By: Max Able
Bryce Hutchins tries to block a shot during a game against Purdue University’s managers at Mackey Arena. Picture courtesy of @BUmanagers on Twitter.
Last spring, the Bellarmine Knights men’s basketball program thrust itself into the national spotlight by winning the ASUN tournament in its second season as a Division I program. This year, the program is getting more national recognition, but because of its managers and not its players.
Since 2014, managers from more than 200 Division I programs have competed against each other in manager games. If each program has enough managers, they’ll meet up for a five-on-five pick-up game the night before the scheduled match-up between the two men’s teams.
If a team doesn’t have five managers, it is allowed to use another person affiliated with the program. The Knights, who have four managers, use graduate assistant Rocky Celebrezze, assistant coach Al Davis, strength coach Jo Griffin and men’s basketball director of operations Scooter Galloway.
Celebrezze, a graduate of the University of Louisville where he was a student manager, tries to stay out of the way and let the managers decide the games, manager Bryce Hutchins said.
“He’s [Celebrezze] pretty good, so we keep telling him we want him to shoot it,” Hutchins said. “But he’s always like, ‘No it’s y’all’s thing.’”
Manager Games, the organization that organizes these pick-up games, released its first manager rankings of the 2022-23 season, and the BU managers entered the rankings at No. 4.
Hutchins said their unselfish style of play is a big reason for their success in the manager games.
“We’re pretty unselfish offensively,” he said. “A lot of other teams just kind of take turns shooting the ball. We try and do a bad rendition of the Bellarmine offense.”
Senior Tristan Beckmann attributes their success to the ability to make shots from the perimeter.
“We work on our shooting a lot,” he said. “I’d say that’s probably our biggest strength, our three-point shooting. We have a lot of guys who can really just light it up from downtown.”
With some tough match-ups looming, including a road game against Liberty’s sixth-ranked managers, Beckmann said he is focused on staying near the top of the Manager Games rankings.
“It feels great. We gotta stay up there,” he said. “We were highly ranked last year, and we kinda fell off at the end of the year, so we don’t want that to happen again this year.”
A strong finish to the year wouldn’t just secure a top 10-ranking, it could send the BU managers to the Final Four this April in Houston.
After the regular season ends, Manager Games creates a 64-team bracket of manager teams. The match-ups are decided by a Twitter poll, in which anyone can vote, until there are eight teams remaining. Those eight teams go to the Final Four site, where they play out the remaining games to determine the managers’ national champion.
The voting will start in mid-March, around the same time as the NCAA tournament. To help send the Bellarmine managers to the Final Four, follow them on Twitter @BUmanagers, as well as the Manager Games @ManagerGames_.
Comments