Stephan Swenson caps late barrage with winning 3, sends Stetson basketball to ASUN final

DELAND — It’s never easy, trying to do something for the first time.

But for an undersized, underrecruited senior point guard from Brussels, Belgium, easy has rarely had much to do with anything when it’s come to basketball.

So, with a dream season and his collegiate career on the brink, Stephan Swenson gave a refreshingly rowdy and success-starved Stetson home crowd a closing stretch that won't soon be forgotten in DeLand.

Swenson scored 14 of his 29 points in the final 4:47, including a game-winning 3-pointer with 4.3 seconds to go, sending the Hatters from 10 points down to a triumphant 88-87 win over 10th-seeded Jacksonville in an ASUN Conference semifinal Thursday night.

The No. 2 Hatters will host fourth-seeded Austin Peay on Sunday at 2 p.m. for a league championship and a bid into the NCAA Tournament. It would be the first in 53 seasons of Division I ball for Stetson.

“You live for those moments,” Swenson said with a grin. “Those are 10,000, 20,000 shots you practice on your own when nobody is looking at you and today, it just happened.”

At the perfect time. And in the nick of it.

The Hatters relinquished an eight-point halftime lead in a hurry, with Jacksonville seizing control out of the break and getting the lead to double figures, forcing Hatters coach Donnie Jones to call a timeout with just 4:47 showing.

Stetson’s Jalen Blackmon, the ASUN’s leading scorer went just 2-for-12 from the floor, the Dolphins pummeled the Hatters 36-18 on the glass including a 15-4 edge on the offensive end and Jacksonville’s Robert McCray enjoyed a 36-point eruption.

Yet, with momentum, a large Dolphins fan contingent and five-plus decades of largely dour history stacked against it, there was no panic from Stetson. Or Swenson.

“We kind of felt we couldn’t get any offense going,” Jones said. “Jalen had some good looks, couldn’t make them and we were just trying to figure out where we were going to get it.

“We work on this all the time. We play four-minute games down certain points. We just started opening it up, trying to get him middle ball screens and let him make plays. He’s our quarterback.”

Swenson started with a 3 and a layup coming out of Jones’ timeout to quickly cut the deficit to five. He hit another 3 after a pair of Jacksonville free throws to cut it to four and after a layup for the Dolphins' Zach Bell, Alec Oglesby swished a corner 3 to get it to one possession at 81-78.

Two McCray free throws with 33 seconds remaining put the Dolphins up 86-82, setting up Swenson’s second-biggest shot of the night, a step-back 3 over the outstretched hand of Jacksonville center DeeJuan Pruitt with 20.4 seconds remaining. McCray managed just 1 of 2 free throws with 15.8 ticks left on the other end.

Now down two, Swenson took a few dribbles before freeing up yet again along the 3-point line and swished the deciding shot. A McCray shot at the buzzer missed, sending Stetson to the final.

Swenson, a 30.2% 3-point shooter coming into Thursday, finished 7 for 9 from beyond the arc.

“I realized in the second half they were going under (screens), so challenging my 3 and it’s been like that all year but today it felt different. Today, I felt like I had better rhythm,” Swenson said.

Stetson big man Aubin Gateretse added 23 points to the cause with Blackmon chipping in 12. Freshman Tristan Gross buried four big 3-pointers in the first half and ended with 14 markers.

Bryce Workman scored 19 points for the Dolphins with Pruitt finishing with 12.

Here are some takeaways from Thursday’s game.

Jacksonville’s Cinderella run comes to an end

Swenson summed it up quite eloquently when it came to the Dolphins’ play Thursday.

“We played them a week ago and it’s like a completely different team with their confidence and how they played,” he said.

That’s a fact top-seeded Eastern Kentucky learned the hard way on Tuesday when it fell at home to the Dolphins.

For much of Thursday’s game, including the vast majority of the second half, Jacksonville (16-17) looked like anything but a double-digit seed in a one-bid league.

“You say to yourself, ‘Positive assist-to-turnover ratio, you outrebound them, so you get the majority of your misses back,’” Jacksonville coach Jordan Mincy said. “But at the same time, sometimes the ball just doesn’t roll your way.”

The good news for the Dolphins, who were riddled with injuries throughout the year, the bulk of its roster is set to return next year. That includes McCray, who averaged 28.5 points per game over the team’s final four contests.

“If you had told me two weeks ago, one week ago that you’re going to be in a one-point game at Stetson, one game from the championship game, I’d have taken that,” Mincy said. “We have a fairly young team. For us, we look forward to the future trying to get healthy, trying to get some more depth on our roster.”

Edmunds Center comes alive

The Dolphins arrived with three bus loads of fans and that was matched by an unusually large Stetson turnout, despite it being Spring Break on campus.

From the outside, that energy was matched on the court as McCray and Gross traded early blows, setting up a physical, often chippy battle throughout.

But it’s March. And it felt like it in DeLand.

“It was the loudest I’ve ever heard it,” Jones, now in his fifth year, said. “I just want to thank the fans that came out … to come out and support a team, this program hasn’t won big in 50 years, so for that fanbase to come out is huge.”

Hatters history lies just one win away

If the opening few rounds of the ASUN Tournament has taught anything, it’s that nothing in March is given.

Sunday promises to be a battle against a Governors team that has now won nine of its last 10 games.

And yet, all involved are fully aware of what one more win would bring.

“We’ve got to embrace this moment and use this momentum to get us going on Sunday,” Swenson said.

“It’s down to a one game season now and you don’t get to play for a championship very often in life,” Jones added. “That’s what we told them in their living rooms and of course, a lot of people never believed that could happen and it’s happening on Sunday.”

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Stetson basketball rallies past Jacksonville, 1 win from March Madness