Reusse: St. Cloud State basketball on the rise, even if locals haven’t noticed

ST. CLOUD — The St. Cloud State Huskies already had clinched a regular-season championship in men’s basketball for the first time since 2003 when they hosted Concordia St. Paul on Wednesday. They were 18-2 in the sprawling, 16-team Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference, and the next-best teams were 15-5 with two games left in the schedule.

Many of the conference wins had been close, including 93-87 over Concordia St. Paul in early December.

The Huskies had been mediocre for a time when they held a coaching search after the 2021-22 season. One candidate was Quincy Henderson, a former Winona State standout player, who was an assistant to Tom Brown and his main man, Chris Gove, at West Texas A&M for eight seasons.

“I wasn’t the athletic director yet — Heather (Weems) was still here — but I was the head of the search committee," said Holly Schreiner, now the Huskies’ AD. “There were some good candidates, and then when she finished spending quite a bit of the time with Quincy …

“We looked at each other and said, ‘He’s the one, if we can convince him to come here.’”

Schreiner smiled and said: “I was worried about his wife, Mary Ann. She’s from Texas. Could Quincy really get a Texas lady to move here, so he could coach in a winter sports season, surrounded by the cold and snow?”

Turns out, Schreiner said, “She is just the greatest person. And now a mom.”

That took care of any catching up Henderson required on the Minnesota basketball scene. St. Cloud State had only four returning players for the 2022-23 season, which wasn’t a bad thing with what the new coach wanted to bring to the Huskies.

“We came in with three principles to build a program: Recruit, develop and retain,” Henderson said. “We brought in eight freshmen in our first full recruiting period. And we’ve been able to develop and retain those players to become a nucleus for us.”

Even though it’s Division II and not quite the transfer free-for-all found in D-I, the retain part is very impressive. There are 11 Huskies who have received a share of playing time, and there’s only one transfer in the bunch.

That’s Bob Griechen, a 6-5 sophomore, and he had been recruited to West Texas A&M by Henderson before he took the St. Cloud State job.

The best way to confirm the Griechen recruitment is that he is from Geraldton, Australia. Kynan Philippe is a 6-5 sophomore, also from Australia.

“I played in a pro league down there for three years,” Henderson said. “The Aussies love basketball, and I still have friends and basketball connections there.”

In addition to the Big Three principles, Henderson is also devoted to a motion offense — so much so that all five starters are announced as guards.

And then Matt Fletcher’s Concordia athletes came out as if they were champions Wednesday. The Knights were ferocious driving the ball, then kicking it out for threes. It was insanely fierce basketball, both ways, but Concordia dropped in eight threes on its first 10 tries and led 30-15.

Henderson called a couple of timeouts, although not in a panicked manner. The Huskies shut off those drives, Concordia’s threes stopped dropping and the Huskies went on a 28-4 run the rest of the half.

The 43-34 halftime lead turned into an 89-78 win. Azayah Washington, a 6-2 freshman from St. Cloud Apollo, was zooming everywhere for 23 minutes and led with 20 points. The Huskies also have Nate Dahl, a junior from Buffalo, back from injury — an important player needed for the NSIC tournament battles ahead in Sioux Falls, S.D.

St. Cloud State has been reeling for several years — from enrollment dropping into the 9,000s for a time (just above 10,000 now), a reduction of academic programs and the disastrous PR move of dropping football after 2019.

Yet, the official attendance figure for this home game was still shocking: 454.

It wasn’t a long time ago — it was a long, long, long time ago — when I worked at the St. Cloud Times (May 1966 to September 1968). Even now, I’ve never enjoyed covering a beat more than the Huskies, particularly Red Severson’s basketball team.

Take the time machine back then, put a first-place conference team in (then-new) Halenbeck Hall, and the large bleachers upstairs would have been pulled out and full, and 10 times as many fans as were announced for this game would have been going wack-o as their Huskies made that 28-4 comeback.