NCCS National Championships

Testimonial

Hello, My name is Matt Walker and I am currently a Junior in the W.P Carey School Of business at Arizona State University.  I am from Arizona and went to high school about 25 minutes north of ASU's Tempe campus.  Over the past two years I have had some wonderful experiences with POWERADE intramurals and I would like to take a second to share them with you. Our intramural story starts last year right before basketball began.  At first the team consisted of a few close high school basketball buddies of mine but quickly grew into something much more.  During playoff play at ASU we were scheduled to play one of the top two teams of that year.  We knew we were the underdog considering one of the players on the other team had just been playing overseas professionally.  The game came down to a last second buzzer beater three pointer which led to us loosing by one point.  It was a devastating blow to our teams moral and we thought our intramural season was over.  About a week later I was given the opportunity to get a bid for my team to enter the NIRSA regional tournament in Tucson at the University of Arizona.  W.P Carey School of business offered to cover our entry fee and help us realize our goal by making it to regionals because most of our team are currently business majors.  The sponsorship and confidence of our school to back us in an event like this really took our team to a whole new level.  We recruited a few more players to fill in the holes of our roster and we took on the identity of the only men’s basketball team to represent ASU at the regional tournament.

Before I go through what eventually happened at the regional tournament I want to introduce one of our many special players.  His name is Rich Ramsey and he is our point guard, Richie has a lot of interesting things about him but the one most people notice is the fact that he only has one arm.  Rich was basically a high school legend here in the state of Arizona during his time at Scottsdale Christian academy.  He was a standout multisport athlete that includes being an all state wide receiver (yes, wide receiver with one arm) and honorable mention on the best basketball team in the state at the time.  Richie ended up at ASU because a major D1 school did not want to take a chance on him because of his disability.  The story made ESPN Sports center his senior year of high school.

When we arrived to Tucson we considered ourselves huge underdogs.  We were slightly undersized but we knew we had the talent to compete.  After the first and second day of competition we had not lost a game and came into the playoff tournament as the number 1 seed.  We knocked off our arch rivals from the University of Arizona and we even beat UCLA.  The night before the playoffs started a few of our team mates ate Chipotle on campus.  This was the worst thing that could have happened, they woke up the day of playoffs with food poisoning.  We still managed to reach the championship game but sadly were defeated by a very solid Utah State team.  Our director of intramurals and some of the tournament staff came up to us and congratulated us and said they might still want to try and send us to nationals.  I came back to ASU thinking of ways to raise money for our team to make it to Ohio for the national tournament.  The business school and the student recreation center came through again and pledged 1400 dollars for us to go.  This covered almost half the cost of our trip and made it possible for us to get to Columbus.  We arrived to our first game in Columbus in a small ford Taurus.  Seven of us proceeded to pile out with our bags and everything.  We didn't have enough time to go to a hotel before we played our first game so we all got ready at the gym.  We represented ASU well and despite not having a great seeding for the playoff bracket we were still confident.  We were matched up against the number one seed team from Georgia Southern University in the first round.  The game took on a life of its own in our eyes.  We felt like this was our chance to represent our university, our state and the Pac10's reputation.  There is no doubt in my mind that this was by far the best game our team has ever played together.  It was a hard fought battle and came down to the last few series of plays.  We were down 6 with 38 seconds left in the game.  Our shooting guard Jake Maddox intercepted a pass and out let the ball to me coming up the floor.  On instinct I pulled up from 3 and scored with 15 seconds left.  Georgia Southern inbounded the ball to their big man and we immediately fouled him to send him to the line.  He missed both free throws and we called a time out to advance the ball to half court.  We drew up a double screen for Rich to come off and shoot a fade away three to tie the game.  As the play developed 3 of the defenders went with rich off the double screen and that left me in the corner wide open.  Richie turned and threw me the ball with 4 seconds left and I hit the 3 in the corner to send the game to overtime.  After that the completion of the game changed.  We ended up pulling away by 10 in the overtime period to win the game.

Our experiences with the NIRSA Regional and National tournaments have been nothing short of exhilarating.  I speak for all members of my team when I say that it was an experience of a lifetime and we loved representing our university with class.  It also helped the W.P Carey School of Business recruiting efforts.  At their incoming freshman orientation they had a blurb about the sponsorship and the W.P Carey basketball team going to nationals.  I would love to have our team featured by PowerAde and I really support all the work that PowerAde has been doing with college intramurals.  They made football here at ASU and regionals fun as well.  Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.

Matthew Walker,
W.P Carey School of Business
Arizona State University