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It’s no longer UALR, they say.
Yes, the school is still named the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, but last summer its athletic marketing department rebranded its teams as “Arkansas-Little Rock.”
Now, thanks to another rebranding decades in the making, the most high profile of the Trojan teams is in the most high profile of American basketball tournaments: March Madness. On Thursday UALR plays as a No. 12 seed — its highest seed in five tourney appearances — against the No. 5 seed Purdue Boilermakers in Denver. TBS will televise the 3:30 game.
First year UALR head coach Chris Beard has led the Trojans to a 29-4 record, the best mark in program history, and to the most successful debut season in all Division I men’s basketball coaching careers in the state of Arkansas. He did this by getting his senior-led team to buy into playing tough, smart, fundamentally sound defense game in and game out. That’s no small motivational task, considering 98% of players prefer the fun of offense to the grind of stopping that fun.
“Chris Beard has a unique ability of saying the right thing to make guys feel good at the right time,” UALR assistant Wes Flanigan told The Buzz 103.7 FM. “There are some instances in the course of the year where he had a great feel for how to approach our guys. He may be the best I’ve ever been around in terms of that.”
In essence, the 42-year-old Beard has put his own twist on a defensive lineage shared by Eddie Sutton and Nolan Richardson, the two titans of Arkansas men’s college basketball. A significant portion of all three coaches’ defensive philosophies trace back to a single man: former Oklahoma State head coach Hank Iba.
Iba, known as the “Iron Duke of Defense” espoused a methodical, low-scoring style which propelled his Aggies to national titles in 1945 and 1946. In the late 1950s, he coached Sutton, who went on to develop a faster “Hawgball” variant which in the late 1970s pushed Arkansas into the national elite.
Another of Iba’s players, Don Haskins, had coached Nolan Richardson in the 1960s.
Richardson has credited both Haskins and Iba for deeply influencing his own coaching. Richardson sped his defense up to great success, branding it “40 Minutes of Hell,” but he also applied critical principles from the two older coaches. They taught not just technique but ways to get total “buy-in” from players for consistent, maximum effort.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Hank Iba mentored and befriended former Indiana coach Bobby Knight. Knight served as Iba’s assistant in the 1972 Olympics, then became the national team head coach himself in the 1984 Olympics. He thought so highly of Iba, then 80 years old, he carved out a staff position for Iba as special assistant. “Bob Knight recalled the gravel-voiced Iba telling U.S. players, ‘Men, the thing we’ve got to do tonight is just get out there and beat their ass,’” according to the Tulsa World. “He was an extremely competitive, tough-minded guy that I think anybody that played for him would have to say he was the greatest teacher of life that they ever encountered.”
After Indiana, Bobby Knight coached Texas Tech. He hired Chris Beard as an assistant and mentored him for seven years. Now, Beard takes Knight’s lessons into the biggest game of his life.
On paper, Purdue is one of the worst imaginable opponents for the relatively undersized Trojans. The Boilermakers are one of the nation’s best rebounding teams and boast future NBA players in two powerful seven-footers, both of whom weigh more than 260 pounds, and a rugged 6’9” power forward.
The Trojans, meanwhile, don’t have a single probable future NBA player. Their center, Lis Shoshi, stands at 6’11” but weighs 210 pounds. They also have a 6’9”, 215 pound wing player in Mareik Isom and Daniel Green, a seldom-used 6’9”, 225-pounder.
But the Trojans also have a long-armed, 230-pound power forward in 6’5” Roger Woods who has repeated proven he can guard star players 6 inches taller. They appear to have a superior backcourt, led by sharpshooters Marcus Johnson, Jr. and Josh Hagins. UALR allows only 59.6 points a game, second in the nation, and as a team led the Sun Belt Conference in three-point shot percentage. To win, the Trojans must pester Purdue into a higher number of turnovers and shoot lights out from the perimeter.
Beard and his staff’s task is twofold: Getting these Trojans to believe they can win, then putting them in the best position to actually do it. Beard is already saying the right things to fire up his team and keep them poised for what rank alongside UALR’s 1986 first round upset of Notre Dame as the biggest win in program history.
He has for the most part refused to frame UALR-Purdue as a David versus Goliath matchup, pointing out his team beat two NCAA Tournament teams and a Big East team earlier this season. “We played San Diego State, Tulsa and DePaul, and our league’s really good, so our guys have been in games like this before,” he told Fox 16’s Jay Bir. “We certainly respect Purdue. We understand what their program stands for, but this isn’t the first time we’ve played a team to this caliber. To me, it’s just the next game on the schedule and we’ll approach it that way.”
In reality, though, the situation is far more formidable than Beard leads on.
The fact is Purdue is a different caliber team than San Diego State, Tulsa and DePaul. Purdue played in a harder conference (Big Ten) than any of them, with the eighth-toughest schedule in the nation, and still won 26 games. San Diego State also won 26 games, but with the nation’s 55th-toughest schedule. Beard asserts the Sun Belt Conference is “really good” but in every metric that matters — from winning percentage to point differential to strength of schedule — shows the Sun Belt is middling at best.
Most of the numbers portend the Boilermakers will grind out a hard-fought win, the Trojans will get pats on the back for a moral victory and the state of Arkansas will quickly settle back to its normal state of Razorback-centrism.
But if Beard can coax an all-time performance from his defense and somehow lead UALR to an upset win, then expect something rare to happen. This overachieving and gritty team, marketed by its athletic department as #LittleRocksTeam, will begin to really, truly become our state’s team too.
For more of Beard’s thoughts on the historic season and Purdue, go to BestOfArkansasSports.com.
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