Erik Schelkun has photographed Dayton Flyers men’s basketball games — and many other UD athletic events — for the university for decades. He’s as good as it gets. Chances are if you’ve seen a Dayton photo and loved it, it’s an image he captured. On Wednesday at UD Arena, I photographed the pregame introductions from behind the UD bench because I’m always looking for new angles. Schelkun took a similar approach from a different spot, getting low to the floor to feature a player’s colorful shoe with the Dayton starters in the background. You can see him in my photo. Behind those starters was me, looking like I was ready to play, and that would have been true. I’d always rather be playing basketball than watching it. On Fridays at noon every week, I get my opportunity. One of my favorite teammates is my neighbor, Rob, who always tells me I need to shoot more. Of course, he rarely misses, so I often look for him. “You really pass well,” Rob told me earlier this year, “and I’m able to catch and shoot right away with most of your passes.” I don’t mind being the role player. Every team needs that guy. The Dayton Flyers won 29 games in 2019-20 not only because they had Obi Toppin and Jalen Crutcher but because Jordy Tshimanga and Dwayne Cohill were effective and efficient in limited minutes. Last year, Isaac Jack was one of those guys, and as he showed Wednesday, he should be again this year. Jack scored nine of his 11 points in the second half to help Dayton beat Ball State 77-69 in a game that was closer than it should have been, considering how dominant Dayton was in the first half, but not as close as the final score indicated. Jack, who Tom Archdeacon wrote about after the game, received extended playing time in his first appearance of the season because Zed Key was on the bench with four fouls for most of the second half. Grant chose to play the big man with experience instead of the 7-foot-1 freshman Amaël L’Etang. “I thought Isaac did a really good job,” Grant said. “With his size and physicality, he is a valuable piece to what we do. Zed got in foul trouble tonight. Isaac was able to come in and fill that void for us. That’s what you want to see out of a veteran and out of a guy that’s been in the program. He understands what these types of situations call for. He was the beneficiary tonight of some of the guards who were able to make plays for him from an offensive standpoint, but I thought his impact was bigger than just the scoring.”
An important early victory for Dayton My 6-year-old son Chase still has no sense of time. “Is tomorrow a school day?” he asked on Monday. “What about the day after tomorrow?” “What about the day after that?” We put a calendar on the fridge. It hasn’t helped much. However, we do have a good routine in the mornings, and he’s always the first in line outside school. I bring this up because Jack and Enoch Cheeks were asked Wednesday in the postgame press conference about Dayton’s routine of playing games on Wednesdays and Saturdays early this season. Neither had thought about it at all, probably because it’s a rare occurrence these days and will be interrupted soon by the Maui Invitational. Dayton’s schedule before Maui featured one game circled in red, underlined and highlighted: Northwestern last Saturday at UD Arena. The Flyers rallied from a 10-point deficit with 12 minutes to play to win 71-66. They lost to Northwestern by the same score a year earlier. It’s the second-best non-conference home victory of coach Anthony Grant’s eight seasons and the seventh non-conference home victory in the last 15 years against a team ranked in the top 50 in the Ken Pomeroy ratings, assuming Northwestern stays in the top 50. Dayton will now root for Northwestern the rest of the season. The better the Wildcats are, the better the victory will look on Dayton’s resume. It’ll likely be a Quadrant 2 victory in the NCAA Evaluation Tool because Northwestern likely will rank between No. 31 and No. 75. If Northwestern lands in the top 30, it would be a Quad 1 victory. The Northwestern victory makes Dayton’s path to an at-large NCAA bid a bit easier. I think Dayton needs one victory in Maui and needs to beat UNLV and either Cincinnati or Marquette, while not stumbling in any of the other games when it will be heavily favored. That would leave it with a 10-3 non-conference mark. At the moment, Dayton has the best victory in the A-10. Saint Joseph’s has the only other impressive victory. It beat No. 56 Villanova 83-76 on Tuesday. George Mason lost to Marquette, which is No. 24 in the Ken Pomeroy ratings. Massachusetts lost to two top-100 teams: No. 76 West Virginia; and No. 81 Louisiana Tech. Duquesne lost to No. 87 Princeton. Fordham lost to No. 17 St. John’s. “These early-season contests, they really matter,” Grant said Saturday. “Throughout the A-10, these types of games matter. The hope is if we’re going to be a multi-bid league, we’ve got to be able to take care of our business as a conference in the non-conference. That’s why you schedule games like this.”
A familiar face returns to UD Arena We moved to Columbus 11 years ago — about a month before I started covering the Flyers — when my wife Barbara got a job at the Columbus Dispatch. Obviously, I’d rather live in Dayton or Springfield, where we lived before moving here. It was more important that she be close to the office and breaking news and all that stuff photographers have to worry about. One advantage of living in Bexley is I have a short commute whenever I want to talk to former Flyer Damon Goodwin, the longtime head coach at Capital University. I sat down with him for a Where Are They Now story a couple months after moving to town in 2013. Dayton has twice played Capital in exhibition games in recent years in part because Grant and Goodwin are former Dayton teammates who remain good friends. Grant’s Flyers beat Goodwin’s Crusaders (now the Comets) 80-42 before the 2022-23 season and 89-71 before the 2018-19 season. Dayton and Capital meet again at 7 p.m. Saturday, but this time the game counts in the official record books for Dayton. The Flyers settled for playing a Division III team when they couldn’t find a Division I team to fill a hole on the schedule created when they were able to add Marquette to the schedule late in the process. Dayton Athletic Director Neil Sullivan told me they had to move games around and ran out of options for this Saturday. They decided any opponent was better than no opponent at all. At least by playing Capital, Dayton can help an alum. Capital will make more money from this game than it would have in a preseason game. Without getting into specifics, Goodwin said Dayton was “very generous.” The money will help fund his program’s next summer trip to Europe. I visited Goodwin in his office Tuesday to talk about the game and much else. I asked about his son Dane, the former Notre Dame star who’s now in his second season in the NBA G League with the Salt Lake City Stars. Damon will travel to Salt Lake City to see him play in December. We talked about the passing of Don Donoher, Goodwin’s coach at Dayton. Goodwin saw Donoher one last time at a reunion for the 1984 team last December at UD Arena and talked to him several more times in the months before his death in April. Donoher came to watch Goodwin coach at Capital a number of times over the years. Early in Goodwin’s tenure when Donoher was helping coach at Fenwick High School, he would come to Capital’s team camps in the summer. He would also come to watch Dane play at Upper Arlington High School. “I’ve had two mentors in basketball, and that’s Mick (Donoher) and Dan Hipsher,” Goodwin said. “We do a lot of the same things. We have a couple movements we call Muncie, Yankee and Dixie. And if you’d say that to Anthony, he’s going to know what those are. That’s what Mick used to call our movements. We still make those same calls. We do different things offensively. The games changed a little bit, obviously, but we still have the same calls.”
Here’s other news that might interest Flyer fans: 🏀 I’m due to talk to Sullivan again soon for a story about the changes coming to the NCAA in 2025 when athletes will be paid directly by schools for the first time. He often sends links to stories to people in the athletic department about the changes and sometimes to me, too. Here’s the latest story from Ross Dellenger, of Yahoo Sports, which explains where things are heading: “With non-football early signing period upon us, we’re about to see how messy college sports is going to get.” 🏀 Dayton associate head coach Ricardo Greer’s son RJ signed with North Carolina State on Wednesday. “You can tell he’s a coach’s son,” N.C. State coach Kevin Keatts said in a press release. “He can score the ball on all three levels, but is definitely a high-level shooter right now.” 🏀 Dayton received one vote — from Benjamin Rosenberg, of The Commercial Dispatch in Starkville, Miss. — in the Associated Press top-25 poll this week. I did not vote for Dayton because I’m wary of being a homer. I didn’t want to be the only person voting for Dayton or even one of two. The Flyers will get a vote from me if they start 5-0 and then win at least two games in Maui. They’d be No. 1 if they win the Maui Invitational, considering the strength of that field — but let’s not get crazy.
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