Jack Gohlke and the Oakland Grizzlies are what March Madness is all about

Oakland's Jack Gohlke, Greg Kampe, and DQ Cole are everything that make March Madness so perfect.

Published March 22, 2024, 6:18 p.m. ET

PITTSBURGH — There’s a long list of firsts that Jack Gohlke, overnight basketball celebrity, has experienced in his 24 hours in the spotlight. Gohlke scored 32 points and made 10 threes to help his Oakland team down powerhouse Kentucky on Thursday night. There were hundreds of text messages on his phone. He’ll get to most of them later, he said. Postgame, the Division II graduate transfer sat next to his coach on SportsCenter with ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt. He spent part of Friday morning on Pat McAfee’s show.

There were a few NIL opportunities mixed into those text messages, but the money, Gohlke said, will have to wait, too. There’s a game to be played Saturday night, with No. 14 Oakland taking on No. 11 North Carolina State in a South Regional game, a Sweet 16 berth on the line.

All of these things have been pretty cool for a 6-foot-3 guard who played four seasons at a small, private Christian college in southern Michigan. He’s only playing at Oakland because he had a fifth year of eligibility from the pandemic and Hillsdale College didn’t have the type of graduate programs that interested him. But there was another first for Gohlke, one he could hear and feel on the court at PPG Paints Arena on Thursday night.

The listed attendance for Gohlke’s last game at Hillsdale, in the 2023 Division II NCAA Tournament, was 741 people inside Nicoson Hall at the University of Indianapolis. Thursday night, Gohlke put on a show for 19,000 fans, and anyone not wearing Wildcats blue was on his side. Toward the end of the first half, after he had made clear that he was going to keep firing from deep and that the Grizzlies were not some low-major pushover, he started to sense what that crowd could actually feel like.

“If I caught the ball, I could just hear the crowd kind of collect their breath,” Gohlke said Friday afternoon. “I had never noticed that on the court, anything like that. Just hearing that big of a crowd, that type of thing go on, that was kind of cool, but also just a surreal experience of everyone’s kind of on the edge of their seat whenever I touched the ball.”

Gohlke wants to play pro basketball somewhere, maybe in some other country, if he can. There’s a good chance the guy from Pewaukee, Wis., the same hometown of the NFL’s Watt family, may never feel anything like what he felt Thursday again after Saturday night’s Round of 32.

Gohlke and these Grizzlies are everything that make March Madness so perfect. They are led by Greg Kampe, coaching in his 40th season at the same place after nearly dying of sepsis in 2017. Sure, it was Gohlke’s outburst that made him the star of the night, whose “we’re not a Cinderella” comment after the game made you toggle between thinking he was corny and thinking he’s onto something. But there was DQ Cole hitting the put away three-pointer in the corner in front of the Oakland bench. Cole grew up in Pontiac — walkable from Oakland’s Rochester, Mich., campus — before starting his college basketball career at Henry Ford Community College.

The guy who threw Cole the pass? Yeah, that’s the same Rocket Watts you may remember from Michigan State, who was once a top prospect but now is a key role player on the Grizzlies. The moment-makers come from everywhere.

“It’s a dream come true,” Cole said. “I’m seeing stuff I’ve never seen before. Jack Gohlke, I’ve never seen that before ever in my life.”

Cole said he stayed up with teammates monitoring Gohlke’s Instagram and seeing the new followers pour in.

These are the names and the stories of March that always resonate into the future. You rarely remember the college runs of famous NBA players, but what about Princeton and Florida Atlantic in last year’s tournament? Philadelphia was home to Dunk City and Florida Gulf Coast in 2013. The only reason most of us know Sister Jean exists is because of that 2018 Loyola-Chicago NCAA Tournament run.

The City of Rivers became the City of Cinderella (sorry, Jack, the term fits), Oakland pulling a stunner here while Duquesne, its campus a few blocks from PPG Paints Arena, pulled off an upset as an 11 seed in Omaha.

Kampe, Gohlke, Cole, and the others from Oakland all get added to the March Madness memory bank. Win or lose Saturday, the zone-playing, three-point shooting Grizzlies will always take with them that they knocked off John Calipari and third-seeded Kentucky, forcing conversations about the Hall of Fame coach’s future.

“I can’t wait to come back and see all these guys in five, 10, however many years it is and talk about these memories we’re making right now,” Gohlke said. “That’s why we want to keep making more of them.”

Kampe said Friday afternoon that he hadn’t slept. The 68-year-old spent most of the overnight hours preparing for N.C. State, but he did take a break — a strategic one. He, too, had hundreds of text messages. So between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., he started to return some of them. Why? He knew the recipients were unlikely to respond to add back on to the pile.

“I got it down to about 195,” he said. “Now it’s back up to 495. Tonight I’ll be up doing the rest of them.”

A perfect plan made possible only because of this wonderful, crazy month.