How golf balls and ‘the culture’ are impacting Drexel’s historic start to the CAA basketball season

Zach Spiker dribbled a golf ball inside Drexel’s Daskalakis Athletic Center one day last week. He popped into the training room to say hello to some people inside before continuing down a hallway.

Not too many of your guys in there these days, it was pointed out to the men’s basketball coach.

Spiker stopped dribbling, found the closest piece of wood in the hallway, knocked on it, then smiled.

Life is good right now at 34th and Market Streets. The next night, Spiker’s Dragons erased a seven-point second-half deficit in a four-point win over Monmouth. And two days later, a sold-out DAC watched as they rolled their rival Delaware in the second half of an 86-67 victory.

Drexel is 7-0 in conference play for the first time since Malik Rose roamed the DAC hallways in 1996, when the Dragons played in the former North Atlantic Conference. Spiker has assembled his best, deepest roster eight years after replacing Bruiser Flint, two years after his first NCAA Tournament appearance, and a year after injuries helped derail Drexel’s chance to win another tournament title. The historic start to the Coastal Athletic Association slate comes during a season in which Drexel finally broke down the barbed-wired gate that was the Big 5 and announced its entrance to the club with a win over a ranked Villanova team at the Wells Fargo Center.

» READ MORE: With a dominant win over rival Delaware, all of a sudden, Drexel has become the Big 5 team to beat

The Dragons are balanced. They have nine players scoring at least 5.5 points per game and 10 playing at least 15 minutes per contest. They are experienced. Drexel starts three graduate students, a senior, and one sophomore. KenPom ranks the Dragons fifth in Division I in its “minutes continuity” metric, which tracks the percentage of a team’s minutes played by the same player year-over-year.

They have the CAA’s top three-point shooting percentage (42.7% in conference games), one of its most talented scoring guards in sophomore Justin Moore, and a preseason conference player of the year, Amari Williams, scoring inside and protecting the rim on defense.

“It allows us to win different ways,” Spiker said.

“We’ve got a group that is connected. We’ve got a locker room that loves being around each other off the floor.

“Behind any good team is going to be the players. It’s about the players. We’re very much on that edge of being more player-driven than coach-driven. They can see what’s in front of them.”

What’s in front of them could be a lot, and a 7-0 start in CAA play might make the imagination start wandering.

There was a celebration inside the visitors’ locker room at Elon after Drexel’s 89-69 win there on Jan. 13. It was the Dragons’ first time starting 5-0 since joining the CAA in 2001.

Spiker couldn’t remember who it was — “maybe it was Luke House,” he said — but someone grabbed him during the hoopla. The Dragons weren’t 5-0, they were 1-0. “Every day in practice we talk about going 1-0 and not thinking far ahead,” Williams said.

“When you joke about the culture, you know about the culture,” Spiker said.

This program has built a culture during Spiker’s run. Sure, the Dragons have made one NCAA Tournament during his tenure, but they’ve done plenty of winning. On the team’s game notes provided to media before every game, there’s a running tally of the Big 5 men’s basketball teams’ win-loss record since the 2019 season. Drexel’s 72 wins rank behind only Villanova. It’s as much of a hey, look at us as it is a reminder that winning in college basketball is hard.

Spiker said he’s not big on slogans, but there is one on the wall in the team’s locker room at the DAC: “Sometimes you, sometimes me, always us.”

Lucas Monroe has taken to all of this quite easily. The graduate transfer from Penn, whose new gym is three blocks from his old one, has already bought into the daily “1-0″ mentality, he said Saturday after the Delaware win. Sunday was an off day, but going 1-0 Sunday meant recovering, doing homework, and taking care of his body.

This team, Monroe said, has some similarities from previous Penn teams that went on winning streaks. He sees it in the attitude.

“I think one of the best things about the team is there are times when some of the starters at the end of the game are on the bench,” Monroe said. “There are times when Amari is on the bench and [backup center Garfield Turner] is out there and Amari is jumping around like a little kid cheering for him. Guys are really excited to see people happy.”

It all shows in the way they play, that balance. One possession could see Moore, a guard from Archbishop Wood, taking his man off the dribble and getting to the rim. Another might have the ball swinging before finding the hands of a sharpshooting guard like House, an Archbishop Carroll grad, or Hungarian wing Mate Okros. Another might find the ball reaching Williams in the post, where he can show off his developed inside game by scoring or passing to an open teammate.

“Anyone can go off at any given moment, which makes it so hard to guard us,” Williams said. “It makes everything easier for everyone else.”

When Spiker first arrived at Drexel after seven seasons at Army, he was driven by tempo. Army had less size and, similar to how St. Joseph’s coach Billy Lange coached at Navy, winning with the available talent meant playing fast and shooting a lot of three-pointers.

Spiker has evolved, he said. He’s less focused on tempo — KenPom had Drexel at 352nd in its tempo metric Monday morning — and more dialed in on effective field goal percentage, both offensive and defensive. Drexel is in the upper portion of the middle of the pack nationally on offense, but leads the CAA. Defensively? Drexel is 25th nationally and second in the conference.

Still, there’s an element of playing fast that lingers, especially when it comes to House and Okros, whom Spiker has given a mandate to shoot when they’re open: “If you hesitate, by the time you pull that ball down, before you go to shoot again, there will be a sub heading to the table,” Spiker said. “He who hesitates loses.”

Spiker spent part of a week last Wednesday in his office working on a video he recorded and would eventually send out to some Drexel basketball alumni. He wanted to raise awareness about the team’s undefeated start to the season. The previous night, he spent time talking about the team and program during a live show on X, formerly Twitter.

In mid-major college basketball, success at times can be defined by how often one makes the NCAA Tournament. In that regard, Spiker is 1-for-7.

How does Spiker define success?

“In this moment, we don’t walk in and say we’re a one-bid league,” he said. “Success is, can we answer the bell every day right now?”

But what if Drexel goes 15-3 in the CAA and then has a poor shooting night and loses in the quarterfinals of the conference tournament and doesn’t make the NCAA Tournament? Spiker was less interested in diving into the psychology of that hypothetical at this point, in what is still a young season, but he was proudly defiant when approached with the subject of the 2020-21 season. On paper, Drexel looked like a lucky tournament team. The Dragons were sixth in the CAA entering the conference tournament and then went on a run and cut the nets down. Was that season a success?

Spiker had his laptop connected to a television in his office, and, as an obsessor over KenPom metrics, quickly clicked a few hyperlinks to get to his point: Drexel was rated as the CAA’s best team in 2020-21, a season that featured so many moving parts, postponements, and cancellations as the NCAA navigated COVID-19.

No, 2021 was no fluke. And, no, 2024 isn’t a fluke, either. Spiker used KenPom to show that, too. That win at Elon, he pointed out, was Drexel’s most efficient offensive game in 25 years of data tracking, and two of the top seven performances in that metric have come this season.

Spiker knows the numbers well enough to know this reality, too: His Dragons had the 13th-ranked conference strength of schedule out of 14 teams through five games. There’s a long way to go.

“What’s success? I’ll tell you at 5 o’clock tonight,” Spiker said before practice was set to begin.

“We’ve come a long way,” Williams said. “We’re just figuring it out ... keeping an even keel. Enjoying it while it lasts.”

Williams, a senior, knows it doesn’t last forever.

For a guy who says he’s not very good at golf and doesn’t play often enough to fix that issue, Spiker has a fixation with the golf ball. He once listened to Minnesota football coach P.J. Fleck talk about them on a podcast. Golf balls, Spiker learned, didn’t always have dimples on them.

According to Professional Golfers Career College, the earliest form of golf was played with a wooden ball. The ball went through many evolutions before, in the early 1900s, it was discovered that the inward dimples gave the ball a better flight pattern and made it easier to control.

“I think there’s something there about a life analogy,” Spiker said.

The dimples, or “dents,” Spiker said, represent adversity. His Dragons have faced a lot of it. They have dealt with injuries and lost games in just about every way possible. And three months before the season started, former teammate Terrence Butler died by suicide.

“Those dents are what we went through in August,” Spiker said. “Those dents are what we experienced last year, having a bunch of injuries. Those dents ... dented golf balls fly further. People with adversity fly further.”

Like the golf ball nugget acquired from the podcast Fleck was on, Spiker leans on podcasts and other outlets to find inspiration at times. Another one of his latest is the acronym EDGE: Energy, Diligence, Growth, Endurance.

“Do you have energy every day? Are you consistent? Are you willing to learn? Can you stick with it? Most people can’t do those things,” Spiker said.

“People think having an edge is being a killer every day. It doesn’t last. You’re like an animal, just recharge and go again.”

Spiker is 47 years old and has been a head coach since he was 33. But before he was a head coach, he worked under the likes of Gregg Marshall, John Beilein, and current Penn coach Steve Donahue. All of them, Spiker said, have an edge, but in different ways.

“I think we’re trying to blend all of that into what we know and what we do,” he said.

For now, the golf ball analogy is working fine. Spiker gave Turner a ball in 2021 when he recruited him in Maryland. Turner has been a key reserve backing up Williams this season, and Spiker sent him a text message recently.

“I’m really proud of you,” the coach said. “Golf ball …”

Last week, the Dragons got a not-yet-announced recruiting commitment. The player sent Spiker a picture of a golf ball.

Spiker lamented not having Drexel-branded golf balls to give out, a realization he seemed determined to rectify.

“This is our team,” Spiker said, holding a ball up, “and we’ve been through a lot.”