Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1220211
and we had one practice where I real- ized… that this team would be as talented as we are," he said. "I didn't know that guys had taken the huge steps and huge leaps that they did. I was a little surprised by that." Stevens left that session believing the Nittany Lions could earn a top-10 rank- ing, and they set out to do that when the season began last November. In Decem- ber, they celebrated the program's first appearance in the Associated Press Top 25 since 1996, and a three-game speed bump in January didn't knock them off- track. Instead, they responded with an eight-game winning streak that included rare victories at Michigan State's Breslin Center and Purdue's Mackey Arena. In mid-February, the Nittany Lions matched the program's all-time best ranking, appearing at No. 9 in the AP poll. In the process, Stevens earned a place on the Wooden Award's Late-Season Top 20 Watch List and, more important to him, Penn State sold out the Bryce Jordan Center for the first time in nearly a decade. Accompanying the string of suc- cesses were expectations that hadn't been present at any point in his college career. The attention created a challenging set of circumstances at the season's conclusion, but Stevens accepted the tradeoffs that came with the team's sudden rise to na- tional prominence. "My first few years, it was kind of like, I wish we got a little more publicity. No- body is talking about us," he said. "Now this year, when we're having one of the best seasons in Penn State basketball his- tory, you get a little sidetracked about a couple of losses. But at the end of the day, up to this point, we've had a great season. We broke a lot of barriers for this team and this program, and it's something I think as a community we should be proud of. We're not satisfied, but just re- member we're breaking through and there's still a lot more season to be played. We have everything [necessary] to compete at a high level with anybody in the country." While the team's tournament outlook seemed to darken with its late-season stumbles, Chambers insisted that a reset leading into the Big Ten tourney would help recalibrate his star forward. During Penn State's final six regular-season games, Stevens connected on only 31.4 percent of his attempts from the floor (34 of 108), a sharp decline from his season shooting average of 45.7 percent. But fol- lowing a particularly demoralizing 80-69 loss at Northwestern on March 7, the Nit- tany Lions' veteran coach offered a sense of perspective. "He's put this program on his back for