The march toward madness is underway.
Edmonton’s own Aher Uguak is taking a trip back to college basketball’s biggest stage after helping his Loyola University of Chicago Ramblers to a Missouri Valley Conference championship on the weekend.
It will be their second NCAA March Madness appearance in three years after going on a run to all the way to the Final Four in 2018.
But things will be vastly different for Uguak this time around, considering he didn’t get to see the floor while sitting out for a mandatory year after transferring from New Mexico following his freshman season.
“I was kind of on the scout team in practice and I got to travel with the guys in March, which was a good experience, for sure,” said the the six-foot-seven, 225-pound Harry Ainlay high school grad, who rode the wave of Madness through Dallas, Atlanta and San Antonio that year.
This year, as one of Loyola head coach Porter Moser’s ‘seven starters’, Uguak will get more than a front-row seat in the tournament.
“Oh, yeah. For sure, I’m very excited,” said the 23-year-old power forward. “I don’t know what to expect, but at the end of the day, it is just basketball and I can’t make anything else of it.”
The only other time Loyola reached the NCAA tournament, they won it all in 1963.
And this year, they head in with the No. 1 defence in the entire Div. 1 after holding the opposition to an average of just 55.5 points per game.
And Uguak played no small role on that side of the ball, getting named to the MVC all-defensive team one week ago, as well as to the all-conference third team.
“That’s a big accomplishment that I’m very proud of, the (all-)defensive team, as our team is recognized as one of the best in the nation,” Uguak said. “It’s just a lot of hard work on the defensive end, just playing defence is nothing less than fun.”
And they had it on full display last weekend.
On Sunday, Uguak and the top-seeded Ramblers roared to a 75-65 win over Drake University for the conference to punch their ticket to the national tournament, where they await their first opponent to be announced on Monday.
“It was a good tournament, I feel like we turned it up a notch in the last three games, as we had to,” Uguak said. “I think we just competed well and shot the ball well as a team and kind of just wanted to send a message.
“Because we weren’t playing that well, we feel like, to our standards coming into the tournament over the past couple games and we kind of just wanted to send a message with a fresh start and get ourselves going for this next month.”
Message delivered.
And in a tournament where anything can happen, preparing for an opponent that is to-be determined, Uguak’s eyes are firmly on the prize.
“The goal for every basketball player is always to win a championship,” he said. “But for us, the goal is Game No. 1. Whoever we’re playing, that’s the focus, nothing else. Just whoever’s in front of us.
“There is definitely a level of anxiety because no one know who we’re playing until Sunday. But we’re all very mature guys and we just have to focus on ourselves this week until we find out who we play and try to get better and take advantage of the time we have.”
The second-oldest of six siblings, Uguak has a younger brother, Lwal, who is a defensive lineman for the University of Connecticut football team.
Both were high school provincial champions at Ainlay, Aher with back-to-back basketball titles in 2014-15 and Lwal with Titans football in 2017.
“Yeah, we’re blessed with the genes to play sports,” said Aher, adding he and his brother, who stands six-foot-five, played both basketball and football prior to reaching the college ranks. “My first sport was football, actually. I kind of grew, so I stopped playing football because I was tall and skinny, so it wasn’t the best sport for me.
“And he played basketball and Ainlay too in high school.”
And with college basketball getting set to capture the full attention of sports fans and bettors across the continent, Aher knows there will be all kinds of friend and family keeping eyes on him from back home.
“They will definitely all be watching,” he said. “But I don’t know about viewing parties due to COVID.”
E-mail: gmoddejonge@postmedia.com
On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge
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