UVa powers past Wake for ACC win

By ANDREW JOYNER
Daily Progress staff writer

Entering Tuesday night’s game between No. 14 Wake Forest and No. 10 Virginia, much was made of the similarities between the two teams because of the connection of UVa coach Pete Gillen and his former assistant, Wake coach Skip Prosser.
As the game played itself out, however, it became clear the difference between the two teams: Gillen has Roger Mason Jr. and Travis Watson and Prosser doesn’t.
Mason scored a season-high 25 points, including a career-high seven 3-pointers, and Watson had 20 points and a career-high 17 rebounds as the Cavaliers evened their ACC mark with a 86-74 victory over the Deacons, who entered the game having won five in a row.
“Tonight we beat a terrific basketball team. I feel it is the best basketball team we’ve played this year. ... It was a tremendous victory for us,” Gillen said. “This was definitely our biggest win of the year. I said that last Saturday [after the win over North Carolina] but this was even better.”
Added Prosser: “Watson was the dominant player inside and Mason was the dominant player on the perimeter.”
Chris Williams added 15 for the Cavaliers (11-2, 2-2 ACC), who just a week ago fell to 0-2 in the ACC after a loss at Clemson.
Mason finished with those 25 points, despite leaving the floor for a brief stretch in the second half after crashing to the floor after colliding with Broderick Hicks on a charge with 15:33 left in the game. After leaving for the locker room with team trainer Sue Saliba, Mason returned to the floor with 15:03 left to a thunderous cheer from the sold out University Hall crowd.
“Roger was great. I didn’t think he was going to come back in the game. His shoulder popped out but somehow the trainers got it popped back in. I was stunned he came back in the game. We didn’t think he could lift his arm up,” Gillen said.
As for Watson, Gillen said his performance was equally impressive though it might have lacked the drama of Mason’s.
“Travis was great as well. Whenever we had the ball he just wanted it inside,” Gillen said.
Virginia quickly gained the advantage in the second half and when Mason connected on his sixth trey with 12:11 remaining, the Cavaliers had a 62-51 lead. That advantage grew to 14 at 74-60 with 7:05 remaining when Watson, who had three 3-point plays in the second half, converted two free throws.
Wake could only manage to get as close as six, 77-71, with 2:06 remaining but Virginia outscored the Deacs 9-3 the rest of the way, primarily from the foul line, to secure the victory.
Josh Howard led Wake Forest (13-4, 3-1 ACC) with 19 and Broderick Hicks added 12. Darius Songaila, who entered the game averaging a team-best 17.0 points per game, had 11 as he was constantly harassed by a plethora of UVa big men including Watson, J.C. Mathis and freshman Jason Clark. A visibly frustrated Songaila ultimately fouled out with 54.8 seconds remaining.
Wake Forest led by as many as 11 in the first half but Virginia came back to take a 41-39 halftime lead when Mason connected on a high-arching 3-pointer as both the shot clock and game clock ticked down.
Prior to the game, it was announced that 6-foot-5 senior swingman Adam Hall has been diagnosed with a partial tear of the plantar fascia (dense tissue that supports the arch) on the bottom of his right foot. Hall, who sat behind the UVa bench Tuesday on crutches and in street clothes, injured the foot in the waning seconds of Saturday’s 71-67 victory at North Carolina. Hall, who was averaging 9.8 points and 5.1 rebounds a game, will be out for an unspecified amount of time but is likely to miss a couple of weeks with this type of injury.
“We hope we can get him back as soon as possible. No one knows at this point how long it will be but he probably won’t be against Florida State on Sunday,” Gillen said.

Coaches find themselves
in unenviable position

By JERRY RATCLIFFE
Daily Progress sports editor

If Pete Gillen and Skip Prosser had their way, tonight’s basketball game between Virginia and visiting Wake Forest wouldn’t be played. There is such a strong bond between the two men that both are extremely uncomfortable having to do battle against one another.
But the game will go on. The two will have to put aside their friendship, their history, for a couple of hours as one of them will hang an “L” on the other in the ACC clash.
Both coaches are much more at home teaching the game to their players in the gym than being under the spotlight of headlines and TV cameras. Unpretentious, both have done everything possible to play down the first head-to-head meeting between the former colleagues.
“Hey, it’s not myself and Pete
playing against each other,” said Prosser, who was Gillen’s assistant for eight years at Xavier. “People aren’t paying to see a couple of red-headed guys shooting jumpshots around the gym.”
How true. A sellout crowd at University Hall will pay to see if Virginia can build off its victory at North Carolina over the weekend and to see if the Cavaliers can hand Prosser’s Deacons their first conference loss.
Still, with all the attention directed to high-profile basketball coaches by TV these days, the game may be more about Pete vs. Skip than either man would like.
“This is very difficult,” said Gillen. “It’s something I don’t want to do. I’m not looking forward to it. It’s no fun for me going against a friend and former assistant. Skip did a lot more for me than I did for him. He recruited a lot of great players as my assistant, and as Woody Hayes once said, to be successful, you have to have good people.”
Prosser, who will be the guest speaker at Gillen’s hoops breakfast at Boar’s Head Inn this morning, said it will be an honor coaching in the same game as his mentor. Once it’s game time, the two will have to go for the jugular.
While Prosser followed Gillen at Xavier, the two had been careful not to cross paths competitively after Gillen went to Providence, then on to UVa. In fact, when Xavier opened its new arena a couple of years ago, there was some consideration of asking Gillen to bring his Virginia team to Cincinnati to christen the new building.
“I thought about it for about five-tenths of a second,” said Gillen, who needed only a microsecond to decline the offer. Prosser nor Xavier asked but rather an alum. Gillen believed it was a lose-lose situation for him.
“It was a game that neither one of us felt was appropriate,” said Prosser. “Coach had done so much to make that building possible, why should one of us be sad that night? We wouldn’t be playing this game if we weren’t in the same conference. It’s tough to play your friends.”
The two first met when Gillen was an assistant coach at VMI in the early ’70s and Prosser was a ninth-grade coach. Prosser later became a varsity coach in Wheeling, W.Va., and reunited with Gillen (who had moved on to an assistant’s job at Notre Dame) at one of Howard Garfinkel’s Five-Star basketball camps. The two met, conversed, and Prosser later wrote Gillen and asked to come up and watch the Irish practice.
“I remember Pete being exceedingly gracious to me,” said Prosser of the visit to South Bend. “It wasn’t like I had any diamond-in-the-rough prospects that he was interested in.”
When Gillen got the head coaching job at Xavier and hired Jeff Nix as an assistant, Nix told Prosser that Gillen had another opening and that Prosser’s name had been mentioned as a strong candidate for the job and that he should call Gillen.
“I don’t know how strong a candidate I was,” Prosser joked. “I knew Pete had offered the job to at least three other guys. I think I was somewhere between three and 33 on his list.”
Closer to three, Gillen remembered. Pete had offered the job to Bob Hurley Sr., a successful high school coach in New Jersey and to a couple of others but settled on Prosser.
“I didn’t know Skip all that well,” said Gillen. “I do remember that he said, ‘Coach, I won’t let you down.’ It was one of the best moves I ever made hiring him.”
The two men have the utmost respect for one another. While Prosser said he had an encyclopedia of stories about Gillen, he wouldn’t tell any.
“I’m not telling tales,” said Prosser.
Current Virginia assistant Tommy Herrion, who has been with Gillen for the past eight seasons, totally understands that mentality.
“All the guys who have worked for Pete are very loyal,” said Herrion. “It’s a family. When you work with somebody for eight years, you spend so much time working close together, working a lot of hours, that you become more than just co-workers.”
Gillen felt the same way his first two years at Virginia when the Cavaliers had Loyola on the schedule, a team coached by former Gillen assistant Dino Gaudio, who will give tonight’s battle a double whammy because he is now an assistant for Prosser at Wake.
While Prosser said that Gillen has had a profound influence on his coaching career, about how to deal with game preparation, how to handle winning and losing and the like, Prosser has taken some things from Gillen’s playbook and added his own touch, both of which are clear to Herrion, who scouted the Deacs on tape.
“Skip has done a great job as a head coach, with his own style,” said Herrion.
That’s no surprise to Gillen.
“I knew Skip would be a great head coach,” said Gillen. “I never gave much thought about being in the same league and playing two or possibly three times a year.”
While neither like the idea, they’ll both show up at U-Hall at the appointed hour, try to beat the hell out of one another, then renew their friendship afterward. There won’t be any points given out tonight for sportsmanship.

Virginia turns up heat on Deacs

Roger Mason Jr. scores 25 points as the Cavaliers reach 80 for the second time in their last 10 games.

By DOUG DOUGHTY
THE ROANOKE TIMES

   CHARLOTTESVILLE - Anybody who believed in the validity of comparative scores should be advised immediately of Virginia's 86-74 victory over Wake Forest on Tuesday night.

    One week earlier, Clemson had beaten the Cavaliers by 16 points. Three days earlier, Wake Forest had drubbed Clemson by 41.

    Virginia definitely made a believer of first-year Deacons coach Skip Prosser, who spent eight years as an assistant to UVa coach Pete Gillen at Xavier and saw Gillen's team at its best Tuesday night.

    Roger Mason Jr. had a season-high 25 points, and fellow junior Travis Watson had 20 points and 17 rebounds for 10th-ranked UVa (11-2, 2-2 ACC). The Cavaliers topped the 80-point mark for the second time in 10 games.

    The loss snapped a five-game winning streak for 14th-ranked Wake Forest (13-4, 3-1). The Deacons, who were tied for the ACC lead before Tuesday, cut a 14-point deficit to 77-71 before Virginia finished the game by making nine of 10 free throws.

    "We were 20-of-22 from the line and that's a big part of the game," Gillen said. "Tonight, we beat a terrific basketball team, the best team we've faced all year. It looked like they would beat us by 25, the way the game started out."

    With defensive stopper Adam Hall in streetclothes, the Cavaliers saw Wake Forest hit nine of its first 14 shots in jumping to a 21-10 lead. Hall is out indefinitely after suffering a partial tear of the plantar fascia, the dense tissue that supports the arch.

    Hall was replaced as a starter before the Cavaliers' 71-67 victory Saturday at North Carolina, but he played 24 minutes against the Tar Heels, and UVa could ill afford to lose him. The Cavaliers were left with nine able-bodied players, four of them freshmen.

    One of the freshmen, Keith Jenifer, started at point guard for the second game in a row, but it was the play of classmates Jermaine Harper and Jason Clark that sparked a first-half turnaround. Harper hit back-to-back jump shots, one a 3-pointer, and Clark's inside defense helped cool off the Deacs.

    "They were carving us up," Gillen said. "Then, we started to defend. I thought our freshmen did a really good job defensively. They were fearless."

    Mason capped an electrifying first half when he drained a 3-pointer, his fourth of the half, with 2.3 seconds left. It put the Cavaliers on top 41-39 on the 10th lead change of the half - nine coming in the last 4:06.

    The Deacons, so dominant early with a starting lineup that includes four seniors, played the last 6:39 of the half without post man Antwan Scott. Scott injured a finger while deflecting a pass thrown with such force by Watson that it landed 15 rows deep in the crowd.

    "He was great - tap-dunking and shooting from outside," Gillen said. "He wasn't the same player when he came back."

    Scott returned with 15:33 left with a bandage on his left hand but did not score again. Moments before Scott returned, Mason went to the locker room with a shoulder injury, only to return after a 54-second absence and score his last eight points.

    Mason had gone 1-for-8 on 3-pointers in each of his previous two games and missed his first 3-point attempt Tuesday before finishing 7-of-13. The Cavaliers were 10-of-18 as a team - one week after missing 20 straight 3-point shots against Clemson.

    "The last 30 minutes, we didn't guard nearly as well as we did to start the game," Prosser said. "We had to press at the end and, as you can tell, we're not a very good pressing team."

    Virginia will return to action Sunday at 4 p.m. against Florida State. Original plans were to play Saturday, but tickets mistakenly were printed with that date.

Cavaliers pummel Deacons
Mason, Watson propel Virginia

Cavs, Deacons gave fans a good run for their money

Cavs' Hall could miss more action

By Jim Reedy
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 16, 2002; Page D03

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Jan. 15 -- Tenth-ranked Virginia rode junior stars Roger Mason Jr. and Travis Watson to a 86-74 win over No. 14 Wake Forest tonight, evening its ACC record at 2-2.

In their past two games, the Cavaliers (11-2) had struggled offensively against zone defenses, but they returned to form tonight against a Demon Deacons defense that played a mix of man-to-man and zone. Virginia shot 57 percent in the second half and hit 10 of 18 three-pointers. The Cavaliers made 20 of 22 free throws, including several down the stretch that preserved their second top-25 victory and snapped the Deacons' five-game win streak.

"We finally started playing defense, moving our feet, and that was the difference," Cavaliers Coach Pete Gillen said. "I said it on Saturday [after winning at North Carolina], but this was our biggest win of the year."

Mason's offensive success was a microcosm of -- and a reason for -- Virginia's overall improvement. In the Cavaliers' loss at Clemson and win at North Carolina, he had identical 1-for-8 performances from behind the three-point arc. Tonight, the Good Counsel graduate hit 7 of 13 threes and finished with 25 points and four assists.

Watson, who had been laboring with calf cramps since Virginia's Jan. 5 loss to N.C. State, won the battle down low against Wake's veteran big men. He tied his career high with 20 points and established a personal best with 17 rebounds, eight on the offensive end.

The Cavaliers charged back from an early deficit to lead by two at halftime and pushed the margin to 14 with 4 minutes 21 seconds left. The Deacons (13-4, 3-1), a veteran squad that starts four seniors and a junior, did not go away, though. They fought back with a late run, slicing the Virginia lead to 77-71.

In the final minutes, the Cavaliers hit their free throws to gain the victory, just as they did Saturday against the Tar Heels. Senior swingman Adam Hall sat out as expected because of a foot injury, and the Cavaliers got another scare when Mason popped his shoulder out of joint crashing to the floor on a fast-break drive early in the second half. He headed gingerly to the locker room but was back in the game less than a minute later.

The news on Hall, who hurt his right foot with less than a minute left in Saturday's 71-67 win at North Carolina, was not as good. He sat on the bench in street clothes tonight, holding crutches, a day after an MRI exam revealed a partial tear of the plantar fascia, the dense tissue on the bottom of the foot.

Gillen said after the game that the Cavaliers, who have four days off before hosting Florida State on Sunday, are not sure when Hall will be back. He had struggled for six weeks before Saturday's game, but he contributes 9.8 points and 5.1 rebounds per game and is one of the conference's most explosively athletic players.

Without Hall, freshman guards Keith Jenifer and Jermaine Harper stepped into increased roles. Harper, a 6-foot-3 shooting guard, had 10 points and established personal bests with five rebounds and 21 minutes. Jenifer started at point guard for the second straight game but never found his rhythm. He picked up three fouls in a span of two minutes early in the second half and finished with four points, three assists and five turnovers.

"They're getting better," Gillen said. "Both are courageous, which you want in the ACC. They play good defense, which is what we want. Offense is a bonus."

Mason gave Virginia a 41-39 halftime lead with a pull-up three-pointer in the final seconds of the first half, capping the Cavaliers' return from an 11-point deficit.