John Dunne is sad that his team’s season is over. You might wonder if that would be the case for a team like his, a St. Peter’s team that went 9-21 on the season. But you can believe Dunne when he says it, much as you can believe he would like the results to be a little different.
This year was not a memorable one for the Peacocks on the bottom line, although it started with promise as they won their first three games. Friday night’s 54-47 loss to Fairfield finished a season where they were 3-15 in the MAAC in as competitive a year as the conference has seen. They were 6-6 when MAAC play began in earnest, but started 2013 with eight straight losses in January and never recovered. After the season-opening three-game winning streak, they never won consecutive games again.
“My guys, regardless of what’s gone on this year with our record, have come out fighting game in, game out,” said Dunne.
The Peacocks struggled to generate offense, averaging less than 60 points per game on 41 percent shooting, below 34 percent from long range. They weren’t a bad defensive team, forcing more turnovers than they committed, but you have to score to win, and this team couldn’t. That showed up at times on Friday night, where they led by seven with over 11 minutes to go but couldn’t hang on, and as they fell behind late it was tough to catch up.
“The microcosm of the year is going cold down the stretch and giving up a couple of offensive rebound easy baskets down the stretch,” said Dunne. “When you’re not scoring, sometimes you don’t have enough focus on the defensive end.”
Through it all, though, Dunne was happy with how his team competed. They simply weren’t a very good team on the bottom line. Still, they didn’t go down easily on Friday, and they were up against a very good defensive team in Fairfield as well.
“At the end of the day, when you’re having a losing year, you could see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as the end of the season,” Dunne reflected. “We, as a group, never looked at it that way. I loved coaching them. I’m sad the season’s over, regardless of our record.”
The might sound like a lot of talk of moral victories, or searching hard for a bright light, but one has to realize something. John Dunne wants to win as much as any coach, but he is also about doing things the right way. There’s a reason he’s highly respected among his peer for more than just his coaching; to a man, fellow coaches describe him as a great guy for good reason. Character matters to him, and he also has some perspective. That’s also why there were some lean times when he first took over, as he had to discipline a few players even if it meant a hit to the bottom line.
Dunne is also in a very tough job. The school isn’t located in the best area, it’s not a great gym and there’s little tradition. It’s in a very talent-rich area, but they’re hardly the only school near there vying for many of the kids. They’re in a very competitive conference where the way to win often means getting the right combination of under-recruited kids and good transfers. The former is hard to get right, the latter has a little more risk to it.
Dunne and St. Peter’s reached the NCAA Tournament two years ago with a veteran group he mostly recruited. The difficulty since then shows how tough the job is. Next season doesn’t look much better on paper at first glance, as the Peacocks lose three starters. One of the returning starters is sophomore Desi Washington, the team’s leading scorer, and they will return a few key reserves who are underclassmen. Some of the conference will take a hit in terms of departing players as well, but that’s a relatively minor factor.
Above all of that, Dunne will return a team where character isn’t an issue. That will make his job easier, and then he can try to turn some of the losses into wins.
“We got down – losing is not easy – and you get down when you go through losing stretches,” Dunne reflected. “If we were down one day, we dug deep and had energy the next day.”
