Dons on Defense

Even home-town fans could scarcely believe it: this week the University of San Francisco Dons were firmly established as the second-ranking basketball team in the nation. Ahead of the Dons, Kentucky's whimpering Wildcats had just blown a game to unranked Georgia Tech (65-59) for the second time this season. San Francisco's Dons, who specialize in holding their opponents down to low, losing scores, seemed to be moving no place but up.

Not since 1949, when their team won the National Invitation Tournament, have the Dons been able to hold up their heads in the national standing. After its N.I.T. success, the little (2,515 students) Jesuit university on Ignatian Heights lost Coach Pete Newell to the high-priced payroll of Michigan State, its champions were graduated and there was neither the money nor the organization to recruit replacements.

On the Defense. The new coach, Phil Woolpert, from nearby St. Ignatius High School, was a disappointing dissenter. In an era when basketball seemed to belong to hopped-up, high-scoring crowd pleasers, Woolpert stubbornly insisted that defense was still the most important part of basketball. His boys spent a lot of time practicing the unspectacular arts of blocking shots and bottling up their opposition.

It takes two years for a man to learn Woolpert's meticulous defense, and not until this season were the Dons able to field a whole team that could live up to his theories. "If your opponents can't shoot, they can't score," he kept telling his players. Statistics bore him out. In their first 15 games the Dons allowed their opponents an average of 49.7 points a game. They had little trouble scoring an average of 65.9 points themselves.

Only once were the Dons beaten--by U.C.L.A., in U.C.L.A.'s cracker-box gym.

In a return match in San Francisco the Dons ran up 56 points, while holding U.C.L.A. to a scant 44.

Muscular Morale. For all their defensive excellence, the Dons this year also pack an offensive wallop. Much of its muscle is hidden in the skinny (6 ft. 10 in., 210 Ibs.) frame of Bill Russell, 20, a happy-go-lucky Oakland Negro. A tireless, ambidextrous string bean, Russell is the Dons' high scorer (more than 300 points), but he still prefers Woolpert's style of defensive play. "Heck," he says, "I'd rather block a shot any day than score. It seems to do more for team morale." It also does something to the opposition's morale. Russell's breaking out of nowhere to stretch out a ham hand and ruin a sure basket can take the heart out of the best players around. Once he got warmed up, he and his teammates hardly had to exert themselves last week to gobble up Loyola (65-55) and St. Mary's (69-48) on successive nights.

"This is a hungry team," said Coach Woolpert as he began to think about postseason tournaments. "Their appetites are such that they can do a lot of eating before they're filled up."

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