NEW ORLEANS -- There is one UALR player remaining with direct knowledge of a meeting that helped spark the program's best week in more than two decades.
Gus Leeper said he hadn't thought about it much this week, but when reminded the senior forward recalled its significance.
It happened sometime in the three days between the end of the 2010-2011 regular season and the Sun Belt Conference Tournament. Solomon Bozeman, a senior guard who was named the league's player of the year, gathered teammates for one final pep talk following a regular season that skidded to an end with three consecutive losses.
"He was basically just telling us that we can do this if we want to," said Leeper, then a freshman. "We just have to come together and do it."
The Trojans' followed Bozeman's direction and won four games in four days, capped by Bozeman's last-second three-pointer to beat North Texas in the tournament final. It remains UALR's only Sun Belt Tournament title and NCAA Tournament appearance since 1990.
Leeper said there is plenty of similarities between how his first UALR team entered the conference tournament and the current team's plight.
No. 7 seed UALR (13-17) opens tournament play at 7:30 tonight against No. 6 South Alabama (11-20) at Lakefront Arena. The Trojans enter on a losing streak, just like in 2011, although this year they have lost two consecutive instead of three.
Even the first-round opponent is the same. UALR avenged a regular-season loss by beating South Alabama 82-68 in the first round to kick start the run in 2011. The Trojans will try to beat a Jaguars team tonight that swept them in the regular season.
"I think we made a lot of mental mistakes in a lot of our losses that year," Leeper said. "It was what we did. That's kind of the mind-set we have now. ... We can do this."
UALR Coach Steve Shields recognizes the similarities, too, but he said he feels better about this team than what he remembers from the day of the 2011 opener.
While the Trojans lost their final two games this season, they closed the regular season by winning five of their last eight.
Shields credited his team's gradually-improving defense for that stretch. UALR was ninth in the Sun Belt in field-goal percentage defense (44.6 percent) and 11th at defending three-pointers (37.5 percent).
Field-goal percentage defense is UALR's worse since 2010, and its three-point defense is its worst sine 2007. Shields insists there has been progress, though, citing four of the past eight games in which it has held teams to 41 percent or less from the field and five games during that stretch in which they have allowed 36 percent or less from behind the three-point line.
"I'm not going to say it's every night, but I think our guys have defended better during that stretch," Shields said of his team's improved defense. "I think we've rebounded the ball better.
"We're excited about the opportunity in front of us. It's a new season."
Junior guard Josh Hagins said the "new season" mantra is what helped players move on so quickly from a loss at Louisiana-Lafayette in the regular-season finale. Hagins said players learned immediately after the game in the locker room that they had qualified for the Sun Belt Tournament because of Arkansas State's loss earlier in the day.
"We're just trying to show who we really are," Hagins said. "We don't want to go drive nine hours and lay an egg."
Leeper said team morale gives this team another edge over the one from 2011. Leeper said most practices have been spirited, including in the last final week.
"That team, everybody was pretty depressed by the end of that," Leeper said. "Now, I don't want to say we're happy, but we still have a pep in our step and we feel like we can play with anybody."
Sports on 03/12/2015