Mike Brophy '83 remembers a time when the men's basketball team at Ursinus didn't have the resources to compete against each other in practice.

"The guys who were seniors would tell us they used to practice against chairs," Brophy said. "They didn't have enough guys on the team."

Thanks in large part to the efforts of Brophy and the other members of the Bears' 1981 team, the first in school history to reach the Final Four, the program has come quite a ways since then. Its remarkable progression will never be more evident than it is this weekend, when Ursinus shares the sport's most legendary floor with one of its most storied programs. 

When the Bears take on Penn Saturday at the Palestra, long-awaited meetings of old friends will be happening both on and off the court during a day made up of equal parts family reunion and basketball game. Against the backdrop of college basketball's most historic arena, one of the most successful teams in the College's history will be assembled once more. For the Bears, it's a day many years in the making.

While the present iterations of the Quakers and Bears reacquaint themselves, waking up the echoes of a series that dates back a century, some of Ursinus' past greats will be doing the same. Many members of the 1981 team, including head coach Skip Werley, will be in the stands, their loyalties divided as their alma mater opposes their former teammate.

"It will be," Brophy said, "a tremendous day for Ursinus."

Thirty-five years ago, Penn's John R. Rockwell head coach called Ursinus his home. Steve Donahue was a freshman on that 1981 team, and three-and-a-half decades later his former teammates find themselves in a strange position, preparing to watch one of their own coach against the school they helped take farther than it had even been before. 

"It's an honor," said Jay DeFruscio, a junior on the 1981 team, "that someone we used to play with has reached the top of the profession."

A year removed from the program's first NCAA Tournament berth since 1946, the 1981 Ursinus men's basketball team boasted a deep arsenal of talent, and the product they put on the floor reflected it. The Bears averaged 78.3 points per game, frequently engaging in shootouts with scores that reached well into the 80s, three times cracking the 100-point barrier. They were a veteran and balanced unit, with five players who averaged between 11.3 and 12.7 points per game. The reserves, made up of DeFruscio, seniors Mike Cola and Larry Davis, sophomores Jack Devine and Kevin Callahan, and freshman Jeff Berlin, would sub in for a minute or two of up-tempo chaos at a time.

Junior center Tom Broderick averaged a double-double (12.5 points, 11.2 rebounds), and senior guard Jim Mobley (pictured at left) led the team in scoring (12.7). Senior forward Kevin McCormick (12.0 points per game), junior forward Dave Petitta (11.7), and Brophy (11.3) were right behind. All have been inducted into the Ursinus Athletics Hall of Fame, along with Werley and DeFruscio, who averaged 5.0 points per contest. Mobley, Broderick, Petitta, and Brophy are members of the Bears' 1,000-point club.

"It's odd to have that many Hall of Famers on one team," DeFruscio said. "I was on the second team, and every day at practice was a dogfight. You had guys on the second team that, if it wasn't for such a good first team, would have played a lot more. We showed that when we went to the Elie Eight the next year."

For a team that came within a basket of the national championship game, it might surprise some to learn that the Bears' magical run almost didn't happen. Ursinus had lost to Dickinson in the Middle Atlantic Conference Tournament, and without the league's automatic bid, their chances of getting into the NCAA Tournament appeared bleak.

"We thought our season was over," said Brophy, who served as team captain alongside McCormick. "Skip said, 'nobody is going to give you an at-large bid, and I don't know if I'd even accept it.' We went in the gym that night, all ticked off thinking that the season had come to an abrupt end."

But the NCAA did extend the Bears an invitation, and Werley did accept it.

When the NCAA Tournament rolled around, Brophy and company found themselves locked in one nail-biter after another. Of the Bears' five postseason contests, four were decided by three points or less, and all were against higher ranked squads.

The saga began with a 69-58 defeat of Franklin & Marshall, which had beaten the Bears in the second game of the regular season. Revenge in hand, Ursinus then stunned William Patterson, 66-64, when Broderick threw an inbounds pass that ricocheted off the backboard and landed in the hands of Petitta, who laid it in at the buzzer to send the Bears to the Elite Eight.

"That's not exactly how we drew it up," Brophy said with a laugh. "That was when we realized that we had something special."

That set the stage for a thriller against Upsala, where Ursinus continued to redefine "March Madness."

The Bears were clinging to a 67-66 lead in the final minute when they were called for an offensive foul. But Upsala fans threw toilet paper onto the court, resulting in a technical foul, and Pettita, who had just put the Bears ahead with a put-back, cashed in on the free throw. The Vikings hit a foul shot of their own with 30 seconds left, but Brophy (pictured at right) converted a three-point play with eight seconds remaining, sending Ursinus to its first Final Four.

"Earlier in the game, somebody had thrown toilet paper, and the referees had warned that there would be a technical foul the next time it happened," Brophy said. "I got called for an offensive foul, and I just remember thinking, 'you have to be kidding me.' I thought that was it.

"Then the toilet paper came down, and it came from the Upsala side, so the referees called a technical. I remember the Upsala coach coming up and asking the refs how they knew someone from Ursinus didn't go over to their side and throw it. We still talk about that: the Toilet Paper Game."

The Bears' dream of a national title ended with a 63-61 setback to eventual champion Potsdam State, but Ursinus shook off the heartbreak to top Otterbein, 82-79, in the third-place game.

Looking back on that extraordinary season, Brophy can't help but marvel at the effect it had on the campus as a whole, the way it energized the area and brought Ursinus a level of notoriety it had not seen before.

"When we got there, they would only bring out one set of stands for games," Brophy said. "They said it was a waste of time (to use more), because we'd only get 100 people there.

"You went from that to getting really good crowds. I remember making mimeographs to put on all the tables at Wismer. That (Final Four) week was tremendous – between the radio stations and the papers, they all did articles. The mood on campus was incredible. People even came down to watch practice, which never happens. We went from nobody in the gym, to when we left for the Final Four, there were buses with parents and supporters on them, headed down to Rock Island, Illinois. To get that kind of recognition was absolutely phenomenal." 

The members of that pioneering unit have gone on to extraordinary success since leaving Ursinus, both within and outside of basketball. McCormick coaches the boys program at Springfield (Delco) High School, where Werley coached after his time at Ursinus ended. Callahan is a sports journalist at the Courier-Post. Brophy is the president of MBI Group, Inc., and Cola serves as president and CEO of Medgenics, just to name a few.

"The teams we were a part of, some of those guys are doctors and lawyers and doing great things," DeFruscio said. "But they're humble, always humble."

DeFruscio, meanwhile, spent 18 years coaching at Wheeling Jesuit University, where he is the all-time leader in wins, before taking a job as an assistant with the Indiana Pacers from 2007 to 2011. He then went on to become the first-ever Associate Commissioner of the Atlantic 10 Conference.

And Donahue, of course, has risen through the ranks to his latest post, and the accompanying challenge of returning the Quakers to prominence. DeFruscio can't help but marvel at how far he and Donahue have come since that magical season – and a few years after, when they were in the same line of work, dreaming of becoming full-time coaches one day.

"When I graduated I actually coached at Ursinus for two years as an assistant," DeFruscio said. "I quit an accounting job to try to find a coaching job full-time, and I was painting houses and dorms on the side. Steve was working at MAB Paints, and we used to paint together and talk about wanting to coach."

Werley gave Donahue (pictured above on the 1984 team, for which he was point guard and captain) his first coaching gig, an unpaid assistant position at Springfield (Delco); Donahue, remarkably, didn't earn a paycheck for coaching until he was 33. Stops at Monsignor Bonner High School and Philadelphia University followed before he began a 10-year tenure as an assistant at Penn, under current Temple coach Fran Dunphy. Next came a decade as head coach at Cornell, where he led the Big Red to three straight Ivy League crowns and a Sweet Sixteen (the first by an Ivy League program since 1979) in 2009, and four years at Boston College before Donahue was named Penn's 20^th head coach on March 16.

Donahue's former teammates are convinced he is up to the difficult task with which he is faced. In large part, that conviction is grounded in the bonds they shared as part of a school they believe is uniquely equipped to help its graduates succeed. 

"Steve is exactly like he was when he was at Ursinus," DeFruscio said. "He was a gym rat who loved the game. He's a student of the game, a sharp basketball mind, full of energy. Last year he did a TV game for us in Pittsburgh, and after the game we went out and talked basketball until about two in the morning. He's a great guy, and all of the success he's had is well-deserved.

"I think we were challenged all the time, in the classroom and on the court," he continued. "In a lot of cases, our parents didn't go to college, so I felt it was an obligation to make every effort in the class and on the court. The skills you learn in sports are the ones of teamwork, perseverance, hard work, and preparation. Those are the things that Ursinus and our families taught us, and they have served us well."

Werley knew long ago, well before he hired him as an assistant, that Donahue (at left, in 1984) would be a successful coach.

"As a point guard, he was a coach on the floor, which doesn't always translate to being a good coach, but he showed that as a player," Werley said. "When he came with me for three years as an assistant you could tell – he had a way about him with the kids, and he knew the game. From there on it just blossomed. He always had it inside of him."

Apparently, there's still a player inside of him as well. Twenty-five years ago, Dennis Leddy, a senior on the 1980 team that reached the NCAA Tournament, started a showcase called the South Jersey Shootout, a tournament featuring teams made up of alumni of Division I, II, and III programs alike. This year, 35 seasons after they came so close to winning one, Ursinus' outfit took home the league title.

"Steve was out directing traffic," Brophy said. "It was pretty neat to see that we hadn't missed a beat, and some of us hadn't played in years."

The members of that 1981 team, and the men who played for the Bears in the years immediately preceding and following it, remain close to this day. Many still live in the area, and see each other often – frequently at the Palestra, fittingly, watching as their friend and teammate undertakes his rebuilding task at Penn. Every five years, the whole group gets together for a reunion.

"That's always a pretty good showing of people coming back to town," Brophy said. "Skip has done a fabulous job keeping in touch with everyone.

"There was something about the way that Skip and his staff did things on and off the court. I can honestly say I'm closer with these guys than I am with any other group. The bond that we had, I give Skip all the credit in the world for developing that. It taught us a lot more than just basketball."

Werley (at right, with McCormick and Brophy) keeps in touch every day, via an email entitled 'Thought of the Day.' It includes quotes from figures from all walks of life, with one from a coach in a section called 'Coach's Corner' at the bottom of the page. Werley is delighted that the bond his former protégés shared all those years ago remains indelible.  

"It's just the kind of guys that they were," Werley said. "We were hopeful that we would be getting kids that bought into the team aspect. There were no individuals on that team. It's a neat group of guys."

"When we tell people we stay in touch with friends from 35 years ago, they can't believe it," Brophy added. "Whether we won or lost, we're all very successful in whatever walks of life we're in. I can't believe we're talking 35 years later…it brings back a lot of memories. There are certain plays and games that bring you right back."

Shortly after the final buzzer sounded on the 1981 season, an anonymous fan sent a letter to the Grizzly, Ursinus' student newspaper. It read: "I'm not thankful for, as one professor said, 'putting Ursinus on the map.' Rather, I'm grateful to them for a basketball season that gave life to cold winter nights. Thank you for…providing us all with some beautiful memories of eleven fantastic basketball players. You're number one in our hearts."

And, always, in their hearts as well.

"I always kid with Coach (Kevin) Small, when they went to the Final Four (in 2008) – that was great, but they couldn't have beaten the '81 team," DeFruscio said of that 2008 team (pictured at left). 

From practicing against chairs, to playing against Penn in the Palestra - the last 35 years have been quite a journey. 

"It's tremendous," Brophy said. "Back when we were playing, to put Ursinus on the map and going to the Final Four, nobody had ever heard of Ursinus. Nobody ever thought much of us. The year before we got there, the team was 1-19. Who would have thought that three years later we were playing for a championship?

"I think everybody at Ursinus has to feel proud that you're going to be listed in the same breath as an Ivy League team and be able to play on the same court. I don't think anyone is expecting Ursinus to upset Penn, but that's not what this game is about. I think Steve has to feel pretty proud. I'm sure he'll have goosebumps. To be able to coach at a place as prestigious as Penn and give up a game for Ursinus is tremendous."

And how will the 1981 team align itself on Saturday, when teammate goes against alma mater?

"I pull for Ursinus, and I pull for Steve Donahue," DeFruscio said. "Everyone is a winner in my book."