HALF a college hoops season remains, yet the schools surrounding the game’s mecca appear bound for a familiar fate.
Once again, stories like Hofstra’s 10-1 start, St. John’s Holiday Festival victory and Manhattan’s win at then-unbeaten Wichita State are scarce. So come early March, more fans will be praying for a .500 finish instead of an NCAA bid.
There’s promise this winter, though, new reasons to think things may swing in the coming seasons. In this case, hope is still a teenager, carries the upperclassmen’s bags and, most importantly, provides a scoring punch at nearly every local school.
In this case, hope is a freshman.
Fordham and Manhattan each started three of them in home games last week. Ten days ago, with then-No. 17 North Carolina State in town, St. John’s started frosh Cedric Jackson, Dexter Gray and Eugene Lawrence and left with a 63-45 triumph and a Holiday Festival title.
And wait until tomorrow, when Wagner meets Long Island for the second time this season. Among the 17 regular likely to see action at the Schwartz Center, 13 will be freshmen or sophomores for two of the nation’s youngest teams.
“They’re just like us,” LIU coach Jim Ferry said in a recent interview. “It’s who we have to be. We’re starting to get our players into the program, and they’re getting valuable experience.”
Both the Blackbirds (4-7) and the Seahawks (1-11) continue to rebuild under relatively new coaches. The same goes for Fordham (5-8), which added Marcus Stout to regular starters Kevin Anderson and St. John’s Prep grad Bryant Dunston.
Coach Dereck Whittenburg has few other options, thanks to a lack of scholarship players present when he arrived 20 months ago. Up the road at Manhattan (6-4), Bobby Gonzalez has placed first-year players over talented veterans with NCAA tournament appearances in their pasts.
Rice alum Arturo Dubois gives the team its lone big body, and he excels for the few minutes he’s not saddled with foul trouble. But classmate C.J. Anderson, who’s scored in double figures in eight of the Jaspers’ 10 games, bumped junior Mike Konovelchick to the bench.
Wednesday against North Dakota State, freshman Jeff Xavier, whom Gonzalez criticized for his defense in November, started, as three-year letterwinner Kenny Minor sat.
“There are no problems on this team with it,” Goznalez said. “The guys here know that priority No. 1 is winning, and we’re going to use the players we need to do that. Mike understands, Kenny understands, everybody understands that.”
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A semester after his expulsion from Hofstra, Kenny Adeleke left the University of Hartford basketball team for what university officials called “personal reasons.”
Scheduled to sit this year per NCAA transfer regulation, Adeleke clashed with his teammates and coaching staff and sporadically attended class, local hoops sources said.
When he left Long Island after violating school rules in a September off-campus altercation, folks around the Pride called the move “addition by subtraction.” Hofstra won 10 of 11 since the dismissal – Hartford can only hope for a similar luck.
NCAA rules also say Adeleke, a first-team All-Colonial Athletic Associations selection last season, can restart his college career only at Hartford. His next move is likely to try to score a pro contract overseas or in an American minor league.