For a school such as N.C. State, which has 50 official clubs affiliated with it, an ordinary person would assume that one of those 50 clubs would have been a men’s basketball team. This was not true, however, until last year, when senior Matt Kostelic and junior Lucas Elliot went through the process of starting a club that became N.C. State’s first club basketball team.
“N.C. State had about every sport you could think of for club, but we didn’t have men’s basketball, which I thought was a bit strange,” Elliot, a junior in biological science, said. “We love to play and we just tried to start it up and it worked.”
In its second season the club team has big expectations for this year, beginning with tryouts, which will be held September 9 p.m. in Carmichael Gym. Another round of tryouts will be held the following Wednesday at the same time and place. Tryouts are open to everyone and the team is looking to keep anywhere from 12 to 15 players.
“We will have two or three cuts depending on the number of kids and the level of talent that is there,” Kostelic, a senior in human biology, said. “With school work and the heavy schedule that we are planning on playing this year, we will try to take about 12 to 15 kids to ensure we have a decent sized team all year long.”
After the team is finalized, the team plans to practice once a week and is hoping to sponsor a tournament in conjunction with the women’s club basketball team during the middle of October.
“We are trying to host a tournament with the women’s club team at State and we are trying to make it a school wide tournament,” Kostelic said. “We are shooting for a mid-October time, hopefully on the weekend of the sixteenth and seventeenth. We are just trying to get as many teams out there as possible and just have a good time.”
The team’s schedule begins to go into overdrive during the second semester when they have multiple tournaments scheduled for each month, with most being played on the weekends.
In the team’s first season, last spring semester, it participated in a very light schedule that included a scrimmage game against Campbell University and an entry into the National Basketball Tournament that was held at N.C. State at the end of last semester. In the tournament they made it into the second round of play before being eliminated.
“We sat up a scrimmage with Campbell and we entered the national tournament at N.C. State, where we made it into the second round,” Kostelic said. “But just getting the experience and the feel for playing together in real events was huge for us.”
The team will have three coaches this year. The head coach, Bryan Bender, works with Campus Outreach for N.C. State. His brother Alan Bender, a recent Clemson graduate, and Emmanuel Acquaah, who is a junior majoring in psychology, will serve as assistant coaches.
Both Kostelic and Elliot expressed how much more beneficial it is to have coaches that can focus on the technical side of the game, allowing for both of them to be able to focus on playing the game and performing at a high level.
“[Bender] comes to all of all games and practices,” Elliot said. He gets us drills to do in practice and tells us what defenses we are going to run. In games he is able to make adjustments, and just having him there for leadership is a huge deal.”