Abdimalik Mohamed, sports editor

Andy Stafford had the ball. The crowd was on its feet. The clock was winding down. Three. Two. One. The shot went up and in came Elias Batala and he put it back in for the win against St. Scholastica on Feb. 22. The team cleared the bench and ran towards Batala in celebration. The jubilation on their faces was incredibly evident. 

This Augsburg men’s basketball team finished 12-14 and 8-8 in conference play on the season and the number five seed in the six-team MIAC postseason playoffs that ended on Feb. 25. This team is relatively young with 10 out of the 17 players on the team being underclassmen and so being the number five seed is something to be proud of. Stafford, Batala and Will Blascziek are some of the best players on the team and Stafford himself scored 21 points in that game earlier against St. Scholastica. 

One thing that has always fascinated me about people that play college or even high school basketball is their stamina and their ability to play major minutes and play with energy until the final buzzer. This team certainly plays that way and they love to play that way. Fourteen out of their 26 games have been decided by less than 10 points which is pretty remarkable. That generally drains you as a team but the Auggies kept fighting and, even though the results haven’t been there the whole season, the process has been good. 

Even though the season ended in a 73-57 loss to Carleton College, the team has an incredibly bright future. A lot of that has to do with coach Aaron Greiss, who has been the head basketball coach since 2005. Under his guidance the program has been moving up the upper echelon of the MIAC conference. Some of his accomplishments at Augsburg are winning the Auggies their first game against a Division I opponent in 2011, leading them to back to back MIAC Championship games and winning said Championship in the 2017-18 season.

To wrap this whole thing up, I think that the Auggie men’s basketball team is on the right track with players like Batala and Trent Gomez returning next year. When we think about the game of basketball, we tend to talk about scoring 20 or 30 points a night. Scoring that much is cool however, you need to have a certain level of team defense and connectedness to do so — which is what all the teams in the MIAC have, including the Auggies. Take Saint John’s for example, with their 15-1 conference record and 22-3 record overall. That is who the Auggies are chasing, and with time and effort they should be able to reach them. Hopefully this season is the start of something special and here’s to a return to the top one step at a time.