UCF Knights lose season, and their coach

The Knights lost 65-63 to the worst team in the American Athletic Conference and fired their head coach of six years in the span of an hour last Thursday.

Coach Donnie Jones had led the Knights since 2010 when he took over a struggling team hampered by NCAA sanctions that featured a troubled Marcus Jordan and a would-be pro in Keith Clanton.

Six years later Jones was coaching the Knights to one of their most dismal finishes in recent memory.

The Knights, having lost 11 of their last 13 games of the regular season, seemed to be turning it around when they won their penultimate regular season game by a convincing 73-65.

Then they got buried 67-46 by a UConn team that was mid-pack in the conference at the time. But as luck would have it, the AAC tournament was being held in UCF’s hometown at the Amway Center. Even more good luck: The Knights would be playing Tulane again, which had never defeated UCF under Jones’ tenure.

The Knights seemed a shoo-in to make it through the first round.

Five and a half minutes into the first period, Tulane took the lead for the first time. The Knights were shooting wild in that first half, hitting only 25 percent overall and missing nearly four out of five shots from beyond the big arc. Tulane was missing the vast majority of their shots too, but what few shots they could land were burying the Knights’ season beneath them. The lead grew to 10 points just before halftime.

After coming out of the tunnel in the second half, something seemed to have changed. The Knights scrambled to the floor to snag a team-effort dead ball rebound away from the Green Wave, then dished out to Adonys Henriquez to bury only the second three-pointer the Knights had seen in the last 15 minutes of court time. Just a few seconds later Henriquez hooked in a layup and the Knights were down by only three points.

The game would tie up four times — three of them in the second period alone — as the teams struggled to wrestle the lead away. The last time the Knights led, after Tacko Fall sank a layup that gave the Knights their biggest lead of the game — six points — with only 4:40 left to go, was again only fleeting. A minute and 40 seconds later, the last time the Knights would lead a game in the 2015-16 season, the last time Jones would command UCF on the verge of a victory, the Knights let it slip away again.

The final minute would be a desperate game of keep-away that Tulane would win, inbounding the last ball with a two-point lead and just a second to go. The Knights could only watch their season tick away into oblivion.

“You’ve gotta finish the game,” Jones said in a postgame press conference. “Give Tulane credit. They battled back.”

The same night Jones would be told his career at UCF was over, cementing what had until then been a rumor that had surfaced by way of the sports blog Victory Way on Feb. 24, before the Knights tacked four more losses onto what would become a 12-18 season.

Jones had put together a 100-88 record leading the Knights, though the first 21-12 season was vacated due to NCAA sanctions. Jones’ teams saw a big drop-off in success from the fourth season onward. In the first three seasons of his tenure the Knights compiled a 63-34 record. In the last three seasons the Knights were 37-54.

In the wake of the revelation of Jones’ firing, UCF officials were nothing but complimentary to Jones, who was touted as a savior when he arrived to hold court in CFE Arena. But they were direct about why Jones was let go.

“…Our athletics department, university and community expect our men’s basketball program to compete for American Athletic Conference titles and make regular postseason appearances, and unfortunately, we have not reached these expectations,” UCF Vice President and Director of Athletics Danny White wrote in a release after the decision.

After UCF bowed out, the AAC Tournament’s lowest seed, Tulane, would go on to shock No. 2 Houston in a 72-69 upset that propelled them to the semifinal. They would lose that 74-54 to No. 6 Memphis. UConn would go on to win the whole thing 72-58 Sunday at the Amway Center.

With half a year to prepare for next season, White announced the Knights are launching a nationwide search for a new head coach, who would become the team’s seventh.

Rollins

The Tars exited the NCAA Division II South Region Tournament the same way they left the Sunshine State Conference Tournament 10 days before: losing out in the first round.

This time the Tars (21-9) didn’t have the luxury of home being walking distance away. They traveled to Huntsville, Ala. to face Barry (25-6) on Saturday.

Both teams would come out shooting strong, with Rollins burying 55.6 percent of their shots, outpaced by 60.3 percent by Barry.

Rollins’ Sam Philpott slammed home 20 points in just 26 minutes on the floor to lead the team, grabbing five boards in the process. Sharif Almulla wasn’t far behind with 18 points.

That effort still wasn’t enough to hang with Barry, which won 107-92 in the biggest shootout Rollins has been drawn into this season. Rollins led for all of 34 seconds of the game before Barry powered ahead and didn’t look back.

For the Tars, their season ended on the court in Alabama. Barry would go on to beat Union College by 74-65 en route to the Division II Tournament semifinals on March 24.

Winter Park baseball

In Wildcat country, the wild wins keep coming as Winter Park extended its winning streak to six in a row with an 11-1 blowout punctuating it last Friday. They’re 5-0 in the conference and 10-4 overall after sweeping University (8-11, 2-2) and Colonial (3-8, 1-5) in their two-game series.

The Wildcats hosted Timber Creek (8-4, 2-4) Wednesday night at press time. They play them again tonight, March 17, at 7. They host a team all the way from Bentonville, Ark. on Monday.

Edgewater baseball

After a long string of wins the Eagles fell on the road at Freedom on Monday by a 7-6 nail-biter.

That may have come as a surprise to the Eagles (4-7-1, 3-4), who were up 6-0 after two innings before watching the Patriots (6-8, 4-2) chip away at the lead before uncorking five runs in the seventh inning to walk off with a win. Freedom’s Jonmark Pesi cranked out four hits and four RBI in the process.

The Eagles came back from an early deficit to destroy Mainland (3-7-1, 2-3-1) on Tuesday night. Edgewater fell down 1-0 before the fourth inning when they rallied to briefly take the lead. After some back-and-forth scoring, they teed off in the seventh inning to take an 11-5 win.

The Wildcats finish a two-game series hosting Mainland at 4 p.m. today. They host Oviedo (9-5-1, 3-1) at 4:30 p.m. Monday.