Secret’S Out: Pepperdine Is For Real Surprising Win Over Indiana Means No More Surprises
The locker room fell quiet for a moment, it was as if the significance of the situation had finally hit the Pepperdine basketball team.
In a few minutes the Waves would take the floor against Indiana in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. A national television audience was waiting, not to mention 20,000 fans inside the HSBC Arena.
These are moments that sometimes determine the mentality a team takes onto the floor, whether it plays with fear or confidence.
And it was a moment Waves coach Jan van Breda Kolff, who leads Pepperdine into the second round today against Oklahoma State, was well prepared for.
Van Breda Kolff and his assistants had had edited a 12-minute video tape of Pepperdine highlights from this year, then put them to music. When he concluded his pregame speech, van Breda Kolff surprised his players with it.
“Our guys didn’t know we’d done that, so when we were finished talking, I said let’s go to this other room,” van Breda Kolff said. “We put the tape in and all of a sudden our guys were like. … I mean they were like … And I said, that’s a pretty good basketball team. Let’s go out and show all these people that that’s the basketball team we are.”
The 11th-seeded Waves then proceeded to dominate sixth-seeded Indiana, 77-57, to push into the second round and perch themselves atop the national stage.
The victory was as shocking as it was thorough, not because of the outcome, but the ease with which the Waves handled Indiana and the swagger they displayed in doing so.
“They took it to us,” said Indiana’s Michael Lewis. “There wasn’t a time we were really in the game except right before tip-off.”
The 38-hour window between Friday’s game and today’s might not be enough for van Breda Kolff to come up with another motivational ploy, but maybe he doesn’t need one. The Waves were a confident bunch Saturday as it prepared for Oklahoma State, enjoying their moment in the spotlight but not yet ready to give it up.
The win over Indiana may have awakened the rest of the country to Pepperdine, but the Waves weren’t surprised at all.
“We expected to be here, we knew we had a good team,” said Pepperdine point guard Tezale Archie, who had a career-high 11 assists Friday. “We’re just glad to get the opportunity to show the rest of the world.”
Oklahoma State coach definitely noticed. The Cowboys (25-6) were happy to avoid a top seed in the second round, having lost there to No. 1’s Duke and Auburn the last two years. But after watching Pepperdine embarrass Indiana, they weren’t so sure they had an advantage.
“I think the easiness in which they were able to beat the Hoosiers surprised our coaching staff and players,” Oklahoma State coach Eddie Sutton said. “They present a little bit of a problem for us in that we really haven’t seen anyone that plays the style that they play. Their changing defenses, their trapping. But hopefully we’re mature enough to handle all the different defenses.”