After a run to the Sweet 16 last season, junior guard Yogi Oliff said the Bears approach everything with a “national championship mindset.” (Elle Su | Student Life)

Coming off a tournament run to the Sweet 16 of the Division III NCAA tournament, this year feels different for the WashU men’s basketball team. 

Last season’s run capped off a year of question marks. The Bears had several key players to replace, dealt with injuries, and battled in conference play, splitting their season series with six of their seven conference teams. 

This grit and determination allowed a young team with a veteran head coach, Pat Juckem, to be one of the last 16 teams standing. But like every team except one in the country, the Bears’ season ended in disappointment. The Bears were outmatched in a 21-point loss to the eventual D-III champions, Trine University, ending WashU’s hopes of a Cinderella run. 

Even as much of the roster remains intact, this year, expectations are different. As with any season, WashU wants to be that one team left standing. And this year, more than any year in the recent past, they have the pieces to do it.

“…We lost very few rotational players … and we were one of the best teams in the nation [last year],” senior forward Drake Kindsvater said. “Our goal has always been to win a national championship. At the end, we lost to Trine, who won the national championship. It proves that we’re right there.”

Entering the season, the Bears are ranked fourth in D-III. Kindsvater and senior guard Hayden Doyle were both named to the preseason All-American Third Team, placing them among the 15 best players in the nation at the Division III level. This star power, along with the squad’s depth and chemistry, will make them a difficult team to beat all season long.

“We don’t talk too much about the rankings, but we do talk about our habits and our mindset and doing things with a national championship mindset,” said junior guard Yogi Oliff, who hit two massive free throws with 1.8 seconds on the clock in the Bears’ second-round victory over Illinois College. “If we have that mindset, and that can carry us through our practices and things we do off the court as well, that would put us in the best position to accomplish our goals.” 

Oliff and Doyle will again make up a dangerous backcourt tandem for the Bears. Both are capable ball-handlers and strong facilitators — last season, the duo were among the Top 5 in the University Athletic Association (UAA) in assists and assists-to-turnover ratios. The two upperclassmen are also above-average rebounders for their size — something Oliff identifies as a strength of the team. 

“One of our staples is dominating teams on the glass. That’s such an important thing in basketball: just winning possessions. And rebounding, both offensively and defensively, is something we take a lot of pride in,” he said. “Our bigs do such a good job of boxing their guys out and preventing their matchups from getting the rebounds, and that’s when guards come in and kind of clean up the mess.”

Oliff recorded double-digit rebounds in all three playoff games last year — stepping up big when the team needed him to crash the boards the most. He also played through a broken foot, which he had surgery for in the offseason.

For the second half of the year, the Bears were without starting-power forward Kindsvater, who broke his nose twice and had surgery to repair the damage. When healthy, Kindsvater averaged team-highs of 16.2 points and 7.1 rebounds in 14 games of action. 

Drake Kindsvater, who missed much of 2023-24 season with an injury, was named to the preseason All-American Third Team. (Elaheh Khazi | Student Life)

Kindsvater, who said his nose was “shattered in seven spots,” spent the offseason working on his three-point shot and attacking the rim. He will likely be joined in the starting lineup by junior forward Will Grudzinski and junior center Calvin Kapral.

However, Kindsvater is hesitant to use position labels to describe the team. 

“We have a pretty free-flowing offense,” he said. “It’s positionless basketball.”

This year, the Bears will be supplemented with an infusion of youth as five first-years join the team. Guards Lleyton Thomas-Johnson and Yusuf Cisse, along with forwards Liam Smith, Connor May, and Anthony Przybilla, add an exciting new dynamic that the Bears hope to capitalize on. 

“The freshman class is awesome … They’re all super skilled, kind of a diverse group in terms of some guards, some big wings,” Oliff said. “They bring a bunch of different skill sets to the team. In terms of character, they’re just really high-level character guys that have really just fit well into our culture.”

WashU is going to need players from up and down the bench to step up if they want to withstand the loss of senior guard Kyle Beedon, who will miss the entire season due to a torn ACL. Beedon, a sharpshooter who entered the starting lineup after Kindsvater’s injury and shot nearly 40% from three-point range last season, provided the Bears with crucial spacing that allowed others to create open looks. Now, the Bears are looking for the next man up.

“Obviously, it’s a big loss,” said Doyle, who led last year’s team in total points scored. “Kyle was really playing well, especially towards the end of the year, and we’re gonna miss him a lot.”

Oliff echoed the sentiment. “He’s just a super hard worker. And I mean, not only a super hard worker — he was such an important piece to our team last year. We [would] not [have gotten] to where we got without Kyle last year.”

But the Bears have a number of sophomores who will have the opportunity to step up in Beedon’s absence. Guard Emmett Lawton contributed key minutes down the stretch in the Bears’ first-round victory over Wisconsin Lutheran College last season, while guard Lucas Vogel has impressed members of the team in practice. Forward George Gale and center Jake Davis are two frontcourt players with high potential, while guard Ryan Cohen demonstrated some of Beedon’s sharpshooting chops, nailing 41.7% of his threes in limited action last season.

More than anything, the Bears see this year as an opportunity to grow. Last season’s tournament run provided valuable experience to this group of players. They saw firsthand what it takes to be a champion. With the right developments, WashU can bridge the gap that exists between them and the level of play required to be a champion.

“I think what we take from that experience last year is just the value of one single possession,” Juckem said. “We emphasize all the time [that] a missed block out offensive rebound we give up in the first half, well, that possession is every bit as valuable as the last possession of the game that everybody focuses on … every single possession, one possession at a time, 30 seconds at a time. ”

Center Calvin Kapral averaged 10.6 points per game in his sophomore season. (Bri Nitsberg | Managing Photo Editor)

But most importantly, this season offers another chance for the Bears to do what they love most: play basketball. It’s important for the team to stay focused on the games at hand and enjoy the season.

“We always refer to the season as a journey, and that journey is filled with so many moments, and people would think those moments are primarily attached to winning games, and that’s certainly our aspiration,” Juckem said. “A lot of the moments are things that occur outside of the games … They’re funny moments, they’re breakthroughs, they’re heartbreaks, they’re all these things, and they’re all opportunities to grow and to take something away. So just really looking forward to the full journey with a really, really committed group of young men.”

The journey will begin this Friday, as WashU will take on Rhodes College. The Bears, who are ranked as the top team in the conference in the preseason UAA coaches poll, will begin UAA play on Jan, 11 when they face off against the University of Chicago.

Only one team can stand alone at the end of the long season. And the Bears believe that that team can be them. They have good reason to believe it, too. Despite the loss of Beedon, WashU boasts a blend of scoring, size, and length, coupled with new additions ready to contribute, who are led by a veteran coach. Add to that the experience that last year provided, and it’s easy to dream of what this season could become.

But crucially, the Bears aren’t shifting their focus that far ahead. Instead, they’ll continue to emphasize the importance of each possession and how they can improve each and every play. They hope, and believe, that that is the key to this year’s season.