N. Iowa's McDermott latest coach to shine in Valley

	In five years as head coach at Northern Iowa, Greg McDermott has turned the Panthers into a power. Greg Nelson/SI
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It's hard to miss the UNI Dome. After driving down Hudson Road in Cedar Falls, Iowa, for about four miles, the horizon as flat and dreary as is stereotypically imaginable, you come down a hill and boom, there on your left is the nation's most out-of-place domed stadium. It is inside this '70s-era monstrosity (complete with a red-yellow-and-blue interior color scheme befitting a monster-truck rally) that one of college basketball's most improbable success stories plays and practices -- that is, when it's not getting squeezed out by the football or track teams.

I spent two days last week around the University of Northern Iowa's basketball program as part of a feature on the rise of the Missouri Valley Conference which appears in this week's Sports Illustrated. It has been a banner year for The Valley, which currently has five teams ranked in the RPI Top 30, and nearly every coach, player and administrator I interviewed last week scoffed at its perception as a "mid-major" conference. "There's nothing mid-major about our facilities," said Creighton coach Dana Altman.

That's easy for Altman to say. His team plays in a sparkling, NBA-caliber arena in downtown Omaha, to which nearly 16,000 fans flocked for a game I attended last Saturday against Southern Illinois. For the University of Northern Iowa to field (as of last week) a Top 25 basketball team -- one that has beaten both Big Ten leader Iowa and SEC West leader LSU this season and is headed for a likely top six seed in next month's NCAA tournament, is a remarkable feat in its own right; to see the UNI Dome with one's own eyes makes it seem downright astonishing.

On the first day of my visit, the then 25th-ranked Panthers were holding an afternoon shootaround for that evening's game against Wichita State. Not 20 yards away, the high hurdlers were sprinting around the track that circles the Dome floor, a pole vaulter was practicing her landings and some baseball players were practicing in an indoor cage just behind the court's bleachers. "We've had a [javelin] hammer come on the floor during practice," said head coach Greg McDermott, whose windowless office is tucked at the end of a corridor inside the stadium (his assistants sit in adjoining cubicles), about 50 feet from the football coaches.

When I met up with athletic director Rick Hartzell that day, he was busily trying to figure out when visiting Bucknell would be able to get in a shootaround prior to this Saturday's much-anticipated Bracket Buster game, because a track meet is scheduled at the Dome all day Friday. The answer: 9 p.m. Tip-off is at 11 a.m. the next morning.

OK, so the place isn't that bad. The Panthers' court is perfectly suitable, even if it is portioned off by curtains on one side of what is normally the football field. The place can get loud for a game, especially when 10,053 (a school record for an MVC game) show up, as they did for a recent showdown with Missouri State. But I've been to countless college athletic factories the last several years -- the Floridas, the Tennessees, the Ohio States, the Michigans -- and let me put it to you this way: Northern Iowa is to those places what the Golden Nugget is to the Bellagio. And yet, on the court, this year's Panthers can hold their own with nearly any of them.

For this, fifth-year coach McDermott deserves eons of credit. Northern Iowa had had its share of success in nearly every other sport it fields -- football played in the I-AA title game last season -- but had almost no basketball tradition pre-McDermott. Average attendance the year before he took over barely cracked 2,500. A 41-year-old former UNI player who returned to his alma mater after Division II head-coaching stints at Wayne State and North Dakota State, he's engineered three straight 20-win seasons (the school had two in its history before he arrived), and the Panthers are likely headed to their third straight NCAA tournament (after just one berth in their previous 24 years in Division I).