Say it’s a down year for college basketball in Georgia, but don’t say it within earshot of Mercer.
Georgia Tech and Georgia are re-tooling, Georgia State made a little noise for a while, but the team from Macon with only one senior and no one averaging more than 11.3 points per game might have the best shot at making the NCAA tournament of any team in the state this year.
And the Bears haven’t made it since 1985.
That just adds to the excitement for a team with 11 freshmen and sophomores which headed into Monday night’s game at North Florida having won nine of its previous 10 games.
Sophomore point guard Langston Hall wasn’t even a gleam in anybody’s eye when Sam Mitchell led the Mercer Bears into the first round of the NCAA tournament in 1985 where they lost to Georgia Tech. Hall was born in 1991.
And when Mercer coach Bob Hoffman started recruiting Hall out of Atlanta’s Chamblee High School, Hall thought Mercer was the satellite campus just down the road from his DeKalb County high school.
Now he’s averaging 11.3 points and 4.0 assists for a group that has six players averaging between 7.8 and 11.3 points. To Hoffman, Hall serves as a prime example of the kind of athlete he’s been able to snag from just below the radar.
The 6-foot-4 point guard has started all 61 games for Mercer the past two seasons, was named to the A-Sun All-freshmen team last year and has back-to-back 100-assist seasons.
“He wasn’t at the perfect AAU team that everybody goes and checks out,” Hoffman said. “He wasn’t this. He wasn’t that. Then in high school he didn’t score all the points because he had another player on his team that he was getting the baskets because that was best for their team.”
But Hall, who averaged 16.7 points to Chamblee teammate David Mason’s 22.8, was quick and smart with the ball, Hoffman said, and he had the kind of play-hard character Hoffman said he makes his highest recruiting priority.
Hall’s personality seems to be a great fit with the personnel the Bears have this season, relying largely on defense and the hot hand on offense. Mercer is ranked 19th among 344 Division I schools in field goal percentage defense (38.7 percent) and 25th in 3-point field goal percentage defense (29.6).
“This year we don’t really have that go-to player, and so we just try to come together and play as one,” said Hall, an accounting major.
That’s a big change from two years ago when James Florence, Mercer’s all-time leading scorer who averaged 19.2 points per game, took the Bears to the cusp of the NCAA tournament before they lost to East Tennessee State in the final of the A-Sun tournament.
Last year, despite season-ending knee injuries to their top two scorers, Mercer advanced to the A-Sun semifinals before losing to Belmont. Once again it’s likely to be Belmont standing between the Bears and the NCAA tournament.
Belmont, which returned four starters from a team that went to the NCAA last year for the fourth time in six years, comes to Macon Saturday for the first of a possible two meetings, including next week’s Atlantic Sun tournament.
A loss Saturday at Jacksonville dropped Mercer (20-8, 12-3) a game behind A-Sun-leading Belmont (21-7, 13-2). The Bears have lost four in a row to the Bruins and are 5-19 against them overall. But Hoffman, now in his fourth year at Mercer, brings a wealth of experience from coaching against Belmont and Coach Rick Byrd, while at Oklahoma Baptist and Texas Pan-American.
“A lot of people walk in the gym sometimes fearful of them,” Hoffman said. “I was never fearful of them. I was respectful of what they’ve done and who they are. But I think our guys have always performed well against them, and we’re hopeful that we’ll get a chance to at the end of the day compete against them for the chance to win the conference championship.”
Mercer lost at Belmont Dec. 3, but both Saturday’s game and the A-Sun tournament will be held at Mercer’s University Center, where the Bears are 11-1.
Hoffman said he and school president William Underwood have designs on getting Mercer into the same conversations as schools like Davidson and Gonzaga for their academic and athletic prowess. Mercer’s seventh 20-win season in 106 years is a good step. The NCAA would be even better.
“This would be a major step in the right direction for where we want to continue to go with our athletics program,” Hoffman said.
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