Former Siena men’s basketball assistant coach Tobin Anderson brought his new team to Loudonville for a closed scrimmage last October.
Hired in May by Fairleigh Dickinson, Anderson got his first chance to be a Division I head coach, taking over a Knights program that went 4-22 last season. When he scheduled the scrimmage against Siena, it gave him a chance to see what he had against a solid Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference team, led by Saints head coach Carmen Maciariello.
It wasn’t pretty, according to Anderson.
“We had a long ways to go,” Anderson said. “I told Carm, ‘We should be OK, but we have a long ways to go.’ We got beat around pretty good by Siena and I thought to myself, ‘This is going to be a struggle. We’re going to have our ups and downs. There’s a lot of work to do and we’ll get better.’ But never fathomed we’d be doing what we’re doing now.”
Anderson spoke by phone this morning from Columbus, Ohio, where Cinderella FDU is getting ready to pay Florida Atlantic at 7:45 tonight on truTV in an NCAA Tournament second-round game for a spot in the Sweet 16 in Madison Square Garden – just 15 miles from FDU’s Hackensack, N.J. campus.
The 16th-seeded Knights (21-15) of the lightly-regarded Northeast Conference shocked the college basketball world on Friday, beating Purdue 63-58 in a first-round contest to become only the second No. 16 seed to beat a No. 1.
“It’s amazing,” Anderson said. “It’s awesome. This season wasn’t like a smooth ride. We had a lot of ups and downs. Obviously, you’re building a program, so you’re kind of starting from scratch a little bit, so to get here and beat Purdue and get chance to play today and go to the Sweet 16, it’s beyond our wildest dreams.”
Anderson spent 2011 to 2013 at Siena under then-head coach Mitch Buonaguro, who lobbied hard to hire…
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