got announced, we had a meeting that night and the whole program was just excited, everybody was just back in the gym. That was the first time, I feel like as a group we finally came back to being together, because last year there was a lot of separation within the team.”

His hiring was enough to convince Corbett to come back to school, and start the needle moving back in a positive direction.

Ingelsby took over a program that has zero outside expectations, as evidenced by the team’s last-place selection in the CAA’s preseason poll and more -- CBSSports.com put Delaware 309th-best out of 351 teams in Division I basketball this year, sandwiched between No. 310 Alcorn State (no winning seasons since 2001-02) and 308 Texas-San Antonio, which is coming off a five-win campaign.

“Nobody’s talking about Delaware right now and that’s a great place to be in,” Ingelsby said after practice on Tuesday. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”

“I don’t really care what those people say,” Carter added. “I kind of expected to be in the lower group but they also don’t know much about me, they don’t know much about Chivarsky playing, they don’t know any of our system.”

Ingelsby arrived in Newark, Del. with a terrific resume: a four-year playing career at Notre Dame (1997-01), a year at Wagner College and then 13 seasons spent at his alma mater (six in basketball operations, seven as an assistant coach) under head coach Mike Brey, who himself was the UDel coach from 1995-2000.

Quickly, Ingelsby assembled his staff, bringing aboard former James Madison assistant Bill Phillips, DeMatha (Md.) assistant Cory McCrae and Pennsbury grad Torrian Jones, who played at Notre Dame (2000-04) and had spent the last two years as an academic counselor for the Fighting Irish while also serving as the team’s radio color commentator.

“It was important for me to hire a staff that was loyal, guys I can trust and really know, and also guys that played at the Division I level,” Ingelsby said. “They’ve done a terrific job connecting with our student-athletes and helping them grow as basketball players and also people.

“Bill’s going to work with the front-line guys and Cory and Torrian can work with the perimeter guys. We get up and down a lot and I want those guys to have a voice and a presence and a relationship with those guys, and continue to teach. We have to teach to get better.”

Watching the Blue Hens in practice, it’s clear that Ingelsby and his staff have the pieces on the roster to exceed expectations from the get-go.

In the backcourt, they have senior Cazmon Hayes (11.3 ppg, 5.2 rpg), junior point guard Anthony “Champ” Mosely (9.7 ppg, 2.2 apg) and George Washington transfer Darien Bryant, who’s eligible for his redshirt sophomore season after sitting out last year.

On the wings are the 6-7 Corbett, who was averaging nine points and 4.8 rebounds before he hurt his knee four games into the 2015-16 season, plus senior wing Devonne Pinkard, a 6-6 athlete who’s averaged 3.7 ppg in 82 career games.

Two freshmen, Archbishop Carroll (Pa.) shooting guard Ryan Daly (6-4) and Neuqua Valley (Ill.) wing Jacob Cushing (6-8), will also factor into the rotation in the team’s four-out offense.

Up front, Carter will be the go-to option and should be in for a breakout year, though 6-9 senior Barnett Harris and 6-8 junior Skye Johnson are both strong, active bodies who will see time, with minutes depending on productivity and foul situations.

“I like the core group of guys we have,” Ingelsby said. “We have about nine or 10 deep, trying to figure out how deep we go. My thing has been just trying to get these guys to play together on both ends of the floor and really try to bring our blueprint from Notre Dame and how we played and implement that here.

“I think we’re a little ahead of schedule, where I thought we’d be on the offensive end and that’s where we’ve hung our hat,” he continued. “We want to be unselfish and hard to guard, kind of free-flowing and use our basketball IQ and be cerebral on the offensive end, just be really disciplined and tough and hard-nosed and scrappy on the defensive end.”

But it’s a group that played some ugly basketball last year, finishing 229th in the country in offensive efficiency (1.004 points per possession) and 302nd in defensive efficiency (1.106 ppp), according to hoops stat guru Ken Pomeroy.

There are habits that won’t be so easy to break, and full-scale change won’t be immediate. It’s certainly going to be a growing process throughout this season and beyond, as Ingelsby shapes the program to be as similar to his predecessor as possible.

“The one area I think we really have to improve on is taking care of the basketball,” Ingelsby said. “At Notre Dame we were one of the top five, ten teams in the country every year on assist-to-turnover (ratio), it’s something that I’ve harped on our guys with, I don’t think we’ve done a great job of taking care of the ball at key times. We’ve got to just be more consistent and not as sloppy on that end. And if we do that, we’re going to get good shots and then we can get backs and an opponent can play against a set defense.”

Friday night, the Ingelsby era official tips off with a game against D-II Goldey-Beacom (Del.). The team’s first Division I opponent, Bradley, awaits them in Illinois two days later.

That kicks off a stretch of six games in nine days to begin the year, a trial-by-fire indeed for a first-year head coach still adjusting to being in the first chair.

“I feel like the honeymoon phase is over,” Ingelsby said. “Now it gets real.”