Cal Poly Basketball Awards Banquet – What I learned

I didn’t really know what to expect Friday night. As a player, coach, or family member, I’ve been to probably 20 high school end-of-year awards ceremonies, but I didn’t know what to expect for an end of year banquet for a Division 1 basketball program. Cal Poly’s event at the Performing Arts Center was a fun one. Here are some of the things I learned and some things I was reminded of.

Dylan Royer, Drake U’u, and Chris O’Brien shared the Cal Poly captain’s award. by Owen Main

Seniors mean a lot

Sometimes in the middle of the season, fans might look at a player and wonder why someone is in the game over someone else. Often, it comes down to intangibles, and it was clear that this year’s seniors have earned a ton of respect from head coach Joe Callero.

“The maturity of three seniors was the absolute key to the season,” said Callero.

The personality of a team at this level can be shaped by the leaders on the team and it’s clear that, along with Chris Eversley, the personality of the past year’s team was driven by the three seniors — Dylan Royer, Chris O’Brien, and Drake U’u. Look for Eversley, Jamal Johnson, and Kyle Odister to quickly establish themselves as dominant personalities on next year’s roster.

And the winners are…

Chris Eversley took home the team’s Most Valuable Player Award. In other news, the sky is blue, Avila Beach is warm, and SLO is a great place to live.

Dylan Royer won the Mr. Hustle award, Drake U’u took home the Academic Excellence and Media Darling Awards. Chris O’Brien won the Inspiration Award, lamenting “I really am an old man, and I feel like it.”

All three seniors split the Captain’s Award and junior point guard Jamal Johnson netted the Coach’s Award.

Men’s college basketball news can be broken on a Friday night in June

About two hours before the awards ceremony, head coach Joe Callero tweeted that Reese Morgan would undergo surgery on the 24th of this month and miss the entire 2013-14 season. Morgan redshirted in 2011-12 with an injury of the same knee, but came on to have a strong freshman campaign last year, starting in at least 10 games down the stretch. Morgan’s best game of the year came in his first start, when he scored 26 points at the Thunderdome in Santa Barbara. With the loss of Morgan and Dylan Royer, look for senior Kyle Odister to be Cal Poly’s main three-point threat next season.

Ryan Darling, Shawn Lewis, and other former Mustangs were on-hand at the 2013 Awards Banquet. By Owen Main

The Cal Poly basketball family continues to grow

Joe Callero and basketball alum Alex Lambertson have worked over the past year to develop a Cal Poly basketball alumni network, and that network was represented with several recent graduates from the Cal Poly basketball family. Among others who attended Friday night’s awards ceremony were Shawn Lewis, Will Taylor, Ryan Darling, and Jordan Lewis. For someone who is a Cal Poly basketball fan, it’s fun to see players past and present interacting and to get a chance to talk and catch-up with all of them. Taylor, for example, recently returned from a stint playing basketball professionally in Germany.

Cal Poly has a Media Darling Award

And it went to Drake U’u. Take a few minutes and watch. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. (props to Chris Giovannetti)

The UCLA win was nice…

But the team has other milestones it’s hit during the past few years. They’ve won at USC and UCLA, finished with back-to-back 18-win seasons, become a team Big West opponents implicitly respect, and raised the bar for future Mustangs teams. The change is one of culture and, while not all Cal Poly fans agree with everything that happens all the time, it’s hard to argue that the culture around the basketball team at Cal Poly has changed from five years ago, when the team finished 7-21 and expectations seemed almost impossible to have.

The event overall was really fun

I wasn’t sure how much fun I would have, but if you followed the basketball team at all this year, there were lots of inside jokes, fond memories, and other fun things. The location was pretty great too — inside a side hall of the Performing Arts Center I had never seen before. For the $5 admission, I think it was totally worth it.

The Future

The awards ceremony got me thinking about the future of the program. Questions about who will improve the most from last year to next stand-out. The unknown can be the most exciting or terrifying thing in the life of a college basketball coach or fan. How will David Nwaba fit-in and is he really the physical specimen they’ll need him to be with Morgan out and O’Brien graduated? Can any of the three freshmen next season (Markel Leonard, Ridge Shipley, and Taylor Sutlive) break through and make significant contributions? How will Kyle Odister move into a role where his shooting and energy are needed night-in and night-out? Will Jamal Johnson’s efficiency continue to improve? Can Chris Eversley take a next-step to being a candidate for Big West Player of the Year?

I could go on and on. the point is, the future is a fun thing to play with, as anticipation builds toward next year.

Next year’s schedule is ambitious

The non-conference schedule for Cal Poly includes games at Arizona, Pitt, Stanford, Delaware, and Fresno State and a home game against Nevada, among others. To build a reputation and get teams to schedule home-and-home series, you have to play good teams on the road, and Callero has once again put several BCS schools on the schedule.

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