Even after 30 years, Steve Zeiber’s shining moment remains as bright as ever

Each time the NCAA men’s basketball tournament tips and CBS plays that heart-tugging montage of tournament highlights Steve Zeiber thinks back to his one shining moment.

It came far from the glare of the national spotlight, in a small arena in Buffalo, against schools ESPN doesn’t know about, but to him and his Lebanon Valley College teammates it remains a prime time experience.

“Every year I think about it,” said Zeiber, a 1,000-point scorer at Central Catholic and a senior when Lebanon Valley won the 1994 NCAA Division III national championship.

“You hear about the underdogs and you hear all these stories and think, ‘Ah, that’ll never happen,’ ” Zeiber said. “Then you think back to our story.”

The amazing story of how the smallest school in the 40-team tournament weaved its way through the bracket and won each of its Final Four games in overtime was retold again recently in an 82-minute documentary, “The Dutchmen.”

“It’s kind of a fairy tale story,” said Zeiber, whose team battled back from a 14-point deficit with five minutes to go in the semifinal against Wittenberg, the top-ranked team in the nation, to keep its dream alive.

In the championship game against NYU – the largest school in the tournament, with 50 times the enrollment of Lebanon Valley – Jason Say’s tip-in at the buzzer sent the game to OT where the Flying Dutchmen won, 66-59.

The film was unveiled Saturday during Homecoming in Annville. Zeiber and all of his teammates re-lived their basketball journey, this time with their children and spouses, most of whom weren’t there to witness it 30 years ago.

Until this summer, when production on the documentary began, Zeiber hadn’t watched any of the games since he played in them. He had seen snippets of the tournament when the 1994 team was inducted into the LVC Hall of Fame 10 years ago but he didn’t own a copy of the games.

Prior to returning to Annville in the summer for interviews used in the documentary, Zeiber and his teammates were sent tapes of the tournament games.

For the first time Zeiber’s 12-year-old twins Bryson and Brady, avid basketball fans who play at Wilson Southern and attend high school games with their dad, were able to see him in action.

They were impressed after seeing him knock down the 3-pointer in overtime that gave the Flying Dutchmen the lead for good in the championship game. (Zeiber still holds the LVC career record for 3-point shooting percentage.)

The boys attended the film debut along with sister Morgan, brother Barrett and their mom, Cassandra. Sister Alexa, studying abroad, couldn’t make it.

The twins, like most who watched Lebanon Valley play back in the day, were more impressed with Zeiber’s teammate, Mike Rhoads, a Division III All-American and the driving force of that unlikely championship run.

Zeiber played on Central Catholic’s 1989 District 3-A championship team as a junior and was part of Cardinals teams that won 71 games over his final three season. Lebanon Valley hadn’t done much in the years before he arrived; he had no visions of repeating that kind of success.

“You always have that ‘I can make a difference’ mentality,” he said. “You think: I’m gonna get better, I’m gonna have fun, we’re gonna win some games. Where that leads us, who knows? (But) I won’t say I ever thought we’d win a national championship.”

Flying Dutchmen coach Pat Flannery had other ideas.  A year earlier he had inherited a program that hadn’t come close to a .500 record in a decade. Zeiber was part of Flannery’s second recruiting class. Rhoads, a scoring whiz at Mahanoy Area, was brought in the year after Zeiber and put the Flying Dutchmen over the top.

“He was so competitive, it was unreal,” Zeiber said.

Rhoades went on to become a two-time All-American and set the Lebanon Valley scoring record with 2,050 points. He became head coach at VCU, taking the Rams to the NCAA Tournament three times before being hired earlier this year as head coach at Penn State.

Flannery was an assistant coach at Bucknell, Drexel and William & Mary before taking over at Lebanon Valley. Like Rhoades, the Dutchmen’s championship was just the beginning on a successful basketball journey for him.

After leading Lebanon Valley to a 28-4 record in 1993-94 the Pottsville native was hired as head coach at his alma mater, Bucknell. In 2005 he coached the 14^th seeded Bison to a first-round upset over Kansas in the NCAA Tournament. A year later  Flannery’s team ousted Arkansas in the first round.

Lebanon Valley’s championship, while considered a Cinderella story by outsiders, wasn’t a huge surprise to Zeiber and the Flying Dutchmen. His junior season they reached the Elite Eight before losing at Scranton, which was ranked No. 1 in the nation.

“At that point (we thought): ‘We have a shot to do really good things,’ ” Zeiber said. “We had (virtually) everybody back (for the next season). That offseason we worked out butts off.”

The Flying Dutchmen won the MAC championship, drew a first-round bye, then beat Johns Hopkins, UMass-Dartmouth and Amherst in the first three rounds of the NCAA Tournament. Those games were played at Franklin & Marshall.

“This was unchartered territory for this school,” Flannery told d3hoops.com. “The year before was the first time the school had ever been to the NCAA Tournament. Our name wasn’t prevalent in the Final Four.

“We were playing Wittenberg in the first round, which is a giant, then playing New York University, which is a giant. And to get there, we beat Amherst, which is a giant. All the way along, we’re making inroads, and as we’re going along (we start to realize) we can play with these people.”