CHECK-IN: Flagler men's basketball is off to a balanced start
ST. AUGUSTINE — The Flagler College men’s basketball team is above .500, improving to 5-4 with a dramatic win over Rollins College Saturday. Sophomore Spencer Bain hit a go-ahead 3-pointer with one second left to help the Saints edge the Tars 94-93.
After nine games, new Saints’ head coach Blake Selland’s young team is starting to become more comfortable with its identity as a sharp-shooting squad that trusts in one another.
It’s togetherness that makes this Saints squad special, Selland said. Sharing the ball the way they did against Rollins College in racking up 27 assists, is Flagler basketball.
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“We have winners on our team,” Selland said. “We come in with the mindset we had tonight, I promise you we’ll have a great year.”
It was the first time this year sophomore Kyle Young said he has seen the team together the whole game. Young is a starter and one of six new faces, part of nearly a complete overhaul after graduating five seniors last season. This year's team boasts a brand new starting five.
They’re younger but have many more players that can score in double figures on any given night and often on the same night. The Saints had five players score 14 or more points against Rollins.
“We all bought in to who we are and what we do,” said second-year player Chase Fiddler, who scored a game-high team 21 points and made five 3-pointers. “When the coaches ask us to do something, we put our head down and we do it because that’s who we are. We work.”
So far, this year’s team scores more than last year’s team (84.4 points per game to 76 points per game), shoots more proficiently (51% to 46%), passes more (18.1 assists to 16 assists) and blocks more (4.4 blocks per game to 3.4 blocks per game). However, this year’s team averages more turnovers (16.1 to 13.9), less rebounds (35.8 to 38.1) and less steals (6.1 to 8.4).
The most notable statistic is the team's 10.3 3-pointers per game. Last year, it averaged 7.6 3-pointers per game. In the process, the the team is hitting a better percentage of shots from behind the arc better as well (41% to 32%).
The Saints made 19 3s against Rollins, one shy of the program record in the Division-II era.
Simply put, the Saints are just as dangerous — if not more so — than last year’s team. And although they have a smaller roster than last year’s team (13 players this season, 19 last season), they can still play just as well as they have in the last two years when they went 41-11 and made the final four of the Division II NCAA tournament.
The Saints’ blueprint for success — which Selland, Fiddler and Young reiterated — is to play together and to take advantage of the talent on the team.
“It’s kind of like the 13 of us against everybody else,” Young said.
This article originally appeared on St. Augustine Record: College basketball: Flagler College men's basketball a work in progress
