Rams Show Their Progress in Baron’s 300th Win
SOUTH KINGSTON, R.I. – On the night of a milestone for a good coach, his team showed why they will be contenders in the Atlantic 10 about as well as they have in any other game thus far. It also served to illustrate how far the program has come under their current leader.
Rhode Island’s 92-72 win over Northeastern looks nice already, and the score might lead one to believe this was a simple blowout of a young team. But this was far from that, as it was a ballgame up until just after the second media timeout in the second half, as the game was tied at 59 with 11:57 to go.
If you blinked, you missed what happened next. Before you knew it, the Rams made it a blowout and were up by 24 en route to the eventual 20-point margin.
“I thought that once they opened up the court, we just took it to score,” said Rhode Island head coach Jim Baron. “We were very aggressive and we really attacked the bucket.”
The win was the 300th for Baron in his career in three head coaching stops. He’s done it in tough places and situations throughout his career, starting at St. Francis (Pa.), then at St. Bonaventure (his alma mater), and now at Rhode Island.
While the first two remain tough places to win and have had their struggles since he was the head coach, Rhode Island had won before he got there. The Rams won 20 games two years in a row under Al Skinner, and Jim Harrick took a veteran team to the Elite Eight in his first year and won 20 games the next before he moved on to Georgia. Then they fell on hard times under Jerry DeGregerio, with two terrible seasons after Lamar Odom bolted for the NBA, not long after Odom was on the committee that selected DeGregorio. The Rams were 12-48 in those two seasons and endured multiple long losing streaks.
When Baron took over, the program was practically in shambles. The Rams had a couple of good players, but the team had no depth and limited talent. They were a shell of the old Rams that had great success earlier in the 90s. Tyson Wheeler, Cuttino Mobley, Antonio Reynolds-Dean and Preston Murphy weren’t walking through that door. For that matter, nor was Odom.
Baron has had to go around the campus to pass out leaflets for fans to come to basketball games and events, and he still does it to this day. It wasn’t something new since he did it at his prior head coaching stops, but it was surely needed more in South Kingston than anywhere else. While not a rah-rah person, Baron knows that sometimes a coach has to do whatever it takes to move the program forward.
He’s also done this the right way, not hesitating to suspend a player if they miss a class or otherwise violate a team rule. It may have hurt the team a time or two, but Baron is a firm believer that the less problems a team has off the court, the less problems they have on the court. With the rate at which his players have graduated while winning games, the payoff is evident.
The result is what we have seen this season, a Rams team that looks more and more like one that will contend in the Atlantic 10. The Rams’ depth continues to be a big strength, as reserves scored 20 of the final 33 points after the game was tied. They are one of the most athletic teams in the country, and they’re a veteran team that’s well-coached and determined to avenge the tough ending to last season. The Rams have come from being the worst in the Atlantic 10 to being a contender.
Baron’s work has been a process, and it’s not one that’s complete at all. But on the night that he earned a milestone win, the fruits of his labor to this point were very evident.
