Colonials celebrate return to NCAA Tournament

Robert Morris basketball coach Andy Toole was preparing to coach his team in Tuesday night’s Horizon League Championship game.

He couldn’t ignore the irony of the date: March 11.

“I was getting ready to get on the bus. I saw on Twitter that five years ago today was when Rudy Gobert tested positive for covid,” Toole said. “Right after that news came out, I got a text from Chris King, our A.D., and he basically said, ‘We’re in trouble.’ That next day was Thursday. It got canceled.”

The “it” in that sentence was the 2020 NCAA Basketball Tournament. That event, along with many of the preceding conference tournaments, were the first of many dominoes to fall in the world of sports as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

Goebert’s diagnosis is often seen as the “patient zero” moment for the sports world when it came to dealing with the pandemic. That night, his Utah Jazz game against Oklahoma City was canceled, and pretty much the entire sports world followed over the next few days.

Most pro sports leagues eventually worked around protocols and figured out ways to finish their seasons. Those spring semester college athletes weren’t so lucky. They may have been given extra eligibility. But the seasons weren’t resumed or replayed.

Just one day earlier, Toole and his players were celebrating a 2020 Northeast Conference Championship that they had won on their home floor. They were about to play in that scrubbed 2020 NCAA Tournament.

Sitting at a postgame press conference table in the recently opened UPMC Events Center that night five years ago, Toole answered a question about what it was like to savor that win in the wake of Penn (his alma mater) and the rest of the Ivy League canceling their conference tournament.

“It’s such a shame about the Ivy League,” Toole said. “To have your career ended in that kind of manner is crushing.”

A few days later, he had to walk into a locker room full of his own players and deliver that exact message about the end of their season. They’d have an NCAA Tournament berth unfulfilled. They’d have an NEC Tournament crown without a twirl in the big dance.

“I walked into the worst locker room I’ve ever been in my life,” Toole recalled Tuesday night. “It was like going to a funeral. Those guys will always have that disappointment of not being able to participate in the tournament.”

Speaking on Wednesday morning, 2020 Colonial alum Josh Williams still remembers how Toole addressed the team.

“It was a heartfelt message, almost to tears. It was heavy in the room emotionally,” Williams said. “It’s a message that he delivered like a father figure. … You could feel the pain in his heart and the desire he wanted for us to experience a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

This year, RMU will get a chance to right that wrong. This year, the Colonials will participate in the NCAA Tournament as champions of the Horizon League. They claimed the title with an 89-78 win over Youngstown State on Tuesday.

It’s the first conference tournament title for the university since moving to the Horizon League in 2021. It’ll also be the first time they actually get to play an NCAA Tournament game since losing to Duke in the first round of 2015 after winning a First Four contest in Dayton over North Florida.

“I’m super happy for these guys to get the opportunity to play. It’s an amazing experience to represent your school on that type of stage. I’m glad that they are bringing that recognition back to Moon Township and to the program,” Williams’ brother, Jon, said Wednesday morning.

Jon Williams was also a 2020 Colonial. He admits it is still hard to process how that season ended.

“The camaraderie and brotherhood that we had. How well we were playing. Being excited to have our Cinderella story,” Williams said. “Covid had its own plan. I don’t know if you ever get over it. I guess you just live with it.”

King was in his first year as athletic director of his alma mater when the pandemic hit. The Apollo native says this is the perfect team to have gotten the school back into the NCAA showcase.

“These guys don’t get scared. They don’t get down in a game. As an A.D., I’ve never been where I think we can win every game. I do with this group. At no point in the second half of the season did I think we were going to lose any game. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that with any other basketball team that I’ve been associated with,” King said. “To get to that point when we’ll have an opening tip (of an NCAA Tournament game), I’m a very proud athletic director.”

Despite the pain of missing out in 2020, Josh Williams insists the alumni on that team are still able to look back on winning the NEC title independently from missing out on playing the next weekend. In a way, he claims that experience actually keeps those teammates closer together.

“Not many people can say that they won their last college game and that they did it with people that they consider family,” Josh Williams said. “Part of the reason why some of the players on the team have an even stronger bond is that we shared that moment. The fact that we did win it outright, and it was our last game together, that’s the last memory that we have together.”

ESPN Bracketologist Joe Lunardi currently has the Colonials as a 15-seed playing Tennessee in Cleveland in the first round on Thursday. The Williams brothers still live in the Akron area, and both claim they’ll be in attendance if that’s where RMU is slotted.

“I’ll for sure be there. Front row,” Jon Williams said. “I’m going to support our guys and Bobby Mo’. I’m proud of what they’ve accomplished.”

For the Williams brothers and other teammates who may join them, they won’t be able to go back in time. But that game might give them a chance to at least experience in person what could have been.