Lockdown boredom struck Aaron Toomey and Matt Goldsmith. The two Amherst College products couldn’t coach their teams (Goldsmith at The College of New Jersey and Toomey then at Vassar) with the Division 3 season canceled in 2020. They’d floated the idea of entering a team in The Basketball Tournament before but couldn’t find the time to make it a reality. The pandemic afforded schedule openings and downtime.

“Aaron and I are cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways,” Goldmith said. “We have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder because we were maybe overlooked or thought of as worse basketball players because we cared about our performance in the classroom just as much as on the court. That was the heart of it, being able to prove nerdy guys can hoop too. ”

The Nerd Team emerged from that chip for the 2021 edition. It’s a collection of players from high academic institutions in the Ivy League, Patriot League and NESCAC. The squad pulls from schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Saint Peter’s, Notre Dame and, of course, Amherst College.

“Obviously with our backgrounds playing at Amherst College and coaching at Amherst College and the high academic world, one of the things we really wanted to prove that guys not just at the D3 level but the high academic world, the Ivy League, Patriot League, that those guys could compete with anybody out there, and we had strong feelings toward that being the reality and wanted to start something that could prove that,” Toomey said.

They didn’t right away, falling to Blue Collar U in the first round. But last year, the nerds exacted their revenge.  The Nerd Team bested the Saint Bonaventure alumni squad Brown and White in the opening round and took down the defending champions Boeheim’s Army, the Syracuse alumni team, on their home floor before losing to eventual champion Blue Collar U, their nemesis, in the regional final.

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“Last year opened our eyes to with confidence be able to say that we’re good enough, we’ve put together a good enough roster to win this. We’re in a spot where we can confidently say that,” Toomey said.

Northampton grad Willy Workman, who won a national championship with Toomey at Amherst in 2013, played in the 2021 edition but couldn’t make it last season. He watched every game and blew up the group chat with messages of support. Workman also missed working with Toomey and Goldstein.

“Being able to do basketball with those people is really hard for me to pass up. It’s a good run, it’s good work. The reality is that in the summer as an overseas player it’s not so easy to get your work in. It’s hard to find a group of guys to practice with, to play with, to push each other. Being in that team setting is so beneficial staying in shape getting ready to go back overseas,” Workman said. “It’s a great opportunity in a lot of ways, and most importantly it’s playing ball, which is the best thing in the world.”

Workman is one of the oldest players on The Nerd Team and is happy to fill any role. Toomey and Goldsmith know his game as well as anyone in the world and can put him in the best positions on the court.

“You have to build a puzzle that fits together. But there’s a lot of responsibility on the players to figure each other out,” Workman said. “We’re banking on getting high IQ guys to expedite that process.”

The Nerd Team will only have a few practices to get reacquainted, as many of the players have returned from previous seasons, before they face Happy Valley Hoopers, a Penn State alumni team that includes former UMass forward Trent Buttrick, at 4 p.m. Monday on ESPN2. It’s not more or less than many other teams have, but they plan to make the most of it.

“We’re looking for similar skill sets in the guys we were recruiting. We wanted good size at the guard and the wing position we wanted a ton of versatility. We wanted guys who could pass, dribble shoot at every position,” Goldsmith said. “I think we both really enjoy coaching high IQ players who have different skill sets and who can exploit defenses in different ways or can change how we play defense on the fly just by talking it out in a one minute timeout.”

Goldsmith and Toomey have alternated who receives the “head coach” and “general manager” titles on TBT’s website. Whoever is nominally the coach speaks in timeouts and draws up sets on the whiteboard, but they share both roles and responsibilities. It allows the two now-head coaches, Toomey was hired to lead Hartford in April, to bounce ideas off each other and noodle on basketball idiosyncrasies.

“In a lot of ways it’s a refresher for both of us. We get some fresh ideas and it improves both of us as coaches,” Goldsmith said. “We work really well together. We don’t care who gets the credit for this or that or whatever.”

They both deserve credit for melding so many players and personalities from schools that for the rest of the year are competing on and off the court. Harvard’s Kyle Casey and Yale’s Brandon Sherrod originally gave each other side eyes at practice like “We’re not supposed to be friends.” They quickly became close friends. Casey recently congratulated Sherrod on social media when he joined Stamford’s coaching staff.

“When you get them all together they’re all hustling in their own ways they’ve got different side gigs they’re trying to do, they’re trying to establish what they’re going to do once they basketball career ends,” Goldsmith said. “They’re really smart, really motivated people, well spoken. They just get it.”

Kyle Grabowski can be reached at kgrabowski@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter @kylegrbwsk.]]>