BUFFALO, N.Y. - The Morgan State Bears basketball team could be happy with making their second straight appearance in the NCAA tournament and just enjoy the trip to Buffalo without worrying about the outcome of the game. But they have far too much to play for to be satisfied with just being here.

From their head coach’s past failures to the ailing health of one of their teammates, the Bears know there are plenty of emotions to play off of and obstacles to overcome when they take the court with the Mountaineers on Friday. In fact, they’ve played their entire season that way.

“We are grinders,” says Morgan State head coach Todd Bozeman. “That was our motto from the very first practice or first pre-season conditioning drills. We’ve grinded out victories, we’ve grinded out different things during the season.”

Bozeman has had to grind his way through his own haunted past, which had been defined by a recruiting violation while coaching at California that left him banned from coaching for eight years. Now he uses his own shortcomings to help guide his players on the right path to success off the basketball court.

“I tell the guys and they all know my story,” he says. “I tell them that I made a bad judgment decision. There’s consequences for your actions. I tell them that now. You think before you do things.”

These words for his team have likely gone a long way in molding them as people, but even Bozeman could not prepare his team for the news they got prior to the start of the 2009 season. During Morgan State’s Midnight Madness celebration, freshman forward Anthony Anderson came to Coach Bozeman complaining that he did not feel well.

He was sent to the hospital and later that night was diagnosed with cancer. It hit the team like a ton of bricks and they vowed to come together and play out the entire season in honor of Anderson, whose health would prohibit him from playing.

“Everybody is going to have adversity,” Bozeman told his players. “It just depends on how you deal with it. You guys are family. You have to stick together.”
 

“We know how hard he worked to be on our team,” says senior guard Troy Smith. “He would do things that none of us would do. He was the guy that couldn’t play after sitting out one year. So for us, it’s crazy because we’re young and we think about it – it hits us at a young age. So it’s weird having a teammate going through what he’s going through.”

Morgan State will be missing another player in Friday’s game with West Virginia, as Ameer Ali will sit out the game with an NCAA suspension for his actions in the first round of the tournament last season.

Up against Oklahoma’s Blake Griffin, Ali slammed the future NBA first round pick to the floor. He was ejected from the game and after his appeal failed, he will have to miss his school’s second appearance in the NCAA tournament. Smith is not concerned about missing Ali in the game.

“Of course you would like to have him here, but it’s not a problem because we practice hard every day,” says Smith.

This group of grinders has faced far more difficult scenarios to get to this point in the season than they will be up against when they take on West Virginia in the HSBC Arena. This time, they will use the season’s hardships to try and string together a run that extends beyond the one-and-done that is expected of them.