The Omaha Mavericks Garbage (can) becomes a treasure with the program that obtains its first March madness offer

Omaha, Neb. (AP) – The Omaha Mavericks knew it was just a matter of time until they broke to win their first NCAA Tournament tender.

This was the vision when the school announced 14 years ago that would move from division II to division I, but the circumstances seemed less than ideal for the advance to occur this season.

Frankie Fidler, who was on the way to becoming the score leader of his program career, had transferred to the state of Michigan, the MAVs were chosen eighth in the League of the Nine Teams Summit and were 4-9 after a 32-point defeat in the state of Iowa.

Then came the turning point. The assistant coach Kyan Brown was walking through the locker room before the next game and did not like the body language of the players. I needed to find a way to motivate them.

“So I put this huge garbage boat on the corner of our costumes,” Brown wrote in a Essay “Meet the Mavs” on the school website. “I simply took off and kicked the garbage and began to shout at him. Four guys to the side scared, and four boys on the other side of the room jumped and started shouting too. It sounds strange, but it worked. Something broke inside our boys.”

A meme was born.

The mavs came out and beat Cal Poly 86-82, and a Bash-The-Trash can celebrate after the game Every victory has continued since then. The coaches, the players, the school of the school and invited to guests as the professional fighters have taken, jump and beat the garbage boat.

For a game, fans were invited to Bring your own five gallon or hemalleras garbage can and fill with corn popcorn for $ 5 in a concession stand. In the celebration after the victory in the title of the regular season of the MAVs, the chancellor of Omaha, Joanne Li, with a championship belt, He came out of a garbage can placed in the middle of the court.

The MAVs, who took the Tournament Championship of the Summit League the following week, won 18 of their last 21 games to win the sown No. 15 in the west region. On Thursday night they will play St. John’s number 2 in Providence, Rhode Island.

The NCAA of Omaha’s offer is especially significant for Chris Crutchfield, 56, who played football and basketball for the MAVs in the era of division II. He began his career as a basketball coach as an OMAHA assistant in 1995 and then made nine stops, including Oklahoma and Oregon, before being hired for his first chief coach work three years ago.

Crutchfield took over a program that had gone to 10-45 combined the previous two seasons.

“It’s really satisfactory because when you enter a job like this, you obviously have a plan, you have a vision of what you think you can do,” he said. “You never know what will happen, or the moment will happen.”

The MAVs were 9-23 in the first season of Crutchfield, 15-18 in its second and a combined 28-50 before Brown, the main assistant of Crutchfield, presented the team to the garbage boat.

Player of the year of the Marquel Sutton Summit, JJ White and Tony Osburn are players who return and the three best scorers. The transfer of the northern Dakota state Joshua Streit and Lindenwood Transfer Isaac Ondekane gave the MAVs a very necessary size in the position.

“Although we lost at not a conference, we felt that we were not recovering the steps,” White said. “We feel that every day and every game we were improving. We learned from our mistakes. As the conference game progressed, we improved, when we arrived (to the summit tournament), we felt that we were playing our best basketball.”

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