Ryan Elmquist tried not to think about the 26 years of inferiority riding on what was the final free throw of his career. He fought off those thoughts creeping into his mind and zoned in on the basket. Nothing else.

‘I tried not to think about anything, but it was kind of hard,’ Elmquist said. ‘I was focusing more on just making the basket and tried not to think about what’s on the line.’

What was on the line was Caltech’s 26-year Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference losing streak. There have been 310 conference games for Caltech since Jan. 3, 1985, and each ended with a loss.

So as Elmquist, a forward for Caltech (5-20), stepped to the line at the Braun Athletic Center in Pasadena, Calif., on Feb. 22, he had a chance to end the most dreadful of streaks. With his Beavers tied with Occidental at 45 with three seconds left, one free throw would end an unfathomable part of basketball history.

Elmquist drained the free throw, and Occidental missed its half-court heave at the buzzer. The 26 years of losing finally came to an end.

Fans stormed the court in a euphoric scene rarely captured inside the gym at Caltech. For them, the significance of what happened took effect immediately. For Elmquist, it didn’t sink in as quickly.

‘It took a second to set in,’ Elmquist said. ‘And then all of our fans rushed to center court, so then it started setting in. That’s when everyone was kind of jumping around and celebrating, because we finally did it.’

Caltech isn’t exactly known for its athletic prowess but for its reputation of producing engineers and scientists. Thirty-one members of its alumni and faculty have graduated and gone on to win Nobel Prizes. Still, 26 straight years of losing every conference game is a span that seems almost too difficult to accomplish. Even for a team of players that typically places greater emphasis on academics than basketball.

The Beavers couldn’t even stumble into a win over the past two-plus decades.

Elmquist, who ended that game with 23 points, said 99 percent of the reason he went to Caltech was because of the academics. He saw basketball as a nice distraction from the rigors of homework and stress that comes from studying at Caltech.

He never could have imagined what he would eventually help do. If that win was ever going to happen for the Beavers, it was going to be this year. Last season, they didn’t win a single game, let alone a single SCIAC game.

This year, though, the conference losses came by slimmer margins.

‘I felt pretty good in most of the conference games we played this year,’ Caltech head coach Oliver Eslinger said. ‘A lot of them were really close. … I knew we were close, and our guys knew it, too.’

Caltech suffered a 71-67 overtime loss to Redlands on Jan. 12. That was followed by a 76-70 loss at La Verne. The Beavers were getting closer and closer to the win that eluded the program for so long. When it beat Occidental on Senior Night, not only did it end the conference losing streak, it also marked Caltech’s fifth win of the season.

At 5-20, the Beavers finished with their best record in 15 years. Last season, they went 0-25. And in the previous eight years, Caltech didn’t win more than one game.

To win five games in one season was doing the improbable.

‘This year, we had a lot of really close games,’ sophomore forward Mike Edwards said. ‘Finally getting that win in terms of this team, not even with the streak, was just awesome.’

When it was over, Edwards said he sat in his locker not saying much while his teammates shouted and celebrated the win. He couldn’t help but think about how good it felt to get a victory. With five wins in two seasons on the team, the sophomore doesn’t get that feeling very often.

In the week following the game, Edwards said he started to receive e-mails from alumni telling him how proud they were of the team. Random people around the Caltech campus stopped him to say congratulations. That’s when he started realizing the win meant more to the school than it did to him.

‘It more sunk in afterward when people were talking to me and e-mailing me,’ Edwards said. ‘I was like, ‘This is a bigger deal than I was expecting.”

For Elmquist, though, the win sealed his career. The final free throw he’d ever shoot rescued a program from the doldrums of disparity. Elmquist ended his career in a way no Caltech player has in 26 years.

He walked off the court as a member of a Caltech team that won a conference game.

‘It sounds like a storybook ending to a career,’ Elmquist said. ‘It was pretty awesome that we could finally get it to happen.’

cjiseman@syr.edu

 

Published on March 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Chris: cjiseman@syr.edu | @chris_iseman