What shirt does she want her dad — RedHawks’ head coach Travis Steele — to wear on the sideline that game?
“She’s funny,” Steele said after his history-making team pushed aside Bowling Green 91-77, in front of another packed house at Millett Hall Friday night. “She’s just three, but she’s the boss in our house.
“I pick out two shirts, and then she decides which one I put on. Tonight, it was between my Skyline Chili shirt and my one with the Ultimate Warrior. That’s her favorite. She calls it, ‘The Man.’ She wants the one with the man.”
He lifted the black pullover he’d worn over the t-shirt to reveal the blond, scowling, musclebound image of the Ultimate Warrior, the WWF heavyweight star of 3 ½ decades past, a guy who in real life grew up some miles from Steele in Indiana.
Travis Steele and his wife Amanda also have two boys, Anderson and Winston, both of whom are into basketball,
“Winston loves hoops,” Steele said. “He thinks he’s Luke Skaljac. He’s a lefty point guard, too. He comes to every practice and watches Luke’s every move. He thinks he is the greatest.”
Friday night the two kids’ picks dovetailed better than anyone could have dreamed.
For much of the game, Luke Skaljac was the Ultimate Warrior.
He was “The Man.”
He was a one-man show early in this nationally-televised game. With shifty moves to the basket for odd-angle lay-ups and laser-like accuracy from long range, he had 16 points by the half and finished with a career-high 24 as the No. 22 RedHawks, the nation’s only unbeaten Division I team, upped their record to 27-0 and 14-0 in Mid-American Conference play.
Miami has become the fascination of the college basketball world. Their games are now being broadcast on national TV — Friday’s game was on CBS Sports — and for the fourth game in a row, the arena that was all but dead on game nights a few years ago, was packed to the rafters,
This crowd of 10,127 was a few hundred people short of a sell-out, but like other outings lately, it didn’t lack for emotion, love, fan wackiness (think fleshy bare-chested guy in a wrestling mask, cape and tights leading cheers) and some star power.
Another Ultimate Warrior was in the house.
Myles Garrett, the Cleveland Browns wrecking ball defensive end — and after this past season, the NFL’s all-time sack leader for a single season — sat courtside next to Wil Haygood, the acclaimed journalist and author, who is a Miami alum, now serves as a scholar in residence at the university and, as noted by the PA announcer Friday night played on the Miami basketball team in the 1973-74 season.
He was on the JV that campaign, but put a pen in his hand and he’s as good as this current Miami team.
He was there Friday, in part, to showcase his new book: “The War Within A War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and At Home.”
Garrett was there, someone noted, because he wanted to finally be around a winning team.
The NFL star seemed to really enjoy himself Friday. After the game he visited the Miami dressing room and spoke to the team.
At halftime he bumped into Skaljac in the hallway near the team’s dressing quarters.
That was a special moment for the RedHawks’ 6-foot-2 sophomore from Brecksville, which is a Cleveland suburb some 22 miles south of the Browns’ downtown stadium.
Growing up, Skaljac was a regular at Cleveland Cavaliers games — he loves LeBron James — and was passionate about the Browns, as well.
So, when he saw Garrett, for the first time all night, he was unsure of himself for a second or two.
“I was a little star struck,” he admitted. “I walked past him and was like, ‘Hey, I’m a huge fan!’
“I was like ‘Oh God!’ It was pretty cool.”
Skaljac said when his dad was younger, he would go to Browns games regularly with his dad: “We had season tickets after that … until about 2016.”
With a bit of a sheepish grin, he admitted: “Since then they haven’t been winning a lot so we kind of cut that off.”
Credit: JEREMY MILLER
Credit: JEREMY MILLER
One thing everyone around the Miami team agreed on Friday night — especially after the postgame visit — Garrett is a winner.
“The best defensive player in the NFL by a mile,” Steele gushed afterward. “I think Chuck Martin (Miami’s football coach) is meeting with Myles Garrett and the NCAA to see if he has any eligibility left. That’d be amazing. Holy Cow!”
In weeks past, everybody from former Miami basketball greats to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and his wife Fran have been in the stands for RedHawks’ games.
“When you drive on the campus now there is a buzz like no other. It’s awesome,” Steele said. “Miami loves sports. We just had to give them something to get behind.”
‘Embody Undeniable Confidence’
Steele, who is going against common practice in these transfer portal times, has built much of his team the Old School way.
He’s recruited high school kids: guys like Eian Elmer, Brant Byers, Trey Perry, Justin Kirby, Evan Ipsaro and Skaljac, who he and his coaches especially had set their sights on.
It wasn’t that he was lightning quick like Ipsaro. Steele said he teases Sklajac, telling him he has two speeds: “slow and slower.”
And it wasn’t that he was a big strong guard like the 6-foot-6 Elmer.
But he had something else:
“I was in love with him from the first time I saw him play,” Steele said. “Just his swagger, his confidence, his belief. Man, it was loud. It was loud!
“One of our core values is ‘Embody Undeniable Confidence’ and he does that.”
Even so, when Skaljac joined the team last year as a freshman, he was used solely for backup duty and averaged 5.4 ppg.
This season he again began as a back-up to Ipsaro, who through the first 12 games was playing superbly, averaging 14 points and four assists a game, but he tore his ACL in a Dec. 20 game at Ball State and was lost for the year.
What could have led to the derailment of a season turned into just a change of engines.
It was the next man up, Steele said, and that man was Skaljac, who, with extra work on his own and with his position coach; with in-game encouragement from Ipsaro; and that inbred confidence and quiet swagger has led the team perfectly.
Credit: JEREMY MILLER
Credit: JEREMY MILLER
He does it differently than Ipsaro. He drives the lane and uses a grab bag of quirky, twitching moves until he turns his defender into a pretzel. And from the outside, when he feels it as he did early in Friday’s game — especially when the Falcons switched a slow-footed big man on him — he is money from beyond the arc.
“He’s playing at a very, very high level now,” Steele said. “He’s just playing with so much confidence.”
‘The main thing’
This past week Miami offered Steele a contract extension through the 2033-34 season. A year ago, he signed an extension that took him through the 2031-32 season.
Friday night he admitted he had not signed the new deal or even looked at it yet.
He said not to read anything into that, not to fuel rumors that he’s looking to move on.
He said he loves it here. He and his wife are building a new home.
At the moment he said he’s trying to keep “the main thing the main thing” and that’s getting the RedHawks through the last four regular season games and the MAC Tournament and into the NCAA Tournament, a place once familiar to the program but in the past decades it’s been more like Never Never Land.
Miami has made the NCAA Tournament just once in the past 26 years and that was way back in 2007.
The RedHawks, 25-9 last season, came with a heartbreaking two points of the tournament last year when they lost to Akron in the MAC championship game on a last-second basket by the Zips.
Steele said while winning all these games is important, where this streak leads is the most important thing.
And no one on the team has been more wrapped up in the NCAA Tournament than Skaljac.
“My grandpa and dad have been going to the tournament for over 30 years,” he said. “I’ve gone for the past eight years straight.
“Every year they choose one of the four sites for the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 and go there. Usually, they get a big group of guys and they have a suite and a big steak dinner afterwards.
“Last year we went to Atlanta. The year before, it was Kansas. We’ve gone to Chicago a couple of times, all over.”
This March they’re hoping our team’s there. My parents graduated from Miami and with me on the team, it’d be like a dream for all of us.”
Plus, he admitted with a smile, they wouldn’t have to worry about finding a ticket for him.
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