ALBANY, N.Y.–Howard Garfinkel may be gone, but his legacy lives on.
The fabled director of Five Star camp, who produced over 200 counselors who matriculated into the game and over 500 worked there as college assistants, ran the best teaching camp in college basketball history.
Garfinkel was a legend who was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame for the exposure he provided for hundreds of players, incluiding Moses Malone, Michael Jordan and LeBron James, during six weekly sessions each summer. .
And now one of his disciples, Tobin Anderson, who spent his summers as a counselor at Garf’s camps in the Poconos and Pittsburgh, is working his magic in his first year at FDU.
Anderson, coached 16th- seed Fairleigh Dickson to perhaps the biggest upset in March Madness history, when the Knights stunned Big Ten champion and top seed Purdue, 63-58, in a first-round game at Columbus.
The Knights were coming off an impressive 84-61 win over Texas Southern in a First Four game at Dayton. But no one could have seen this coming. The Knights actually won to Merrimack in the NEC Tournament, but Merrimack was ineligible to participate in
the NCAA tournament because they were still in a transition period while upgrading their program from Division II to Division I so FDU received the conference’s bid.
That did not stop Anderson from dreaming the impossible dream.
Before the game fans saw a video of Anderson pumping up his team.
“I want Purdue to see this,” he said. “The more I watch Purdue, the more I think we can beat them. Let’s go shock the world.”
While Purdue players found his comments disrespectful, the FDU coach looks brilliant for boldly declaring such confidence.
The Knights, a 23.5-point underdog, joined UMBC, which became the first men’s 16 seed to beat a No. 1 by beating Virginia in 2018. But this might have been even bigger. The Knights had the smallest roster– with an average height of 6-1– in Division I basketball and were facing 7-4 Zach Edey, the consensus national Player of the Year. But even with Edey blocking the middle, the Knights scored 24 points in the paint and, down the stretch, they prevented him from taking over the game. Edey finished with 24 points and 15 rebounds. but the Knights blunted a lot of his effectiveness by forcing the Boilers into 16 turnovers, turning 15 points the other way.
With under two minutes left, Purdue entered the ball to Edey in the post. But three Knights swarmed him before Sean Moore popped the ball loose.Off the turnover, Moore got the ball back for a driving layup, putting the Knights up 58-53. On the next possession, Moore nailed a three pointer, giving him a career high 19 points in his hometown homecoming.
Purdue still had one chance to tie the game in the final seconds, but Moore blocked Braden Smith’s layup out of bounds. Off the inbounds play, Fletcher Loyer’s three point shot l rom the corner missed everything before falling into the arms of 5-8 Demetre Roberts, a 5-8 guard, who finished off the game with a pair of free throws.
Anderson, the son of an Iowa high school coach, played for Wesleyan and got his start in coaching as an assistant to Dave Pausen at D II Le Moyne, became the head coach at Clarkson and Hamilton College. While he searched for a head coaching gig, he was told he needed to get hired as an assistant for a Division I before he was offered a head coaching vacancy. He spent two years on Mitch Buonaguro staff at Siena before applying for the job at St. Thomas Aquinas. He reached the NCAA Division II tournament in seven straight seasons, including an Elite Eight in 2017. His team also defeated St. John’s, 90-85, in an exhibition in 2015.
But his accomplishments in D II and D III paled in comparison to what he has done for the little guy in March Madness.
And it shows what can happen if a coach creates belief among his players,as long as he can convince them not to care about labels.
When Anderson took his job last May, he conducted an emergency practice that night to see the cards he was dealt. He took over a program that had only won four games in 2022 and had just five returning scholarship players, none of whom was a
starter.
“I left that practice thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to take us four to five years to be competitive,”’ Anderson told the New York Post. ‘I knew I was stepping into a tough situation, but that practice reallly opened my eyes that this was going to be a real, real long process.’ We lost our best players and the guys who were back had all been role players. The biggest thing we had to figure out was how we were going to reconfigure the roster in a short amount of time.”
Because Anderson had been hired so late, the transfer portal had been picked clean, leaving him with limited choices. Anderson reached out to his own players from STAC, bringing two fifth year senior guards Demetre Roberts and Grant Singleton as well as Sean
Moore with him. His roster this year included four players from his D II team, three junior college recruits, three freshman and one walk on.
His success is proof that coaches from D II or D III can make the transition to a high level if they get a chance and their players buy in.
“I just trust our guys. I have faith in our guys,” he said “We just have faith in what we do. Our guys are so tough and competitive. I’ll do a better job in this locker roo speech than the last one. It was the right message. It made the wrong audience. But listen, I love our guys. They’re tough, they’re gritty and they play their tails off.”
When the game finally ended, Moore raised his hands in the air as chants of F-D-U came pouring down.@HoopsWeiss
