Franklin & Marshall College has some serious tradition — 1,199 wins, 21 conference titles, four NCAA Final Fours — in men's basketball.
That was one reason, but not the only one, that the current Diplomats knew last season's 12-13 record was unacceptable.
"We knew we were underperforming," junior forward Clay Scovill said Thursday.
"We knew it had to stop. This is F&M. But we weren't just letting the program down. We were letting ourselves down."
Consider it stopped. A remarkable turnaround has made the Dips the story of the local college season.
They're 19-2, alone in first place in the Centennial Conference. They're also the top-ranked team in the NCAA's Mid-Atlantic Region, which means that if the season ended today they'd be the region's top choice to get an at-large bid to the NCAA Division III tournament, assuming they didn't earn an automatic berth.
"We thought we were going to be much improved," coach Glenn Robinson said Thursday.
"What we didn't know was how much our record would change, because it's always relative to the competition, and there were a lot of teams in our league that were returning intact."
Robinson, with a 749-286 mark over 38 seasons at F&M, is D-3s all-time winningest coach. In one incredible 10-year stretch, from 1986-96, his teams went 257-37.
But over the previous three seasons, the Dips went 33-42. Had the Big Guy lost his mojo?
Uh, no. The nadir came in 2006-07, when they went 8-17. But that's also when the first seeds — some of them exotic strains — of the current team were planted.
Robinson has never been overly reliant on local recruiting, but the current team includes players from Missouri, Florida, Idaho, New Jersey, New York and Maryland. Just five of the 16 varsity players are Pennsylvanians.
Scovill, a 6-foot-3 swingman who led the Lancaster-Lebanon League in scoring as a senior at Manheim Township, transferred in from Penn State, where he had spent two years as a walk-on, end-of-the-bench player.
Mike Baker, an energetic 6-7 sophomore post player, attended a small, private high school in Missouri. He was connected to F&M by an alumnus who works there.
Anthony Brooks, a tough, athletic guard, transferred in from the University of Miami.
Brooks, who's from the Orlando area, got cut from Miami's varsity as a freshman. He had not even started in high school.
But in 2007 he happened to find himself in a pickup game, in Miami, with Lower Merion High School assistant coach Doug Young.
After the game, Young approached Brooks, told him he thought he could play college basketball, and told him about a few small colleges in Pennsylvania.
Brooks was intending to transfer anyway, probably to a state school in Florida, for financial reasons. He visited Lancaster, and F&M came up with an attractive package of need- and merit-based financial aid,
"I fell in love with it," said Brooks, an excellent student with designs on law school.
"It's better academically than any of the schools I would have transferred to."
Robinson, meanwhile, was working on two conventional recruiting coups.
James McNally, a 6-6 banger considered among the best players in central New Jersey two years ago, is now the Dips' leading scorer with 15.2 points per game.
Now the Dips had two big, power post players (Baker and McNally), and two multi-skilled wing types (Scovill and Brooks). All that remained was a point guard.
Enter Georgio Milligan, a strong, quick explosive talent from Don Bosco Prep, the Ramsey, N.J., all-sports powerhouse. Milligan, whose hometown is Spring Valley, N.Y., can be as erratic as you'd expect of a freshman given the keys to the machine. But he also seems too gifted for D-3.
Last year's team, Robinson points out, lost six times on the game's final possession. This year's club is unbeaten, 5-0, in games decided by four points or less.
"These things don't happen overnight," George Petrie, coach of Centennial rival Gettysburg, said Friday of F&M's resurgence.
True, last year's Dips had a lot of the same players as this year's, but, Petrie added, "they didn't have Giorgio."
During the offseason Baker and McNally committed to serious conditioning. Scovill, Brooks and reserve big man Dan Selig stayed in Lancaster and played on the same team in a York summer league.
Once the new school year began, the open gyms were spirited and intense. Going 8-17 and then 12-13 tends to put egos on a leash. It's a familiar story, especially in this sport.
"The key thing has been team chemistry," Brooks said.
"We all hang out a lot off the court, and we've gotten to know each other's tendencies. But I didn't know we'd be this tight. It's been better than we thought."
"Last year weeded out guys who didn't really want to be here," Scovill said.
"Now it's 16 guys on the same page. The locker-room attitude can be such a huge thing."
The team looks a lot like most of Robinson's better ones, with two bigs to drive the half-court offense reminiscent of the old North Carolina passing game, and relentless man-to-man defense.
The Dips do have some issues. The post defense isn't great. Only Scovill is a reliable foul shooter. Milligan is averaging five turnovers a game.
"They're young, but they're young," Robinson said, and he wasn't trying to be cryptic.
"They make mistakes and erase them. They'll recover so fast that sometimes you don't even realize they were out of position."
Both F&M's losses have been in the league, in competitive games at home to Gettysburg and at McDaniel.
The Dips have since beaten McDaniel here, and a series of upsets have put F&M alone at the top of the Centennial with four games left.
The regular-season champs host the conference tournament, and the winner gets an NCAA automatic. If the Dips win out from here to the tournament, they probably don't have to win it to get in the NCAAs.
"It's too early to be talking about any of that stuff," Robinson scoffed last week.
And maybe it's too early, in this group's development, to think about a serious NCAA run.
Still, F&M is back.
Mike Gross is assistant sports editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at mgross@lnpnews.com. 
