Senior Night in college athletics may be among the happiest and saddest moments in a collegiate athlete’s career. All at the same time, your accomplishments are celebrated and the realization that you may be lacing them up for the last time sets in.
For most, you only get Senior Night once — the desire to walk out of your home arena one last time a winner is all you could ask for. NC State honored seven seniors and in a season that no coach, player or fan was hoping for, they delivered at home one last time.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever had a game where every senior scored and [they] scored all the points in a game,” said head coach Kevin Keatts. “I couldn’t have scripted a better night for those guys.”
All 71 points came from the seniors in the Pack’s (12-18, 5-14 ACC) 71-63 win over Pitt (16-14, 7-12 ACC). Those honored were the only ones to accumulate double-digit minutes in the game.
“We needed this win, so it’s big time that everyone came prepared,” said graduate guard Michael O’Connell. “It’s easy when you’re losing a lot of games and the season isn’t going the way you want to kind of just give up and not try your hardest, but we came prepared and played our hearts out.”
Senior guard Breon Pass is everything a fan and coach want out of a college player, but with NIL and a changing college athletics landscape, his journey is rare and hard to come by. Recruited by Keatts as a freshman in high school, Pass committed and ran with the Pack all four years.
Tonight was his 115th game in a Wolfpack uniform, just his first career start.
He didn’t pass up the opportunity that he earned and posted a career-high 14 points in the win. In an almost scripted manner, Pass was the first one to get the red-and-white on the board.
“I’m so proud of him,” O’Connell said. “He works so hard every day, he gives it his all and he supports everyone, so seeing him go out there and do his thing and get a start with us tonight was really cool and I’m proud of him.”
Pass kickstarted a Wolfpack offense that was lighting it up from beyond the arc. Six of the team’s first seven shots came from 3 and helped it establish an early lead. Through the first 10 minutes of the game, each team had amassed three or more steals, turnovers and assists. The ball was going end-to-end at a rapid pace in a hectic start.
The collectiveness of the Pack seniors eventually prevailed, and by the 11:02 mark of the first half, NC State grabbed a lead it wouldn’t relinquish the rest of the night.
Whether it was forcing steals or grabbing boards, the Pack refused to be out-hustled. Couple that with lights-out shooting in the first half and the team took a four-point lead heading into halftime.
“All the seniors knew what was at stake,” Pass said. “Last game in the arena, we didn’t want to go out in a losing way.”
While O’Connell, Pass and senior guard Marcus Hill were splashing the net in the first half with 24 of the team’s 34 first-half points, senior guard Dontrez Styles was doing the dirty work to spring the scorers in transition.
Despite only scoring three points in the first 20 minutes on a lone three-point make, Styles did everything else totaling seven rebounds, an assist, a block and a steal. Styles’ versatility to play both the guard and forward positions made him an undervalued player for the Pack this year on both ends of the floor.
“We can make the argument he’s been our most consistent guy,” Keatts said. “We’ve had some ups and downs with our offense and guys scoring. One night a guy scores and one night he may not, but if you look at it [Styles] has probably been our most consistent guy in league play.”
Rewarded for his work in the first half, Styles got his double-double in the second. On 5-9 shooting, Styles added 10 more points and six more rebounds, but no points more emphatic than his dunk that punctuated a 7-0 scoring run for the Pack.
Although the Pack jumped out to as much as an 11-point lead, with five minutes left to go, Pitt had cut the lead to one. 15 points in the final five minutes, seven of which came from O’Connell, became too much for Pitt to handle.
As the clock was winding down, you could see the smiles on the seniors’ faces. Sure, the win was nice, but you could tell they were enjoying hooping together one last time.
“I told them, ‘I don’t care whatever the result is, I just want you to have fun tonight,’” Keatts said. “I thought the biggest difference was when you look at the bench, everyone was genuinely happy for one another.”
Pass echoed his coach’s statement.
“I felt like you saw more smiles on the court today,” Pass said.
Although hopes for the season remained high post-game, with the team’s ACC fate still up in the air, it came crashing down hours later. A 56-54 win for Notre Dame over Stanford officially eliminated the Pack from the ACC Tournament it won just under a year ago.
With the NCAA announcing an additional year of eligibility for players who competed at the JUCO level, only Hill is expected to return next year. But for six seniors who played their last game, Pass said something the rest would likely agree with.
“Thank you for your support all these four years,” Pass said. “The highs, the lows, we’ve been together. It’s been a long journey. I can’t thank y’all enough.”
