Radford, VMI to play for Big South championship

RADFORD -- Before last season, Radford's basketball players harbored little hope that they would play for a Big South championship during their careers. They were bad, and they knew it.

"We had a losing mentality," said senior guard Kenny Thomas, a former Highland Springs High standout.

The disheartening reality was impossible for them to ignore: They had just finished an 8-22 season -- their fifth losing record in the past six seasons. They had lost in the first round of the conference tournament for five straight years.

"Some days, I didn't want to come to practice," junior guard Amir Johnson said.

Today at 4 p.m., there is nowhere the Highlanders would rather be than at the Dedmon Center, where they will host Virginia Military Institute in the Big South tournament final.

The winner goes to the NCAA tournament. The loser doesn't, though Radford earned a spot in the National Invitation Tournament by winning the regular-season championship.

That alone was remarkable, considering that last season in coach Brad Greenberg's debut, the Highlanders went 10-20 and were one-and-done again in the league tournament.

But they now are 20-11 (their first 20-win season since 1999), in their first tournament final since 2001 and playing for their first NCAA bid since 1998.

This also is the Big South's first all-Virginia final, and VMI's presence is no less impressive.

The Keydets (24-7) had a winning record this season for just the third time in 24 years. They last made the NCAA tournament in 1977. Today's game is so significant to VMI that coach Duggar Baucom's sister cut short a Hawaiian vacation to attend.

Years ago, Greenberg and Baucom surely couldn't have imagined themselves in these jobs -- Greenberg at a 9,000-student school tucked away in the New River Valley, Baucom at a military college that doesn't let its students have cell phones or electric razors until mid-January of their freshman year.

Greenberg worked in the NBA from 1984-97 as an assistant coach and front-office employee. He was general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers and drafted Allen Iverson. But the Sixers fired Greenberg after a year. He caught on with his younger brother, Seth, at South Florida, then followed him to Virginia Tech.

Baucom was a college dropout, police officer, junior varsity basketball coach and insurance salesman before getting his degree from Charlotte and first college assistant job at Davidson in 1995. Before VMI hired him in 2005, he had been a head coach for just two seasons, at Division II Tusculum (Tenn.).

Like Baucom, Greenberg promised change to his players when he arrived. He said the Highlanders have taken "a quantum leap" since last season.

Credit part of that to Greenberg and his staff for landing Art Parakhouski, a 6-11 260-pounder from Belarus who spent the past two seasons at the College of Southern Idaho, a junior-college power. He lead Radford this season with 16 points and 11 rebounds per game.

"He gets around the rim, he's gonna score," Baucom said.

But Baucom says Thomas, Radford's secondleading scorer, is the wildcard. The teams split their regular-season games. Thomas scored 28 points on 10-of-16 shooting in Radford's win, 10 on 4-of-5 shooting in its loss. He scored 35 in Thursday's semifinal against North Carolina Asheville -- tying the Big South tournament single-game record.

It was the best moment in his bumpy experience at Radford, though today -- a day he never envisioned -- could offer an even sweeter reward.

"We've come so far as a team," he said, "I can't say I could have known."