Team preview: Oakland

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(Information in this team report is as of October 1.)

In a span of 1.3 seconds last March, life as Greg Kampe knew it changed forever.

That's when Pierre Dukes drained a three-pointer in the Mid-Continent Conference Tournament championship game to upset top-seeded Oral Roberts and send Oakland to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history.

Twenty-one years of relentless devotion to a single school all came to fruition for Kampe. Finally, the coach that brought this program from Division II to Division I to the Big Dance was in the national spotlight.

"For 10 days, we were the Cinderella team," Kampe said. "It was non-stop for 24 hours talking to people across the world. & After Alabama A&M [the NCAA Tournament play-in game], I was doing a show somewhere every 15 minutes from 5 a.m. [on]. It was just unbelievable."

Kampe wasn't the only one benefiting from the fantasy finish.

"We sold more T-shirts in one week then we did in three years," he said.

All of this hardly seemed fathomable, let alone possible a few months before.

"We had a tough time [early], with three freshmen playing," Kampe said. "We just couldn't seem to finish [games]."

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