Playing in honor of fallen teammate, UW-Whitewater seeks fifth NCAA Division III national basketball championship

"DG 4!"

Every huddle ends with the exclamation, a reminder of who the UW-Whitewater men's basketball team has been playing for all season – one that began slowly but in the past two weeks has seen the Warhawks perform at their best to earn their sixth appearance in the Division III Final Four and first since 2014.

That season, Whitewater won it all.

And now the Warhawks are only two games away from winning it all again. This time it would be in honor of Derek Gray, their star guard who died unexpectedly of a cardiac event late last July while participating in a youth basketball camp on campus.

The Madison LaFollette graduate would have been a junior and was on track to graduate in the spring of 2024 as a psychology major with a minor in criminology. Gray was also coming off a season in which he ranked as the Warhawks' top scorer, rebounder and defender.

He wore jersey No. 4, hence his former teammates' in-game tributes and the four pushups each player does preceding each and every workout.

"It’s been the most difficult yet interesting year I’ve ever had," said Pat Miller, in his 22nd season as coach. His Warhawks (25-7) face Mount Union (29-2) at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

"I remember last summer after it happened some guys were talking and they said, ‘We’re going to go win a national championship for him.’ My thought was, ‘Don’t put that on yourselves. That’s too much.’ But to their credit, they’ve really bonded around him.

"They’re definitely playing in his memory to honor him."

Whitewater, playing in its first NCAA tournament since 2017, enters Thursday on a nine-game winning streak.

It beat Wabash College and Case Western Reserve in Cleveland in Rounds 1 and 2, then Johns Hopkins in overtime and Oswego State in the Sweet 16 and Elite 8, respectively, in Ashland, Virginia, last weekend.

The Warhawks beat Wabash by seven points, with their next three games all ending as one-possession affairs.

"They’ve gotten better as the year went on," Miller said. "We started out the year (losing to) Hope and North Central (to fall to 2-2). Both are good teams that have fifth-year guys. You could see our potential, but we had to learn our systems better and we had to get better defensively and establish our roles.

"I kept telling them, ‘Look, you guys will be better than these teams in February and March. You just have to stick with the plan.’ We were 4-3 at one point, but to their credit we just really have an unselfish group of players and they just kept working, kept developing and tried to get better defensively."

Whitewater finished third in the WIAC at 9-5 behind eventual winner UW-Oshkosh and UW-La Crosse. It was a 74-71 victory at La Crosse on Jan. 25 that helped set the stage for the Warhawks' late-season surge.

"I think that’s when they said, OK, we can beat the best teams. That was the added confidence they needed," Miller said. "Since then, we’ve been on a really great roll."

Whitewater's last loss came at home to Oshkosh, 72-68, on Feb. 8. After beating River Falls by two and LaCrosse by four – once again on the road – Whitewater put it all together in a convincing 92-79 victory at Oshkosh in the WIAC tournament championship game.

"If we wouldn’t have won the conference tournament, I’m pretty confident we were not going to get into the NCAA tournament," said Miller. "And again, I think that game showed them how good they can be. Oshkosh is outstanding. They’re very good at home and not only did we win the game, but we controlled it from start to finish.

"And now going on the road for the NCAA tournament, we always joke that we’re in dark uniforms, the computers don’t like us, we’re always predicted to lose.

"But I think they have that confidence now."

More:How UW-Whitewater built a sports dynasty you might not have heard about

Whitewater's opponent, Mount Union, enters the Final Four on even more of a roll, owner of a 13-game winning streak.

And yes, Miller is well aware of the history Whitewater and Mount Union have had on the gridiron over the past decade-plus.

"Our fans love that," he said. "But Mount Union has been respected in basketball for the last decade. They are really good and they’re far from an unknown in the basketball circles. They have a really strong, physical, good team. Their conference is good and they’ve won a lot of big games.

"I think that’s fun for the fans, but as coaches we know how good they are in basketball."

The Warhawks have ridden a balanced offensive attack to success this season, ranking first in the WIAC in scoring (80.9 points per game) and field-goal percentage (48.9) and second in three-point accuracy (38.1%).

What they do exceptionally well is get to the free-throw line. The Warhawks have shot 201 more and made 155 more than their opponents. In the NCAA tournament, Whitewater has shot 25 more and made 11 more than its opponents, a huge deal considering its four victories have come by a total of 14 points.

"That’s something that as long as I’ve been coaching I’ve always emphasized – attacking the basket, putting people at a disadvantage, getting those free points at the free-throw line, and we’ve done a good job with that just by nature of some of the guys that we have," Miller said. "They’re best when they’re in attack mode, attacking the rim. I’m old school and I just think that getting teams in foul trouble, getting points at the free-throw line is a good recipe for success."

Whitewater is a bit unusual in that its leading scorer, Miles Barnstable, is a freshman. A Sheboygan native and Howards Grove graduate, the 6-foot-2 guard is averaging 16.2 points per game on 49.4% shooting. He's also hit a team-best 63 three-pointers at a 43.8% clip and knocked down 89.4% of his team-leading 143 free throws.

Delvin Barnstable, his 6-4 junior brother, is a transfer from Marian College who ranks third in scoring at 11.9 points per game while leading the Warhawks with an average of 6.2.

"The Barnstables are just cold-blooded," Miller said. "They don’t change expression. They don’t react to anything. They both look like they’re 12 years old. They’re both exceptional athletes and extraordinarily competitive and tough kids, and I think we just have that fabric throughout this group."

McFarland's Trevon Chislom is Whitewater's best big man at 6-7, averaging 15.7 points on 54.7% shooting and Racine St. Catherine graduate Jameer Barker chips in with averages of 10.1 points and a team-high three assists.

"We’ve had different guys step up in different games," said Miller. "Trevon Chislom has been great for us this year. He had an uncharacteristically poor night (against Oswego State) but (Franklin's) Carter Capstran stepped up with 21 points and double-digit rebounds and just had a fantastic game.

"So, when we haven’t been firing on all cylinders we’ve had different guys step up. Being able to score from different positions has been really valuable. We’ve had teams where if you took 1-2 guys away, it was hard for us to score.

"This year we just have a lot more options, which has served us well."

Tragedy aside, it's been a tremendously gratifying season for Miller, a 2019 Wisconsin Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame inductee. He was also a 2006 inductee into the Whitewater Athletic Hall of Fame as a player.

Miller is seeking Whitewater's fifth national title and the fourth he will have personally had a hand in. He was a star guard on the Warhawks' second championship team in 1988-89 and coach when they won it all in 2011-12 and 2013-14.

"It means a lot," Miller said of the Final Four return. "We had a frustrating stretch – the year before COVID was the worst year of my career. We just had a bad combination of personalities and probably not enough talent in our program. We kind of cleared house after that year, then we had COVID, we had a lot of good players and last year we made good strides with good guys and felt like we were headed in the right direction.

"Then, Derek’s death this summer – he was our leading scorer, our leading rebounder, our best defender and that was obviously a big blow for many reasons other than basketball but from a basketball perspective obviously a significant blow.

So, coming into this year there was uncertainty. But these guys have rallied around each other, they’ve accepted their roles, they’ve played extremely hard. They just have a toughness."

Swarthmore plays Christopher Newport in the first national semifinal game at 4:30 p.m. Thursday.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: UW-Whitewater in Final Four, seeks fifth Division III basketball title