The System: A Retrospective and a Preview

I don't normally write a preview-type piece for an individual game, especially for a non-conference game. But I feel like in advance of tonight's men's game against Greenville, I need to write a little something. But it's not a preview in the traditional sense. I also need to take a look back at five years that were a hell of a lot of fun.

A good primer in advance of reading this piece is this 2017 piece from D3Hoops.com. There are some good quotes included from former North Central coaches Michelle Roof and Doug Porter as well.


Come back with me to the afternoon of Halloween back in 2012. I touched on this a little bit in my season preview that year, but I don't think even I knew what I was in for then. Coach Roof had told me that there was going to be a fundamental change in how we were going to play, predicated on three things: a deep rotation, full court pressing all game, and a crapton of threes. 22 year old me especially loved that last part. But I didn't really know that the strategy was part of a full blown strategy, a strategy known in basketball circles as "The System."

Photo by Cory Hall

Grinnell College was the pioneering team behind this, and David Arsenault, Sr. was its architect. It's a system that's now been around for close to 30 years, and the teams that run it have had some moderate success with it. It's most known nationally from a game played during that first season North Central's women began to utilize it, when an overmatched Faith Baptist Bible College team came to Iowa, and Grinnell's Jack Taylor took 108 of his team's 136 shots, scoring an unbelievable 138 points in a 75 point win.

Photo by Steve Woltmann (North Central College)

Back to the Cardinals though, that team that was picked to finish sixth in the then eight-team CCIW snuck into the conference tournament. It was the beginning of a stretch where North Central women's basketball came back to relevance, making three CCIW Tournaments and, with the right personnel in place, making an NCAA Tournament appearance in 2015 and cementing their place as my favorite team I've ever been a part of. They never had a game where they deferred to just a single player taking that many shots, and the scoring never reached heights like that in the five years I did it, but I tracked a number of things every game for those five years and had a hell of a lot of fun. That I still have a voice after those five years is nothing short of a miracle.

Photo by Steve Woltmann (North Central College)

Whether you read the above article or not, I think the brief description I gave just after the jump is a good way to describe The System: Press everywhere, shoot a ton of threes, line changes every 40-60 seconds. A lot of times when North Central ran it, I was a little critical of how the press would be implemented. Against a press, teams are going to break free for easy layups sometimes; it's a given. But the Cardinals, especially later, had the bigs to be able to break up a bunch of those opportunities either with a Jamie Cuny block party or Anita Sterling drawing one of her many charges. They still did on occasion... just not as often as I might have liked. But I get why they played up near the halfcourt line: it created more havoc and caused more turnovers. And that's one of the goals: more turnovers means more possessions for you, which means more chances to score.

But one thing The System is not, is a gimmick. I remember during that legendary 2014-15 season, the Cardinals went up to Waukesha to play Carroll (this was before the Pioneers rejoined the CCIW). Carroll had student broadcasters calling the game, and I remember at one point they talked about how they thought the whole style was just a gimmick and not real basketball. That night Cuny recorded the program's first triple-double, including a program-record ten blocked shots, and the Cardinals rallied late to win their eighth of what would become a 13-game win streak to start the campaign.

North Central topped the century mark more than a fair share of times in those five years, and every conference opponent except Wheaton had its issues with The System. Alas, the days of my yelling "THREEEEEEEEE!" 22 times in a game and driving current North Central head coach and former Carthage assistant Maggie McCloskey-Bax from finding my homerism annoying to using it as a motivational "Look at what you're allowing to happen!" tactic for her team. And with the Cardinals going away from The System, I didn't expect I'd get the opportunity to announce for it again... until I did.

Photo by Kevin Donovan

Greenville University, out of downstate Illinois and part of the SLIAC, is now in its fifth season running The System. Two years ago won the SLIAC championship to make the NCAA Tournament. Their reward was a first round date at the Carver Center in Rock Island... and I'm not sure when Grey Giovanine's jacket came off, but the Panthers acquitted themselves well: they led by as many as 19 early before falling 123-111 to the Vikings. Last year they averaged 135 a game, ultimately falling in the SLIAC semis, but they also had a game where they won 200-146.

The Panthers graduated nine seniors from last year's roster, but bring back a ton of upperclassmen familiar with The System and are off to a 1-1 start going into tonight's game taking place... at Merner Fieldhouse in Naperville. They've averaging 129 points through the first two games, a total higher than any individual game I've ever announced in my career. I've already told people that I'm going to announce a game tonight where the teams will score a combined 300 points (maybe not, but I wouldn't be surprised). It's going to be a really fast-paced game where I'll have to pull out my old bag of System announcing tricks, and I'm going to busier than any other night I've worked. But I relish the challenge, and I look forward to a super exciting game. We'll have to see how many records get broken.