Sports > April 3, 2008

By Jeff Merski | Senior writer

For many prognosticators, Davidson’s appearance in the NCAA Tournament would be nothing more than a brief break from classes. They figured at best, the Wildcats would play against Gonzaga in the first round and then drive back home from Raleigh that evening.

At best, they’d make it to the weekend and then be eliminated by Georgetown in the round of 32.

However, a man named Stephen Curry thought otherwise.

Curry, a shooting guard that was not heavily recruited out of high school (especially among ACC teams), made the Dance his coming out party.

He might have stayed quiet in the first half of some of the early tournament games; however, that would not deter him from going crazy in the second half, consistently scoring 20 or more points in the second half to lead the Wildcats to yet another upset.

So, with Curry leading the charge, the Wildcats shocked the nation on March 23 by upsetting No. 2-seed Georgetown, a team that many thought had a legitimate chance to make it to the Final Four in San Antonio, Texas.

After this upset, the Wildcats were heading to Detroit for the Sweet Sixteen.

But they would not go alone.

At 2:24 p.m. March 25, Davidson President Tom Ross sent out a campus-wide e-mail.

The message, to put it succinctly, was simple – respond to this e-mail by 4 p.m. and you would get a free trip to Detroit for the Sweet Sixteen.

Free. As in, “one does not pay any more for this trip.”

And Ross wasn’t just giving out free game tickets – that would be too easy.

Included in the package was a seat on a coach bus from North Carolina to Michigan, two nights at a hotel in Detroit and of course, a seat at the game.

The cost of the trip, which easily surpassed $500 per student, was picked up in its entirety by the Board of Trustees at Davidson.

It should be no surprise to anyone that this trip was immensely popular with students.

Davidson was able to procure six coach buses holding roughly 60 people apiece for a total of roughly 300 seats.

That wasn’t enough to appease the Davidson student body, as some students had to be turned away since the university was not able to obtain extra buses to bring students to Michigan.

To say that this was a generous offer by the Davidson Board of Trustees would be like saying that Curry is just a solid player – it understates the reality of the situation by a gap larger than the Grand Canyon.

The cost to Davidson for this trip is a conservative $150,000 – and that number doesn’t even figure in any potential additional expenses that occurred from the Wildcats winning their March 28 contest against the University of Wisconsin; giving the Wildcats another two days before their next game in the Elite Eight against Kansas.

This offer would be the equivalent of Wake Forest giving a free trip to all students that wanted to go the ACC Championship Game in football in Jacksonville, Fla., in December 2006. (For the sake of journalistic fairness, I will say that various organizations at the university did a very nice job in coordinating buses and using various funds to discount the trip for students that were interested in heading down to Florida).

That would have been the closest that a revenue-generating university team has done in recent memory. And while Wake did a great job of getting people to Jacksonville (even getting one student from the Flow House in Austria), it still pales to this move.

Still, this story is just another great one coming from Davidson this year.

Not only did Curry and company keep hitting shot after shot (to the point where one of my friends kept shouting “Teardrops!” and “The Weatherman!” after each Curry shot in honor of the AT&T commercial that’s been on every TV timeout that shows the guy shooting hoops since he didn’t have cell phone service) but a large percentage of the 1700-member student body gets a free trip to see their team compete.

For a school that’s experiencing the major athletics limelight for the first time in their current student body’s lifetime is not too bad.

Not too bad at all.