Fairleigh Dickinson coach Tobin Anderson got his college basketball start at Wesleyan
Tobin Anderson and the Fairleigh Dickinson men's basketball team made history Friday night, becoming only the second No. 16 seed in NCAA Tournament history to defeat a No. 1 seed when they shocked Purdue 63-58.
"What a night," Anderson said after the game, still in in awe of his team's upset performance. "Incredible win for us. Incredible win for our program, our school. Hard to put it in words right now. Honestly, it's really hard to even – it just happened, right?"
Anderson, in his first year at Fairleigh Dickinson, grew up in Iowa, but has strong connections to Connecticut having attended Wesleyan University in Middletown. There, he earned a bachelor's degree in American studies, graduating in 1995.
Anderson played basketball for the Division III program, scoring 1,129 points - ranking him 11th all-time on the school's scoring list.
He started his post-high school basketball journey at a prep school in Maine, wanting to eventually play in the Ivy League. Quickly, Anderson told the Wesleyan podcast Beyond the Box Score in 2021, he realized he was in over his head with several Division I-caliber players on the roster. He was also told it was unlikely he was going to play Division I basketball, but Wesleyan was put on his radar.
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"It was the best fit for me," he said. "The prep school helped me come to the realization that I couldn't play Division I. I could have played and been on the team, but I wanted to have a career here."
Anderson, 51, is now in his first year as a Division I head coach, spending about a decade prior coaching at Division II school St. Thomas Aquinas.
Fairleigh Dickinson won its First Four NCAA Tournament game earlier in the week, defeating Texas Southern 84-61. It was no secret defeating Purdue was going to be a near-impossible task in the next round, but Anderson wasn't backing down from the challenge, even suggesting to his team in the locker room following the Texas Southern win that "the more I watch Purdue, the more I think that we can beat them." The speech was caught on video and has since garnered millions of views online.
— TheFieldOf68 Twitter
Did he really believe his team stood a chance, though?
"I'm not sure how much I meant it," he said in the postgame press conference Friday night. "I wanted our guys to believe. As a coach or a leader, you try to get them to believe in what we're doing, how we're doing it."
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