Epicenter of college hoops is in downtown Des Moines
Tickets won’t be cheap or easy to find at Wells Fargo Arena on Saturday.
The NCAA Tournament is giving fans an unusual treat in the round of the 32 with a lineup of games you sometimes find in the Final Four.
First up is Indiana against Kentucky at 4:15 p.m. Then Kansas and Connecticut play in prime time. It’s a collection of college basketball blue bloods. Together, they have won 20 national championships.
“It’s just going to be a great experience,” Kansas senior Perry Ellis said. “Just seeing all these great programs around you is great. It’s an honor to be here.”
The lowest ticket price listed on Stubhub on Friday was $130. Tickets in the lower bowl were going for as much as $550.
Adding to the intrigue is the relative proximity of three of the schools. Kansas, Kentucky and Indiana all brought large contingents of fans. Casual fans in Iowa will also show interest.
It’s not often four teams with this much history play at the same site this early in the NCAA Tournament.
“Fans on all sides should be into it,” Kentucky coach John Calipari said. “It should be a lot of fun.”
A life at the Roxbury – Kansas guard Wayne Selden and Connecticut freshman Jalen Adams are from Roxbury, Mass. That’s a statistical anomaly because Roxbury is a dissolved municipality now classified as a Boston neighborhood.
Selden and Adams made some of its final years more interesting, though. Separated in age by about 15 months, the elder Selden and Adams played youth football and basketball together in Roxbury, forming a close friendship that has survived their distance.
“We’re actually really close,” Adams said. “Our parents are super, super close. We grew up together, we played on the same AAU team in third and fourth grade, lived right next to each other, pretty much. That’s pretty much like a brother to me.”
Adams said Selden, a former quarterback, was the better football player. He wasn’t ready to concede superiority in basketball even as an underdog in Saturday’s NCAA Tournament second-round game.
The two communicated after Adams made a three-quarter-court heave to send UConn’s American Conference semifinal game against Cincinnati to overtime, where the Huskies eventually won.
“We actually talked after he hit that crazy shot, and I’m sure we’ll be chatting up a lot after the season,” Selden said. “I actually sent him a Tweet, I just said keep going, keep being in attack mode. I was really proud of him.
“…My grandmother is his mom’s godmother. Our mothers are like godsisters, something like that. We’re really close.”
Coaching influence – UConn coach Kevin Ollie played with the Huskies for coach Jim Calhoun from 1991-95. He was an assistant to Calhoun in 2011, when UConn won the national championship.
Calhoun retired the following season with 877 wins, fifth on the career list.
Since he spent so many formative years – as a player, then professionally – with Calhoun, Ollie’s former coach is a natural influence. Ollie has used it to get the most out of his players.
“I just never met anybody that’s tougher than (Calhoun). Never met ’em,” Ollie said. “So he breathes that toughness in us and we try to breathe that toughness into our players.”
Stony Brook coach Steve Pikiell also played for Calhoun in the early 1990s. His team was eliminated by Kentucky in Thursday’s first round, but not before he was reminded of his years with the Huskies.
“We all know what we’ve been through, through coach Calhoun’s practices,” Ollie said. “So all of us have an understanding of brotherhood through those practices.”
Renewed rivalry – Kentucky and Indiana played every season from 1969-2011 and their rivalry dates to 1924. The regular-season series ended when the teams couldn’t agree on whether to play on campus (Indiana’s preference) or at neutral sites.
They last met in the Sweet 16 of the 2012 NCAA Tournament, and Saturday’s game will be their fifth tournament matchup with Kentucky holding a 3-1 advantage.
“I don’t think anybody has ever closed the door on the series,” Indiana coach Tom Crean said. “Certainly it’s not open right now with anything that makes a lot of sense, but hopefully someday it will.”
Kentucky (eight) and Indiana (five) have combined for 13 national titles and played 27 games when both teams were ranked nationally. Kentucky has won the last three tournament meetings, in 1975, ’83 and 2012.
This story was originally published March 18, 2016 at 9:16 PM with the headline "Epicenter of college hoops is in downtown Des Moines."