Reminiscing with former Penn guard Scott Kegler

 

I caught up with former Penn guard Scott Kegler earlier this month for a story on the long tradition of Saturday morning pickup sessions at the Palestra. 

But we also talked about the upward trajectory of Penn basketball from his freshman year of 1991-92 to his senior year of 1994-95, and how a program that had single-digit wins before the Class of '95 came on the scene won the final 43 Ivy games of Kegler's Quakers  career. Here's the '90s rise of Penn basketball as "Kegs" remembers it:

"When we showed up, the team wasn’t very good. The year before they were 9-17. It was coach Dunphy’s either second or third year, I can’t remember. And so it was intense. The team wasn’t any good, we weren’t any good. We wanted to be good, we didn’t know how or if we’d be any good. And the first year, it was just a struggle. We all were competing against each other for playing time. Our freshman class was Jerome [Allen], Eric Moore, Shawn Trice, and me. All those guys wanted to play. We were just beating each other up in practice. Jerome was playing, Shawn was playing, Eric was playing, I was playing a little bit. And we got better.

We beat Penn State that year in Hershey [87-86 2OT on Jan. 25, 1992]. It was a funny game because we won the game in regulation, we went into the locker room, we were celebrating, changing our clothes. The referees came in and said the game’s not over. Something happened, there’s still time left on the clock, you’ve gotta come back out and play. So we had to come out on the floor and play a couple of seconds to win. But that was a big win for us because it was a Big Ten team, a scholarship school and we win, let’s build on that. We were in the Ivy League hunt until we played at Yale, and Yale had this guy named Casey Cammann, and we lost and that really put us out of contention.

We lost to Princeton and we lost to Yale, so we knew we couldn’t win. We watched the game video - coach Dunphy was so mad - we watched the video all the way from New Haven to Brown. He’s slamming the overhead bins. And we practiced the next day at Brown hard. He lined us all up on the sideline, rolled the ball out on the floor and it was a game of if you could dive on the floor and get it first. We were running sprints, we won that night.

So anyway, we finished the season 16-10, but we still didn’t know. We were okay, we knew we wanted to win but we weren’t anything special yet. The next year Matt Maloney transferred. So Matt made an immediate impact. That was a nucleus of the team for the next three years. Matt, Jerome, Barry Pierce, Shawn, Eric and Tim Krug we had as a freshman. We still didn’t really know, but all of a sudden, [we're] better. I don’t really remember who we beat outside the league that year, but we went undefeated in the league, won a championship and it was great. But we still didn’t feel that special. There was some excitement, more people at the games, more fired up, but everybody kept working and working.

Then the next year, we had a transfer, Ira Bowman. He was amazing. For the next year coming back, Barry Pierce’s senior year and my class was juniors, we knew we were special.

So we won some games and I can’t remember who some of our big games were that year, I think we played at Ohio State and lost. We might have beat USC that year, I can’t remember whether it was my junior or senior year [note: it was his junior year, a 77-62 win at USC to open the '93-94 campaign]. But we went undefeated again. And now we knew we were good. We beat Nebraska in the tournament that year and that was amazing. And we cracked the top 25 at some point, and I don’t remember if it was the end of that year or beginning of senior year. But the crowd to play Nebraska, we played at Nassau Coliseum in Long Island, was a Penn crowd. It was filled and they were cheering for us. We had games where we felt like we shouldn’t have won, but in that game we just played well. And we won [90-80 on March 17, 1994]. We weren’t going crazy like it was a Cinderella kind of feeling, it was just, okay. We belong there. And then the next game was Florida, we lost [70-58 on March 19]. A close game, we lost.

So then coming back we were losing Barry Pierce which was a big loss, but we had Ira Bowman, and we had the basic nucleus back, which was great. Although we lost to Canisius in the preseason NIT…hated that. But then we won the ECAC Holiday Festival in Madison Square Garden, beat St. John’s when they had Felipe Lopez. I remember vividly standing at center court at Madison Square Garden, waiting for some ceremony. And I remember consciously making an effort to soak this up because I knew that’s not gonna happen again.

And then we beat Michigan at Michigan [62-60 on Dec. 13]. A little extra special for me and Shawn Trice because Shawn’s from Detroit, and that’s why coach scheduled that game. My family drove up from Columbus, Ohio, so they drove up. I think my dad chartered a bus and brought a bunch of friends and family. But at some point, people were excited and crowds would fill. Princeton games, Big 5 games, it was a sellout, loud as can be. Super-fun. So I don’t know, culture-wise, everybody bought in, worked hard, moved toward the same goal, good guys."

And that's how a nine-win team became the class of the Ivy League relatively quickly.

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