On Feb. 28, the Towson men’s basketball team came back against Delaware to earn a share of the CAA regular-season title and the No. 1 seed in the upcoming CAA tournament. It marks the Tigers’ first regular-season title since 1994, back when they were in the Big South Conference.
Towson and Delaware had their Jan. 27 game suspended due to unsafe court conditions. The university said the combination of a large crowd and low humidity levels inside the arena caused slippery conditions on the court. The Blue Hens were winning, 38-29, with 18:42 at the time of the suspension, but the Tigers won, 69-57, after the game was picked back up Feb. 28.
Redshirt junior guard Nicolas Timberlake, a native of Braintree, Mass., has proved a lot of people wrong on his journey to this point. This season, Timberlake leads the Tigers in scoring at 14.3 points per game and is second among regulars in 3-point percentage at 40.2 percent. He is also adding 4.4 rebounds per game.
“I did not even have a D-II offer coming out of [Braintree High School],” Timberlake said on Glenn Clark Radio Feb. 24. “I didn’t get my first offer until the summer after I graduated, and that’s when D-II [schools] started looking at me. I was like, ‘I’d rather go prep school and bet on myself and see what happens.'”
Timberlake was starting to gain more and more attention from coaches while playing for Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire in 2017-18. He averaged 24 points a game during his lone season there, and his versatility on the court made him extremely valuable. Towson head coach Pat Skerry, a fellow Massachusetts native, went up to New Hampshire for one of Timberlake’s playoff games.
Even though Kimball Union lost the game by 45 points, Skerry still offered Timberlake a scholarship on the spot. On May 4, 2018, he became a Tiger. He went from no Division II offers to committing to a Division I school. He won that bet.
“[Skerry] saw something,” Timberlake said, recalling the 45-point playoff loss. “… Then we did an in-home visit a couple days later. I went back home, and he sat me and my family down in the kitchen, just talking and what he sees in me and what he expects, stuff like that. Then I went on my visit and committed May 4 to Towson and I haven’t looked back since.”
The 6-foot-4, 200-pound guard seems to be a good fit for Towson because not only did he get overlooked coming out of high school, but so did this entire Tigers team.
Towson was projected to finish eighth in the CAA standings before the 2021-22 season, and they did not have a single player who received any preseason accolades — not even honorable mention. Timberlake and the Tigers love proving people wrong.
Were the Tigers motivated by the preseason poll or was there a quiet confidence that they knew how wrong everyone was?
“I think it’s it a little bit of both,” Timberlake said. “I have always been a prove-them-wrong type of guy. There were no real expectations for us, such a new team and only four guys coming back, I understand why we got put there. To have the season we’re having, it’s awesome just to shove it back into everyone’s face and tell them how wrong everyone was.”
In addition to the regular-season title drought, Towson has not made the NCAA Tournament since 1991. That 1991 run was one of two NCAA Tournament appearances in program history, with the other being 1990. The CAA tournament will take place in D.C. March 5-8, with the winner earning the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. The Tigers will play William & Mary or Northeastern in the quarterfinals March 6.
Timberlake was asked how it would feel to be a part of the team that has a chance to break all these droughts.
“Everyone says it every year — that’s the goal,” Timberlake said. “My sophomore year [in 2019-20] we were really confident in it and obviously let one go against Northeastern [in the quarterfinals]. We want to make history and be a part of history here at Towson, be remembered forever, so if we can make it that far, it would be awesome.”
For more from Timberlake, listen to the full interview here:
Photo Credit: Alex Wright/Towson University