PHOTO COURTESY OF JIM O’CONNOR
Lindsay Fluehr of Bensalem recently competed in the Division III NCAA tournament for the Scranton Royals.
By Mike Gibson
For the Wire
At most colleges, the first signs of March Madness usually come in front of a TV set on a Sunday afternoon when the NCAA basketball tournament brackets are announced.
TV cameras are there to capture the men’s Division I teams jumping up and down when their school names are picked. A video of the LaSalle University men’s team’s reaction has been widely circulated on YouTube.
Then there are Division III schools like the University of Scranton, where the reaction is just as enthusiastic, yet not as public.
Bensalem’s Lindsay Fluehr, a sophomore guard, was part of March Madness for Scranton, but her reaction had to be muted a bit. She heard that the Lady Royals had been selected for the tournament via a text message she received in class.
“They do it on the Internet on a Monday afternoon,” Fluehr said. “The entire team was in the coach’s office watching it, but I was in a bio-mechanics class at the time. I had to be. That’s when my class was scheduled.
“My text messages were lighting up. It was still exciting. We thought we were going to get in, but we were the last team in the last bracket that came up so there was a lot of suspense involved and a lot of relief when we got into the tournament.”
For Scranton and Fluehr, the journey was the biggest accomplishment.
While the Royals finished their season at 19–9 with a 79–59 loss to 15th-ranked Williams College (Mass.) in the tournament, the season was a resounding success, and Fluehr was in the middle of it as the starting point guard.
She started 27 of the 28 games, averaged 5.7 points-per-game and was second on her team in rebounds per game with a 5.1 average. She also led the team in free-throw percentage, hitting 55 of 72 — an impressive 76 percent — and her 4.9 assists-per-game led the team by far.
While the Royals finished the season losing to a ranked team, it also beat two ranked teams, Moravian College and Emmanuel (Calif.) College.
“That (Emmanuel) game was in Santa Monica (Calif.),” Fluehr said. “It was in December and I expected the weather to be a little hotter, but it was about 60 degrees and sunny. It was good because at home it was snowing.”
Fluehr’s two free throws at the end helped seal that game and propel the Royals to another fine season for legendary head coach Mike Strong, who has the most wins in the history of Division III women’s basketball (770).
Strong said one of the ingredients for his success is having a reliable person to run the point guard position, and Fluehr fits the profile.
“I usually pride myself on the second-hand stuff, the assists, steals and rebounds,” Fluehr said. “This year we had other girls who could score and it’s satisfying to me to do the things that help them score.”
Strong agreed.
“In our offense, we don’t call upon Lindsay to score, but she can score,” Strong said. “With the point guard position, her primary responsibility is to distribute the basketball and make sure her teammates get great shots. She enjoys doing that and that’s something she’s very good at.
“She was a big part of our success,” he continued. “She’s a three-sport athlete (soccer, basketball and lacrosse) who committed to basketball in the off-season and our team benefited from that decision. We went through some growing pains with her as a freshman point guard starter. It’s very rare that you have a freshman who could do it, but she could do it, and now she’s a lot more polished as a point guard going forward.”
Strong saw a lot of those qualities in Fluehr when he recruited her out of Nazareth Academy in the Far Northeast section of Philadelphia.
“She’s one of the reasons I’m pretty high on Philadelphia kids,” said Strong, who has been at Scranton for 32 years. “I get in trouble with a lot of the local (Scranton) people for recruiting so many Philly kids, but a lot of our success is not solely but largely due to the Philly kids.
“They get to play in a lot of the summer leagues down there and that builds a toughness in them that you see when they get here. Lindsay has that same kind of toughness.”
Fluehr hopes to utilize the same personality traits for the next two seasons and beyond.
“I’m majoring in exercise science and physical therapy and I want to be an athletic trainer and get into coaching,” she said.
That can wait because she has a couple of more dates with March Madness before she graduates.
“We played our (NCAA) game at the University of Rochester,” Fluehr said. “We weren’t really used to being on that stage. I think the experience of being there this year is going to help us in the future.”
