? The field: Iowa (5-1), Fairfield (0-3), Valparaiso (2-0), Tulane (1-2).
? Tournament history: Iowa has won 22 of 23 tournament titles and is 45-1 overall in the event.
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Rough road to Iowa for Tulane
Tulane coach Dave Dickerson paid his dues before landing a head coaching job last April. He was an assistant at Maryland for nine years and is credited with recruiting some of the key players in the Terps' rise to a national championship.
Before that he was an assistant to the legendary Lefty Driesell at James Madison. In all he had 15 years of coaching experience along with his playing career at Maryland.
But nothing prepared him for this.
Before his new players had attended one class, Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans and changed everything. School was suspended indefinitely. Athletic teams found new homes in places like Lubbock and College Station, Texas. Students scattered to other campuses with no idea of when or if they might resume classes.
So how's your new job going, coach?
"The one thing that has prepared me is being at Maryland for the last nine years and working for Gary Williams, who has always taken a bad situation and made it good," Dickerson said. "But no one's ever gone through this -- being a first year coach and having to start your semester on someone else's campus and start your season on someone else's campus."
Tulane is one of three schools competing in this weekend's Hawkeye Challenge men's basketball tournament at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Tulane plays Valparaiso in the first game tonight, and Iowa and Fairfield meet in the second.
Just getting to this point has been something of a miracle for Tulane. On Sept. 8 the athletic department, which was reestablished outside of New Orleans, parceled out its teams to four different universities that agreed to play host to them. Men's basketball went to Texas A&M.
"We arrived on that Wednesday and we had everybody on campus by that Friday," Dickerson said. "Everybody was registered for classes by the 10th."
The culture shock alone must have been something, let alone coming to grips with what happened in Tulane's home city.
"At that point mentally we were in no kind of shape," Dickerson said. "We were fragmented in every sense of the word. We had no sense of direction other than we were going to school at Texas A&M to start our semester."
The Tulane administration insisted that all student-athletes go through counseling to help deal with the upheaval. Dickerson thinks it helped.
"I went through the Len Bias tragedy at the University of Maryland, and in order for us to get through that we had to have psychological help," Dickerson said.
Texas A&M is a school of 43,000 students in a rural setting. Tulane had 8,000 students in a sophisticated metropolitan atmosphere. Classes had already started at A&M, so the Tulane players didn't have a lot of choice in the classes that were available.
When Dickerson was finally able to start practice, his team was three weeks behind every other team.
"We didn't have anything," Dickerson said. "We didn't have any uniforms; we didn't have any gear; we didn't have any sneaks; there were a lot of things we didn't have. We didn't have space.
"Our situation, as far as being displaced, has affected us as a team even to today."
The uncertainty of not knowing whether the team would be in Texas a month or as long as a year made establishing any kind of stability or routine difficult, at best.
More than any coach, a rookie coach needs a break-in period, a honeymoon of sorts, where he can make the rounds on campus and generate interest and support for the program and sell himself to the community. Dickerson had none of that.
And recruiting was simply impossible.
"It's been the most disappointing thing just because the hurricane robbed the program of everything," he said. "We were new to the city; we were new to Louisiana; this is the first year on the job, so we didn't have strong enough ties and contacts that we would have kids commit without seeing the university."
Dickerson was effusive in his praise of the College Station community and the help and support he and his team have received at Texas A&M. But he's most grateful for the loyalty of his players.
"Sometimes you feel like you're wearing out your welcome, but the thing that has helped us is we have each other," he said.
"They were faced with their city and their school going through the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Those guys could have transferred or they could have done other things, but they believed in the school and they believed in me as a first-year head coach."
Dickerson can't wait to return for the second semester to be able to tell prospective recruits that the program and the school have survived the worst and are ready to come back stronger than ever.
"The type of kids we need are kids that can look into the future and who can weather the storm," he said. "If you can't do those two things then you can't be successful in our situation."
? Tournament history: Iowa has won 22 of 23 tournament titles and is 45-1 overall in the event.
========
Rough road to Iowa for Tulane
Tulane coach Dave Dickerson paid his dues before landing a head coaching job last April. He was an assistant at Maryland for nine years and is credited with recruiting some of the key players in the Terps' rise to a national championship.
Before that he was an assistant to the legendary Lefty Driesell at James Madison. In all he had 15 years of coaching experience along with his playing career at Maryland.
But nothing prepared him for this.
Before his new players had attended one class, Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans and changed everything. School was suspended indefinitely. Athletic teams found new homes in places like Lubbock and College Station, Texas. Students scattered to other campuses with no idea of when or if they might resume classes.
So how's your new job going, coach?
"The one thing that has prepared me is being at Maryland for the last nine years and working for Gary Williams, who has always taken a bad situation and made it good," Dickerson said. "But no one's ever gone through this -- being a first year coach and having to start your semester on someone else's campus and start your season on someone else's campus."
Tulane is one of three schools competing in this weekend's Hawkeye Challenge men's basketball tournament at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Tulane plays Valparaiso in the first game tonight, and Iowa and Fairfield meet in the second.
Just getting to this point has been something of a miracle for Tulane. On Sept. 8 the athletic department, which was reestablished outside of New Orleans, parceled out its teams to four different universities that agreed to play host to them. Men's basketball went to Texas A&M.
"We arrived on that Wednesday and we had everybody on campus by that Friday," Dickerson said. "Everybody was registered for classes by the 10th."
The culture shock alone must have been something, let alone coming to grips with what happened in Tulane's home city.
"At that point mentally we were in no kind of shape," Dickerson said. "We were fragmented in every sense of the word. We had no sense of direction other than we were going to school at Texas A&M to start our semester."
The Tulane administration insisted that all student-athletes go through counseling to help deal with the upheaval. Dickerson thinks it helped.
"I went through the Len Bias tragedy at the University of Maryland, and in order for us to get through that we had to have psychological help," Dickerson said.
Texas A&M is a school of 43,000 students in a rural setting. Tulane had 8,000 students in a sophisticated metropolitan atmosphere. Classes had already started at A&M, so the Tulane players didn't have a lot of choice in the classes that were available.
When Dickerson was finally able to start practice, his team was three weeks behind every other team.
"We didn't have anything," Dickerson said. "We didn't have any uniforms; we didn't have any gear; we didn't have any sneaks; there were a lot of things we didn't have. We didn't have space.
"Our situation, as far as being displaced, has affected us as a team even to today."
The uncertainty of not knowing whether the team would be in Texas a month or as long as a year made establishing any kind of stability or routine difficult, at best.
More than any coach, a rookie coach needs a break-in period, a honeymoon of sorts, where he can make the rounds on campus and generate interest and support for the program and sell himself to the community. Dickerson had none of that.
And recruiting was simply impossible.
"It's been the most disappointing thing just because the hurricane robbed the program of everything," he said. "We were new to the city; we were new to Louisiana; this is the first year on the job, so we didn't have strong enough ties and contacts that we would have kids commit without seeing the university."
Dickerson was effusive in his praise of the College Station community and the help and support he and his team have received at Texas A&M. But he's most grateful for the loyalty of his players.
"Sometimes you feel like you're wearing out your welcome, but the thing that has helped us is we have each other," he said.
"They were faced with their city and their school going through the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Those guys could have transferred or they could have done other things, but they believed in the school and they believed in me as a first-year head coach."
Dickerson can't wait to return for the second semester to be able to tell prospective recruits that the program and the school have survived the worst and are ready to come back stronger than ever.
"The type of kids we need are kids that can look into the future and who can weather the storm," he said. "If you can't do those two things then you can't be successful in our situation."
