For Marietta College and head coach Jon VanderWal, Tyler Hammond was the missing piece.

He was the piece that brought a new, up-tempo style to an offense that is otherwise made up of VanderWal’s first recruiting class from three years ago. The missing piece to a team that gritted its teeth through two losing seasons with the hope that things would turn around. The piece that made VanderWal’s message to Hammond come to fruition.

‘He said the program’s going in the right direction,’ Hammond said of VanderWal’s message when recruiting him. ‘He said it was going to be a big turnaround, especially this year. He said he was trying to build a dynasty for this school.’

Thanks to the play of freshman point guard Hammond, Marietta finished its season a winning team for the first time in 11 seasons and fulfilled VanderWal’s vision of a breakout year. After going only 10-16 a year ago, the Pioneers finished this season at 22-3, won the Ohio Athletic Conference championship and have a possible bid for the NCAA Division III tournament looming. Hammond ended up as the perfect fit to the team’s offense to bring success back to the program.

Upon his recruitment, Hammond had to decide whether or not to buy in to what VanderWal told him. After he thought about it, considering the conviction VanderWal had in his voice when he told him his message, Hammond was on board. He headed for Marietta to help get things turned around in his freshman season.

He joined a group of juniors from VanderWal’s first recruiting class. They had traded some losses for playing time early in their collegiate careers, but now they expected those losses to turn into wins.

‘Our juniors, I think, had a lot of faith in our coaching staff that it was going to be a chance to come in and play a lot right away,’ VanderWal said. ‘But we promised them that we would continue to bring in good players so when they were juniors and seniors, we’d have a really good team.’

The team didn’t have to wait long to start to see the results of what VanderWal put together. The Pioneers started off their season 13-0. At the time, it didn’t seem like any team could stop Marietta. Some sense of complacency started to take over.

But in the middle of the season, two straight losses that are as important as the wins that fill the schedule around them stick out to players. They proved the Pioneers weren’t invincible. On Jan. 8, Marietta lost to Heidelberg 81-77. Four days later, they fell 82-74 to Capital.

‘They were important losses. We’d been focused throughout the whole year, but we kind of got complacent,’ forward Kevin Knab said. ‘Those back-to-back losses showed that we have not a lot of room for error and that we needed to stay focused.’

After the second loss, Marietta played what VanderWal considers the team’s best game of the year against John Carroll University. The Pioneers fought off two comebacks by the Blue Streaks and pulled away to get the 101-90 win. Hammond sparked a second-half run to help send Marietta to victory.

That fight, that evident hunger to end the brief losing streak, proved any lingering sense of complacency was removed. Marietta returned to its original motivation to make sure losses were in the past.

‘You could just tell everyone wanted to win that game,’ Knab said. ‘Anyone watching could see that it was probably the hardest game we played all year.’

The Pioneers finished their season 9-1 after those two losses. The combination of VanderWal’s first recruiting class and his ‘blazing fast’ point guard, Hammond, pulled Marietta to where he predicted it would be.

With the regular-season turnaround complete, the Pioneers now set their sights on the OAC tournament and then possibly the NCAA Division III tournament.

Hammond helped bring his team to prominence in the regular season. Now he’s looking to do it in the postseason.

‘We want to win all three games,’ Hammond said, ‘and hopefully make it to the D-III tournament and make a run there.’

 

cjiseman@syr.edu

Published on February 22, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Chris: cjiseman@syr.edu | @chris_iseman