The last time both the women’s and men’s basketball teams at SUNY Brockport won conference championships in the same season was 2009, but no one knows when both finished the regular season in first place in the conference to earn top seed honors for the postseason.
In their first season in the Empire 8 conference after decades in SUNYAC, the Golden Eagles women had a relatively easy time going 23-3 overall and 15-1 in league play. The men had a more difficult run to the top after starting the year 1-7 before running up a 16-2 record the rest of the regular season and was 14-2 in conference.
“When we came back from winter break, we had a tough week of practice – we called it Hell Week where we just worked way harder than we did and honestly that was the big turning point for us,” senior guard Tony Arnold said. “Number one seed really doesn’t mean anything when you get into playoffs. We’re happy about home court advantage, but if we don’t win it, the number one seed don’t matter.”
“It was weighing on us not seeing the results,” Brockport men’s head coach Joe Clarke said about his team’s start. “I think break was really good timing for us and credit to our guys who came back with a focus in January.”
The women are led by Empire 8 Player of the Year candidate, junior guard Stephanie Jean-Baptiste, who stands second in the conference averaging 18 points per game and shooting 49% from the field, along with graduate student Kayleigh Hunt, who is scoring at an 11.8 points per game clip along with 6.9 rebounds per game.
Potential conference Rookie of the Year Peyton Maneri leads the conference in steals with 70, putting her in the top ten in program history in a season. She is fourth on the team in scoring at 8.4 ppg.
“I think from day one, but it all starts with trust so all of us together decided what our goal was going to be and we all had to buy in and trust that we were going to accomplish that,” Hunt said. “Once we had a team meeting and said we want to do something big and we all bought in, we knew we were going to do something big.”
“People put each other over themselves,” Jean-Baptiste added.
“I got a text message from (senior) Shannon Blankenship during preseason and she wrote that Team 49 is going to be special,” Brockport women’s head coach Corrine Jones said about this 49th women’s team in school history. “We have a fast pace…and an active zone. We play very different from every other team in the state, quite frankly, and I think that throws (other teams) off.”
On the men’s side, not a single Golden Eagle is among the top 15 in the conference in scoring only because they spread the ball around with junior Mekhi Beckett and Zachary Rice with Arnold all averaging double-digits in scoring. Arnold and senior Jakhi Lucas stand first and third in the conference in steals.
Did the success of the women’s team help motivate the men’s team after a difficult first half and/or did the late run of the men’s team help drive the women’s success?
“It gave us a little motivation to get wins playing right after them,” Arnold said.
“We’ve actually learned from them a lot playing second (in a doubleheader) so watching them,” Clarke said. “We’ve actually tried to use them to help us and their success has been great and probably helped us for sure.”
“Joe Clarke told me after one of our early games that ‘I talked about your team at the start of our game with our guys…I told them to get like the women,’ and I thought ‘that’s amazing,’” Jones said. “It’s pretty cool and I do think it sprinkles over. It’s nice to travel with winners and I think we feed off of each other.”
Both teams hosted conference semi-finals and were set to host finals with the playoff champions earning automatic bids to the NCAA tournament which begins March 7
