Reprinted from The Athletic with permission

It's not often that you'd expect players from Towson University to be overwhelmed with requests for autographs, interviews, and photographs with fans. But that was the scene Saturday in Belfast, Ireland, after the Tigers hit a game-winning shot to beat Manhattan and capture the Belfast Invitational championship in front of a near-sellout crowd.

"It was actually tough getting out of the arena," said Towson head coach Pat Skerry. As soon as the ball fell through the net the arena erupted, and the pandemonium continued long after the trophy presentation. "It was unbelievable," Skerry said, but he admits the final moments were a "case of us being more lucky than good."

What the video above doesn't show is that Towson had an inbounds play from underneath their basket with 9.4 seconds left as well. 6-5 senior guard Mike Morsell catches the ball, goes into a post-up and fires a fadeaway jumpshot with six seconds to play. He misses. There's a scramble underneath for the rebound, and the ball gets deflected out of bounds, though it's unclear who touched it last. Because the referees went to the monitors to review, it gave Skerry time to draw up a fresh play despite not having any timeouts.

Except the second inbounds play wasn't drawn up for Morsell. It was for 6-4 sophomore guard Zane Martin. Martin was, after all, the team's leading scorer and eventual tournament MVP.

"I was supposed to slip to the basket, but I guess they congested it," Martin says. 6-3 senior guard Brian Starr, the inbounder, had other plans. "I told him to look for Zane, but afterwards (Brian) told me, 'I knew Mike was going to be open.'" said Skerry. Morsell delivered with the championship-winning shot, earning him a new nickname on the team: Big Shot Mike.

Towson's story is one worth telling, and not just because they're off to an 8-1 start with now two regular-season championships under their belts at the Florida Gulf Coast Showcase and in Belfast. It's about how far they've come.

When Skerry took over coaching the Tigers before the 2011-2012 season, the school had endured 15 straight losing seasons. In his first year, they went 1-31. But since, they've rewritten the Towson basketball record books. In his second season they went 18-13, the largest single-season turnaround in NCAA Division-I history. And over the past two years they've recorded the first back-to-back 20-win seasons in Towson's history since moving to Division I. The next step is winning Colonial championships and making appearances in the NCAA Tournament.

"I  think right now we've got a program that is going to be in the mix every year, and then you've got to have a little bit of good fortune too," Skerry says. Last season the Tigers won 11 out of 12 games during one stretch of conference play and looked poised to potentially win the Colonial title. Then their leading rebounder and third-leading scorer John
Davis was shot in the leg during an apparent drive-by shooting outside his Philadelphia home and was lost for the season. The team fell to College of Charleston in the semifinals of the conference tournament just a few weeks later.

This year's team has a chance to be the best in the school's history, already off to the best start Towson has ever seen and even receiving one vote in the latest AP Top 25 poll. That can be credited to the 10 players who returned from last year, or the five seniors with plenty of experience. However, one of the biggest reasons is the emergence of Martin, who averaged just 14.2 minutes per game and 5.5 points last year as a freshman but has turned into a 17.4 points-per-game scorer this season.

"Coach Skerry trusted me, believed in me," said Martin. "I've just been building confidence." Despite being just a sophomore, he knows he's been handed a lot of responsibility on the team. He added: "I'm very confident now, I feel like my team needs me to lead."

Martin had never been out of the country until this past summer, when the Towson team took a foreign trip to Canada. That trip, plus the team's recent journey to Ireland has really given the team a lot of time around one another. As Martin put it, a lot of "long nights in the hotel just vibin'." This time, the team had to deal with flights across the ocean and a five-hour time change.

As for getting out and seeing the sights in Belfast, Martin laughs. "All we did for real besides just going to the gym, stuff like that, was sleep."

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