Remember Dunk City? One of the leading scorers on that Sweet 16 team is now a homeowner in Muncie.
Ryan O'Gara|The Star Press
MUNCIE, Ind. — It was a few weeks after he and his teammates at Florida Golf Coast became a national story, and a few people recognized him from all of the dunks. If you’ve followed the NCAA Tournament even casually over the last decade, you probably remember "Dunk City."
And so in the spring of 2013 at the Buffalo Wild Wings on McGalliard Rd., five or six guys approached Chase Fieler and asked to take a picture. He had been all over TV that month, throwing down dunk after dunk as Florida Gulf Coast upset No. 2 seed Georgetown and then No. 7 seed San Diego State to become the first No. 15 seed to ever reach the Sweet 16.
Fast forward six years, Fieler is now a Muncie resident. He remembers the bars like Dill Street and Locker Room that no longer exist, he knows the city’s obsession with Pizza King (even if he doesn’t quite understand it, except for the breadsticks) and he trains in the offseason at Ball State.
So how did a March Madness hero become a Muncie resident? It’s a love story that started at Florida Gulf Coast and endures to this day as his wife and one-year-old sonmakeregular trips across the Atlantic Ocean to balance her Ball State classes and Chase's professional career in Belgium.
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Whitney Masters arrived at Florida Gulf Coast in 2011 after starring for the Wapahani volleyball team. She lived in a co-ed dorm her freshman year, and she soon met the tall basketball player who lived across the hall. Chase Fieler was a year older. By Christmas, they had started dating, and they’ve been together ever since, marrying in 2017.
Not many had heard of Florida Gulf Coast University, an Atlantic Sun school with an enrollment of about 14,000, before the 2013 NCAA Tournament, but they became a household name very quickly. The school first admitted students in 1997 and was only in its second year as a Division I program.
It wasn’t just that they beat Georgetown, which featured No. 3 overall pick Otto Porter. It was the way they did it. Florida Gulf Coast threw down highlight-reel dunk after highlight-reel dunk, thus the nickname "Dunk City." And Fieler was throwing most of them down, including perhaps the most iconic one of them all – an alley-oop that he finished one-handed against Georgetown. In fact, if you go to Fieler’s bio on the Florida Gulf Coast website, the first note is that he finished his career with 98 dunks.
Whitney didn’t get to go to the games because of her volleyball schedule, so she watched Chase on TV as he became an overnight celebrity.
"From my perspective," Whitney says, "whenever someone would ask what college I went to, it was always, ‘What college is that?’ … ‘Oh, I’ve never heard of it.’ It’s not that I was embarrassed by it, but I always felt like I had to explain it. And then after that, when people asked me what school I went to, it was, ‘That’s awesome!’
"On campus, the basketball team went from being no-names to being stopped on their way to class for autographs."
And every year around this time, the memories start coming back, like about how the team won an ESPY for best upset. Fieler’s dunk is in a lot of the montages about great moments of the NCAA Tournament.
"Any time March gets close, I start seeing a lot of memories pop up," says Chase, who was the third-leading scorer on that team at 12.1 points per game. "It’s always exciting for me because it’s probably the greatest basketball moment of my life. To relive that and see people still talking about it, it brings back a sense of pride that we did that no one can ever take away."
In the aftermath of that NCAA Tournament, though, the two figured out how to navigate each of their dreams. And they decided the best home base would be Muncie.
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Whitney is like most female athletes in this area in that she gravitated toward volleyball. She played Munciana and had coaches at Wapahani like Mike Lingenfelter, Ginger Lingenfelter and Stephanie Bloom. She lived here her whole life, but Chase, who grew up in Athens, Ohio,has caught on quickly.
"Now I mess with her all the time that I know Muncie as well as she does," he says with a laugh. "She still uses her GPS to find certain places."
The two bought a house on the north side of Muncie last year, and they live in it together for about two months out of the year. Chase, now 26, is in his fifth season of professional ball overseas (that includes Spain, Netherlands and Belgium), so he is playing for close to 10 months out of the year, and Whitney is right there with him. She has about a year left in her nurse practitioner program with Ball State, which she does primarily online. Every six weeks or so, she’ll come back to Muncie with Daxton for a few weeks for work she has to do in-person.
But mostly, Muncie has become a place of relaxation for Chase and Whitney. They don’t know how long Chase will continue playing, and they will eventually have to decide where the best place for them to both live out their dreams. Chase wants to open a facility like Munciana that encompasses all sports, and Whitney wants to help people through nursing. That may mean eventually returning to Ft. Myers.
But for this stage of their lives, Muncie is a great spot.
"Muncie is the perfect size for both of us," Chase says. "We don’t like big cities, but we like a certain amount of stuff we can do. We have every store we would need, but it’s still pretty rural with farmland. We’re not crowded by people.
"It’s the best of both worlds for us."
Ryan O’Gara covers Ball State and East Central Indiana high schools at the Star Press. Contact him at (765) 213-5829, rogara@muncie.gannett.com or @RyanOGara.
