Wednesday, March 28, 2001

By Rusty Bryan, Stars and Stripes

MANNHEIM, Germany — When USAREUR’s basketball championship doubleheader tipped off Sunday, the finals were an all-Northern Region event.

Four hours later, the tournament became an all-Mannheim affair as the Mustangs downed Baumholder 79-66 to add their second straight U.S. Army Europe title to the one the Mannheim women had won earlier, 51-44, over Kaiserslautern.

To complete the localizing of USAREUR’s major basketball event of the year, Mannheim’s husband-and-wife duo of Sonja and Dennis Stribling made impeccable cases for sweeping the tourney MVP awards.

Sonja Stribling got the all-in-the-family title run started, slashing through the Kaiserslautern defense for a game-high 20 points, directing the Lady Mustangs’ offense and defense almost flawlessly from her point guard slot, and sealing her team’s victory by hitting crucial free throws down the stretch.

Husband Dennis made his case with 13 second-half points and the all-out hustle befitting the captain of a two-time USAREUR champion team as the Mustangs rebuffed a 15-point Baumholder rally.

Two factors kept the Striblings from those MVP trophies. First, the Army doesn’t give out that kind of hardware, and second, the Striblings probably wouldn’t have accepted them if it did.

"You can’t point to any one man on this team," Dennis Stribling said. He clung to that belief even after being anointed with champagne by a couple of teammates, who seemed to indicate they could point to one man, if they had to.

"Rodney [Carmichael, who had a game-high 21 points] stepped up and played big," Stribling said. "And Lyvell [Perry, three three-pointers, 15 points) hit some big threes.

"This was a team effort by all 12 men."

And therein, Stribling added, lies the Mustangs’ strength.

"Not many teams have 12 good players like we do," he said. "With the way Coach [Thomas] Benson rotates them in and out, not many teams can keep up."

Baumholder certainly tried, but Sunday’s events only underscored Stribling’s point.

Trailing 33-18 when the second half began, Baumholder came out and put the game in a Bear-hug, crashing the boards even more impressively than they had all tournament and banging home some clutch hoops.

"They have great athletes and they came out with lots of intensity," Stribling said. "They hit some threes and got us back on our heels."

Notice that Stribling said "heels," not backs, even after consecutive treys by Baumholder’s Cornelius Rodgers and Wade Taylor knotted the game at 37 with 15:40 to play.

Just when the Bears made a game of it, Mannheim quit playing around.

"We just had to regroup and get back to what we were doing in the first half," Stribling said.

In this case, "regrouping" entailed big Carmichael buckets on a baseline drive and a turn-around jumper, a three-ball from the left baseline by Perry, and the most acrobatic three-point play of the tournament from Stribling, who seemed to float halfway across the lane to tip in a missed shot despite being hacked and converted the free throw. By the time Stribling hit a layup and then hurled himself on the floor a couple of minutes later making a steal and winning the ball for Mannheim, it was 51-42 and the Bears were reduced to kicking chairs.

Mannheim continued to kick the Bears, and when Stribling’s driving layup, his 17th point of the game, made it 64-48 with 8:13 left, the Mustangs cleared the bench, along with space on the shelf for another USAREUR trophy.

Although the Mustangs made it look easy, winning their six games by an average margin of more than 19 points, Stribling said it wasn’t.

"It’s always harder to repeat," he said. "We had to overcome a lot of injuries and adversity."

Both teams will now devote their attention to the U.S. Forces tournament to be played against the USAFE champion and runner-up April 5-8 in Würzburg. That’s plenty of time for a pair of talented, well-coached Mannheim squads to work up even more family feeling.

Notes

In Sunday’s third-place games, Kitzingen’s Southern Regional women’s champions turned back Baumholder’s Lady Bears 65-62 despite a women’s season-high 40 points from Baumholder’s Tyree Armstrong. Because the Lady Rattlers’ 47-33 loss to Kaiserslautern, their first of the season, kept them out of the finals, they do not qualify for the U.S. Forces tourney despite a season record of 12-1.

In the men’s consolation game, Vilseck turned back a late-arriving Heidelberg squad 76-68. The Generals, 0-3 in the round-robin, were coming off a victory Saturday in which they upset Southern Region champion Kitzingen 64-58 and just missed the semifinals in falling to Baumholder 83-73.

Despite the maiden-voyage aspect of this tournament, the first one-site-fits-all in recent USAREUR memory, the event went off without a hitch, thanks to the efforts of USAREUR’s Tony Lee and an experienced Mannheim sports staff headed by David Jefferson. All involved have set the bar high for next year’s hosts.

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