photo by: Courtesy of Ottawa athletics department

Ottawa junior senior guard Darryl Bowie heads to the bench during an opening-round game in the NAIA Division II championship tournament. After a Braves win, the team learned the tournament had been canceled.

The vibe inside the Ottawa men’s basketball locker room got flipped on its head the moment head coach Aaron Siebenthall reentered the space to share the news.

Yes, Ottawa had just won, but the team’s postseason was over.

Moments after the Braves, making their first appearance in the NAIA Division II national tournament since 2009, advanced with an 87-84 win over Concordia (Neb.), Siebenthall was on his way back to the Sanford Pentagon court, in Sioux Falls, S.D., when a venue staffer stopped him.

“You can’t go out there,” the Braves’ coach was told.

Siebenthall figured the playing surface and benches were just getting cleaned up before the start of the next game. Then the words started coming through the public address system: the tournament was canceled.

“I had to walk back in and basically break our guys’ hearts,” Siebenthall said in a phone interview with the Journal-World.

Just like athletes across the country, the Braves’ season had come to a startling conclusion on Thursday, as administrators canceled sporting events due to surging fears about the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The Braves (28-6) had just rallied from a 12-point second-half deficit to move on to the round of 16 — or so they thought. Senior guard Ryan Haskins, on a play Ottawa ran out of a timeout, put the team up for good with a 3-pointer with 15.2 seconds remaining in the second half.

They had followed the March mantra of survive and advance. And then they learned their season was over.

“Our locker room afterward was like, guys are crying, I’m crying, our seniors are crying, my wife’s crying. You shouldn’t feel that way after you just won a game at the national tournament,” Siebenthall said.

Some of the players didn’t believe the program’s fifth-year head coach at first. They thought he was joking. But this wasn’t one of his typical pranks, he assured them.

“This is something you can’t control. And it stinks,” Siebenthall said of his message to the Braves in that strange moment. “And it hurts. But ultimately if it slows down this thing or could even save somebody’s life down the road, then it’s the right thing to do.”

Since then, as the Braves, including former Lawrence High guard Jackson Mallory, packed up their belongings and headed back Friday to Ottawa, their head coach has made a point to try and get them to focus the “incredible” season they just experienced.

Oddly enough, because the NAIA will be downsizing to one tournament in 2021 instead of two for separate divisions, Ottawa won the last ever game in NAIA Division II tournament history.

One of 32 teams that made the trek to South Dakota for what was supposed to be a weeklong tournament, Ottawa happened to be scheduled for the second game of a busy Thursday, with a 10:15 a.m. tipoff. Twelve other teams in the field didn’t even get to play a first-round game, once the NAIA put a halt to the event just as the Braves were wrapping up their victory.

According to Siebenthall, there was much more for his team to feel good about than becoming a footnote in the NAIA annals and finishing with a win. Ottawa’s season involved plenty of firsts and bests. The Braves set a program record for wins (28) and in the most recent national poll were ranked No. 5, the highest in team history. Awarded one of the 32-team national tournament’s four No. 2 seeds, the 2019-20 Braves earned the best seed in program history, too. They achieved that on the strength of a 19-5 conference record in the KCAC, winning more league games than any previous Ottawa team.

Darryl Bowie, a senior guard, was the KCAC Player of the Year. Jaquan Daniels, a junior guard/forward, scored 27 points in the NAIA DII tournament win, on 12-for-13 shooting, by willing his way to the rim. Ottawa shot 71.4% in its 53-point second half to conclude the season.

“We had the best season in school history,” Siebenthall said. “You felt like we’ve put something together and could really make a run at the national tournament. And then this happens. But you try and look at the bigger picture and what’s right for our country, and the world really.”

Six Braves seniors — Bowie, Haskins, Mat Baldeh, Eli Ponce, Kyle Patrick and Kobe Mead — went from contending for a title to the rapid realization that their careers were over.

“I just thanked them for where they’ve got the program. And just tried to remind them of all the great things they’ve done this season,” their coach said.

“No matter how this tournament ends, they can never take away that this was the best team in school history. Nothing can diminish that fact. We obviously would’ve liked to have seen how far we could’ve gone,” Siebenthall added. “But ultimately this was the right thing to do.”