SEATTLE — It would be difficult to find two more unlikely stars than Seth Tuttle and Larry Nance Jr., the 6-foot-8 senior forwards who will square off Friday during a second-round matchup in the NCAA Tournament.
Northern Iowa’s Tuttle is from tiny Sheffield, Iowa, population 1,168, and received little recruiting attention in high school.
As Tuttle said, “People an hour away from my hometown don’t know where my hometown is.” (It’s near the Iowa-Minnesota border.)
Wyoming’s Nance is the son of a former NBA player and was overlooked by recruiters because of his battle with Crohn’s disease, which led him to play only one year of high school basketball.
“At that point, I never really thought I would be sitting here with these guys,” Nance said Thursday during interviews at KeyArena.
Both persevered to not only be their teams’ best players, but also inspirational leaders. Tuttle (15.3 points per game) is the only Northern Iowa scorer to average in double figures and also leads his team in rebounding and assists. Nance, an all-Mountain West selection, leads Wyoming in scoring (16.1).
“The two guys are very similar,” Northern Iowa coach Ben Jacobson said. “If you want to talk about who is a little more athletic or a little less, or who is more skilled or less — they’re so close that it’s a real thin dividing line.
“They will catch the ball on the 3-point line and shoot it if they have some room. They will drive it from that spot. They’re both pretty good passers, and they’re both pretty good scoring on the block. I don’t see a lot of differences.”
Although Tuttle played high school ball at the Class 2A level, Jacobson was intrigued with his potential. Tuttle said he’s not sure he would have gotten noticed had he not played on one of Iowa’s top AAU teams during the summer.
“Seth always had a lot of versatility to his game,” Jacobson recalled of recruiting Tuttle. “When we watched him in high school, he wasn’t a big scorer. But he was really active. For us, that size and mobility makes for a really good prospect, a prospect that you hope develops into an all-conference type of guy.”
Wyoming coach Larry Shyatt, meanwhile, got a heads up about Nance. He got to know Larry Nance Sr. during his coaching days at Clemson, when the basketball program would invite former Tigers stars back to campus. A day after Shyatt returned to Wyoming as coach in the spring of 2011, he received a call from a mutual friend who said Nance Jr. was a late bloomer who was being overlooked by recruiters. Shyatt called Nance Sr. and arranged a visit to their home in the Akron, Ohio, area.
It was no surprise that Nance received offers only from programs in the Mid-American Conference. Before being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in high school, Nance was only 6 feet tall and did not have the stamina to excel in sports. After being put on a drug to treat the disease, a chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, Nance gained 12 pounds within a week. And during the next 14 months, he grew 7 inches.
“After going through all that (battling the disease) and what we have been through together as a team for the past three, four years, I wouldn’t trade that,” Nance said. “I wouldn’t take any of that back. This is an awesome feeling and I’m happy to be here.”
