From a leaky bus to the Final Four: Inside Florida Atlantic's unfathomable run
Thirty years ago, opposing fans felt sorry for Florida Atlantic University. Saturday, FAU will play in the Final Four. That's how far the Owls have come.
Ron McLin learned to dread rain on game days.
The downpour would often seep into the athletic department’s aging mini-bus that transported the Owls to road games near and far. “We always hoped it didn’t rain because the back of the bus leaked and that was where all the gear was,” McLin said.
Of course, it wasn’t much better when the basketball team crammed into vans instead of the mini-bus. Pilipovich recalls a van with more than 200,000 miles on it breaking down as he drove past Port Saint Lucie on the way to a 1991 road game at Valdosta State. “The police came,” Pilipovich said. “They said that we should never drive that van again. They said if we stepped down too hard on the floorboards, our feet could go right through the floor.”
It also helped that nobody was above tackling two and three jobs to compensate for FAU being short staffed and underfunded. Ken Elder began at FAU in 1987 as the athletic department’s volunteer sports information director. By the time he left a few years later he had chauffeured recruits visiting campus, urged student groups to attend more games, come up with marketing promotions to attract new fans, served as a color analyst on radio broadcasts and sweet-talked potential donors into opening their wallets. “I became the everything,” Elder said with a laugh. “We all did what we had to do to get it going.”
Despite Elder’s best efforts, crowds at the 3,000-seat FAU Gymnasium were often sparse. Players remember plenty of nights with only a couple hundred fans in the stands even after Loomis and Pilipovich molded the Owls into a 21-win team in 1990 and produced back-to-back 15-win seasons the next two years.
“You didn’t have to ask the crowd to quiet down when you shot free throws,” McLin said. “It was already quiet.”
FAU brass had listened to spiels from consulting groups on the increased front page coverage that schools with Division I athletics get. They had heard how that can translate to more alumni donations and more undergraduate applications. In the end, FAU saw more upside accelerating its Division I timetable than continuing to compete as a Division II independent.
“We decided,” Loomis said, “you know what, we have to bite the bullet and go Division I.”
The FAU baseball team was on its way back from a game at Barry University during the school’s first year in Division I when the mini-bus, as it so often did in those days, broke down.
As the Owls climbed out of the bus to push it to the side of the road, a veteran player turned to coach Kevin Cooney and mimicked the slogan that FAU Athletics had adopted.
“Coach, we’re on the run to Division I,” the player quipped with a grin.
