HATTIESBURG, Miss. —- As Southern Miss bullied Lamar into submission and forced the visitors to call a timeout in the second half of a mid-December non conference game inside USM’s Reed Green Coliseum, Golden Eagles’ assistant coach Juan Cardona catapulted from the bench, turned around and pumped his arms to implore the home crowd to its feet.
The Golden Eagles were in the midst of a 95-59 beatdown of the Cardinals — a dismantling facilitated largely by the suffocating pressure defense that Cardona has helped instill at the program — and the small but lively crowd responded with adulation.
At a university that can claim the rare title of “baseball school” that has a bowl-winning football program in the heart of SEC country, basketball has fallen by the wayside for much of the past decade. But it is making a stunning comeback that has some buzz percolating as the Golden Eagles enter Thursday night’s showdown at UNLV sporting an 11-1 record.
It’s not even Christmas and Southern Miss has more victories than it did in any of the past three seasons.
“Gosh, Reed Green gets loud,” fourth-year head coach Jay Ladner said after the easy win against Lamar. “If we could just get this place full…But it’s growing and I’m excited about that.”
If anyone knows what Southern Miss basketball and Reed Green Coliseum look and sound like at their best, it’s Ladner, who was a member of the program’s 1987 NIT title team. But in recent years, this building, affectionately known by some as the “yurt” due to its vague resemblance to an outdoor camping structure, has been mostly crickets.
The Golden Eagles limped to a 24-65 record over the past three seasons, progressively winning fewer games each season under Ladner, who began realizing the drawbacks to coaching at a place where he has such deep ties. As a Hattiesburg native, former USM player and longtime winner on the area’s high school and junior college…
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