Men's Basketball
Alabama's men's basketball program has a respectable tradition with numerous SEC Championships and players becoming NBA stars and international professional players. In the conference, it trails only Kentucky in basketball wins, SEC tournament titles, and SEC regular season conference titles. The men's basketball program has risen in stature nationally, achieving a No. 1 national ranking briefly in 2002. The Crimson Tide has become a regular conference basketball contender much as it was in the '80s under the direction of Coach Wimp Sanderson. Under head coach and former point guard Mark Gottfried, the Tide advanced to postseason play for six consecutive years, culminating with the team's advancement into the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history in 2004, where the team lost to eventual champion Connecticut in the Phoenix Regional Final.
In January 2009, Head Coach Mark Gottfried resigned after eleven years at Alabama. Soon afterwards Anthony Grant was hired as the new Head Coach. Under his watch the Crimson Tide battled through a tough first year, finishing 17-15 and achieving a top-10 ranking in points allowed on defense. Grant's second season with the Tide resulted in the SEC Western Division Championship, finishing 12-4 in the SEC and an overall record of 25-12. They entered the 2011 NIT Tournament with a #1 seed and made it to the NIT Championship Game and finished as the runner-up. The Crimson Tide was unbeaten at home with a perfect 19-0 season, a school record. In 2012 the Crimson Tide was a participant in the NCAA Tournament and finished its season with a 21-12 record.
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Famous quotes containing the words men and/or basketball:
“Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
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