There’s a tone of wonderment in Cameron Gaudette’s voice when he discusses his recently completed sophomore basketball season at Green Mountain College. After an ordinary freshman campaign during which the Eagles went 8-16, the team finished his second season 21-4, drawing excited gatherings to the private school’s tiny gym in Poultney, Vt.
“It doesn’t even seem real,” said Gaudette, who is the team’s only native Vermonter. “Like we’re going to be on some ESPN 30 for 30 show.”
And not just because of the dramatic turnaround in wins and losses.
While the 2015-16 team’s record was the best in program history and Green Mountain’s average of 94.2 points per game was eighth-best among NCAA Division III teams, the Eagles’ season will be remembered more for turmoil and multiple departures.
In September, the athletic department announced it hadn’t entered enough cross country and track and field athletes in enough meets during the previous academic year. That meant Green Mountain, an environmental liberal arts school of roughly 575 students a half-hour west of Rutland, had not sponsored the minimum number of full varsity teams to meet NCAA Division III standards. As a result, the NCAA declared all 2015-16 Green Mountain sports ineligible for national tournament play.
Shortly before the school’s December holiday break, fourth-year athletic director Keith Bosley resigned with no reason publicly given. The men’s basketball team, 7-2 at the break, was told soon after that it would not be allowed to participate in the conference’s season-ending tournament.
Gaudette said the players “couldn’t get a straight answer” from interim athletic director James Thivierge as to why that decision was made. Queried this week, Thivierge, who also handles the athletic department’s media relations and event management, said Green Mountain president Paul Fonteyn made the choice.
Thivierge wrote in an email that Fonteyn made the decision “at the recommendation of the (North Atlantic Conference) commissioner because the basketball team was not eligible to play in the NCAA tournament and because of … ineligible players.”
Fonteyn was not made available for comment by the college. He announced last August that he will retire at the end of the current school year. Anthony Leonelli, who was GMC’s second-year coach, said Fonteyn fired him in January upon the 32-year-old’s return to campus from a two-week suspension imposed by the college.
The Eagles, 7-11 in the NAC during the previous season, finished 2015-16 atop the conference standings at 16-2. However, no Green Mountain players were honored on the NAC’s all-conference first team, though two were selected for the second team. Each NAC school landed a player on the all-conference sportsmanship team and Gaudette was the Eagle so honored, although he appeared in only six games.
That makes sense, because as the son of former Hartford High coach Mike Gaudette, Cameron wasn’t about to trash-talk an opponent, argue with a ref or knock over a water cooler, behaviors in which he said his teammates engaged last season.
“It was almost embarrassing being a part of that stuff and I never bought into any of it,” Cameron Gaudette said.
The guard saw the first signs of massive change when he returned to campus last fall and found more than 20 players trying out for the team. Leonelli had gone a recruiting spree that brought in eight junior college transfers and boosted the Eagles’ average age to nearly 23 years old.
The new point guard was 26, another transfer had played at the University of Maryland and the roster now featured competitors from eight states, the District of Columbia, Spain and Greece. Six players were back from the 2014-15 squad.
The slew of imports alone would have raised eyebrows in a New England conference where many schools recruit primarily in their home states. But when the Eagles started to win and were loud and and proud about it, their new incarnation, dubbed “Run GMC” by Leonelli, did not go over well. Technicals for dissent with the officials, disputes with opponents and what referees viewed as taunting began to pile up. Gaudette said Fonteyn, the school president, didn’t seem to mind from his seat in the stands.
“He’d be at our games and shouting, ‘Turn up the heat, GMC!’ ” Gaudette said. “He loved what we were doing.”
Leonelli, described in a January article on the Vice Sports website as often dressing all in black for games, is a former overnight dock worker who spent a decade as a Division III college assistant. He was hired from among more than 100 applicants for the Green Mountain job and made $30,000 a year while living in a school dorm. Also living there was assistant coach Chris Pagentine, who made $1,800 per year and worked part-time at a local school to support himself.
The men’s basketball team’s success this season was in stark contrast to other GMC squads during the last decade. An examination of team records since 2008 and available on the school’s website this week showed that the combined record of the men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s lacrosse, men’s and women’s tennis and volleyball squads was 311-841-7.
That’s a winning percentage of .268, meaning the school has won fewer than three out of every 10 games during the past eight years.
“It’s glorified intramurals, and I wasn’t going to run the basketball program that way,” Leonelli said.
Thivierge said that roughly a third of GMC students participate on one or more of the school’s 14 varsity teams. A study of GMC rosters available on the school’s website turned up 24 Upper Valley residents who have played a sport at the school since 2007. Seven of those played two sports there, and three athletes played three sports for the Eagles.
“Athletics is an integral part of our campus community,” Thivierge said. “We take it really seriously and want them to have a great experience.”
Leonelli said a player found in midseason to have exhausted his NCAA eligibility before he enrolled at GMC lied to both himself and Bosley about his situation. Another left the team at the same time because he had become academically ineligible. Leonelli said Green Mountain did not have a specific NCAA compliance and eligibility staff person. Thivierge said those duties were handled by Bosley.
In early January and with his team at 8-2, Leonelli said he was suspended for four games by GMC vice president for student life Joe Petrick and Thivierge for what he was told was “insubordination and unsatisfactory performance.” The coach admitted that he “boiled over” at Petrick during a meeting, telling him that the basketball program’s resources were insufficient.
“I was insubordinate in standing up for my guys, and I’d do it again,” Leonelli said. “There are giant financial constraints there because their enrollment is 200 fewer than they want. I got 19 kids there in two years and at a school that size and with (tuition, room and board and fees) being $47,000 a year, that’s not insignificant.”
Gaudette said that when Leonelli told the players he’d been suspended, he lined them up on the bleachers and went down the row, offering high-fives. He walked out of the gym and Gaudette hasn’t seen him since, the coach sending news of his subsequent firing via text message.
“It was pretty dramatic,” Gaudette said of the exit scene. “But at any other school, he would have been on thin ice a lot earlier.”
So where does this leave the players? Five are listed as seniors and others are likely to transfer, Gaudette said. However, he said he thinks he’ll stick around. He played in 16 games as a freshman and started nine of them, so he hopes he can regain playing time under whomever takes over the program. Thivierge said a search for a new athletic director is ongoing and must be completed before the hunt for a new men’s basketball coach begins.
Leonelli, who has yet to land another coaching job, is a passionate supporter of Gaudette, describing him as one of his favorite players ever and lauding him for his strong work in the classroom, where he is a natural resources management major.
“Cam’s a kid who will succeed because he’s self-motivated,” Leonelli said. “He’s a great guy to keep your team in its offense, make a three and just play super hard. He might not get the rebound, but there’s a good chance he tipped it to a teammate or boxed his man out.”
Gaudette said he’s not unhappy he enrolled at Green Mountain, although he said it’s “definitely not a sports school. Athletes here are almost like the outcasts. You have people coming to class with no shoes, and there are so many different kinds of people here. They’re nice, but it’s a different world.
“I never dreamed I’d be a junior and we’d be starting the team over again. At schools like Castleton, this kind of thing is unheard of, so I’m a bit nervous about how next season will go.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.