By Stacy Hollowell
Sometimes things go perfectly as planned. As most coaches know, in a basketball season, you are almost guaranteed to see a few curve balls. This one was a different kind of special!
During the 2020-21 season we lost our starting point guard about midway through the season. Our backup point guard helped us make a run to the final eight of the NAIA National Tournament that year but with about eight minutes left in regulation he had an injury that sent him to the hospital. Our guys fought hard, and we were able to take the game to double OT but eventually lost by 5 to a really good Lewis Clark State team that made it to the championship game. Our whole team left the game hurt and I told them after the game to remember that feeling. I didn’t want them to forget it. We knew we had the pieces to compete and we felt like we had left a national championship on the table.
We entered the 2021-22 season with hopes of making another deep tournament run. The addition of some new key players, added to what we already had, gave us the confidence and belief that we had a chance to win a national title. During our first team meeting I told the guys that it seemed like every year we had to evacuate during the second weekend of school because of a hurricane and that they needed to have a plan in place for where they would go just in case. Sure enough, on the second weekend, we evacuated for Hurricane Ida. The media build up of the storm was enough to get most people moving early. I asked our guys to leave early Thursday morning August 26th after hearing news on the radio that the gas stations were running out of gas. About half of our team evacuated to the Dallas/Fort Worth area. The other half went home. My family evacuated to Kiln, MS thinking we had moved far enough to the east to miss the majority of the weather. But on August 29th, as we sat in the pantry for what would be our 14th tornado warning, I was watching a live YouTube stream of the storm in downtown New Orleans. You could see the extreme gusts of wind and the occasional piece of sheet metal blowing through the air. I knew then that when we returned to New Orleans we were in for a very different experience.
Two days later I was sent a video of the roof blowing off of our gym. On the fourth day after the storm, I got a call from our Athletic Director, Brett Simpson. He said we were allowed to return to campus to recover some of our things. When I arrived cleaning crews had been working to get all of the water off of the floor. One of the workers said that every time they thought they had all of the water off of the floor more would show up. When they opened up the floor, they realized there was another two inches of water trapped beneath the court. Every board in the gym was warped from wall to wall. At that point there were plenty of questions. Were we going to be able to have a season? Were we going to be able to have a school year? When would we be able to return to the city? How long would it take for power to come on?
I told Brett that I thought we needed to get our guys together as soon as possible and I proposed that we hold a training camp in Dallas given that most of our guys had gone that direction. He asked me to put together a Covid plan and a budget. And with a lot of amazing help, we were able to organize the trip pretty quickly. We were able to practice at the Mark Cuban Center in Dallas for ten days. A number of people and organizations chipped in to help feed the team. And with that we were off to a very uncertain start. How long would we be there? When would we be going back to school? If we do go back, where would we practice and play games? What if we just did school virtually and stayed in Dallas for the year? We had a lot of questions and not many answers.
We were called back to campus on September 20th if I recall correctly. Brett had been working with some of the local schools to find places for our athletic teams to practice. We will always be grateful for Delgado Community College, Xavier University, and Tulane University who were able to accommodate our practice times. Tulane’s Devlin Fieldhouse became our home court for three and a half months and by mid-January we were able to rent a court from the Ponchartrain Center in Kenner, LA to use in our gym.
We started the season 16-0 and had a convincing NCAA DI exhibition win that was an affirmation of what we believed we were capable of doing. Around mid-December Covid started hitting teams, including ours, and we had a number of cancelled or postponed games. Uncertainty can certainly be a distraction if you let it but this group learned a lot about controlling what they could control from the previous Covid-shortened season. In mid-January we took our only loss of the year. We would go on to win the next 21 games in a row but nothing during this season came without some sort of unforeseen hurdle popping up. We were in a tight race for the regular season conference championship. We were 25-1 going into the last weekend of conference play but our game against Talladega earlier in the year had been postponed. The final weekend required us to drive from New Orleans to Tuscaloosa on Wednesday, play Stillman on Thursday (which got postponed because of a tornado that past just to the side of our hotel), travel to Blue Mountain, MS on Friday, play on Saturday, and then travel back to Talladega, AL to play on Sunday. Talladega had two conference losses, we had one, and they held the tiebreaker. Fortunately, we were able to get out of there with a win and a conference championship. The next week we played Talladega again for the conference tournament championship in what was our third matchup of the year.
At the national tournament in Kansas City, we were hit with a stomach bug. Two guys were hospitalized and a was third very sick. Our starting PG was unable to play the round of 8 game and we were very fortunate to sneak by a very talented and well-coached College of Idaho team. Three days later we would match up against Talladega in the national championship game-our fourth matchup of the year. The resolve that our guys showed throughout the season is still something I haven’t really come to terms with. They were courageous, they had a deep belief in what we could achieve, they controlled what they could control, minimized distractions, and they didn’t let anything stand in their way. What an unbelievable season! 37-1 and a National Championship for Loyola University New Orleans.
Following eight seasons as head coach at Loyola University-New Orleans, Hollowell departed to join the men’s basketball staff at Ole Miss as associate athletic director for men’s basketball, working with head coach Kermit Davis. He left the Wolf Pack after winning the NAIA National Championship, topping Talladega 71-56 in the final. Hollowell had a win-loss record of 166-78 at Loyola, just seven wins away from the school record. He also broke a 71-year postseason drought and guided the Wolf Pack to the NAIA National Tournament in five of his final six years as head coach.
