HISTORY IN THE TAKING
St. Francis is the oldest of NYC’s storied basketball programs, and now — along with all its other sports — it is no more
GLENN Braica figured the hard part was over. A grim truth about coaching college basketball in 2023, especially in the lower echelons of Division I, is this: every year, every spring, you must re-recruit players you’ve already successfully recruited, sometimes as often as each of the previous four years.
Often, it’s nothing personal: the new freedom of movement emblemized by the transfer portal allows players to ponder their options for any number of reasons. Every school is vulnerable to the basketball food chain: Atlantic 10 players get poached by the ACC/SEC/Big East; the MAAC gets poached by the Atlantic 10 and the MAC, the Northeast Conference gets poached by the MAAC and Conference USA.
“It really doesn’t matter if you like it or not,” Braica said Tuesday night. “It’s the way it is and so you have to do your job accordingly.”
And Braica thought he’d done that job. There were several members of his St. Francis Terriers who thought about putting their names in the portal, but those players also knew something else: St. Francis was 14-16 this year, but was playing its best ball at the end of the season.
In the NEC quarterfinals, the Terriers were down only 77-73 with just under two minutes to play against Fairleigh Dickinson; you might have heard, Fairleigh survived that test and went on to enjoy quite a threeweek basketball romp. And FDU’s success inspired many of the Terriers.
One by one they told Braica: “I’m coming back.”
“A lot of them,” he said, “saw what FDU did and said to themselves: ‘That could be us next year.’ And I mean I just couldn’t wait to get back at it. If these guys were gonna be all-in, I was going to be, even more so.”
Then, Monday morning, an anvil fell on Livingston Street in Brooklyn.
In a 9 a.m. meeting with all 21 of its varsity coaches, St. Francis’ administration informed them the athletic program was officially over as of the end of the spring semester. Not deemphasized. Not dropped, to Division III or NAIA. Eliminated. Gone. Forever.
“We knew there were challenges at the school,” Braica said, laughing because the immediate alternative was so unappealing. “And it’s a strange feeling. I can’t be mad at anybody. I can’t get angry at anything. It’s just real life.”
He paused.
“And sometimes real life just happens.” Real life now meant reversing the process. The last two days have been a blurry rush for Braica, who was now helping those same players navigate the portal, and actively hoping to seek landing spots for them. Five days ago he was praying the wolves of the sport would leave his players alone; now he courts them, hoping all of his players find chairs before the music stops.
“It’s not the way I expected this week to go,” Braica said.
Elsewhere in New York this week, another parochial university, St. John’s, made an enormous splash by throwing its arms around — and guaranteeing a king’s ransom to — Rick Pitino. St. John’s and St. Francis haven’t resided in the same stratus in New York college basketball for decades, since they were loosely-tied affiliates in the old Metropolitan New York Conference in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.
But St. Francis was playing basketball within five years of James Naismith nailing his peach basket to the gym balcony in Springfield, and won its first game over
Brown in 1896. They predate every other program in town by at least five-to-seven years. The “Boys from Brooklyn” had a few nice runs in the ’50s and ’60s, making the NIT a few times, losing a 71-70 thriller to Rick Barry and Miami at the Garden in 1963.
“So many great teams, so many great players and so much pride,” Braica said. “When we beat Miami [66-62 in the 2012-13 season opener] I heard from almost every player on that team and they all wanted to thank the guys for finally helping them get even on Rick.”
More laughter, a spasm of sweet to camouflage the sour.
“This school, it’s all about Brooklyn,” he said. “When we started having success here and people would kid me about wanting more, more, more I’d always tell them: ‘Whoa, we’re not the Yankees, we’re the Brooklyn Dodgers: blue-collar lunch-pail guys.’ This school has always been that for its students, mostly first-generation, a lot of them the first in their families to ever go to college. You could root for a school like that.”
A few years ago, the Terriers made a memorable run to the NEC title game, trying to reduce by one the group (which now includes only Army, William & Mary and The Citadel) of schools who’ve played D-I hoops since the NCAA Tournament was founded in 1939 who never earned a spot in the bracket. Across three deafening nights in Pope Complex, the old Brooklyn Heights campus’ gym, the Terriers beat LIU and St. Francis (Pa.) before falling three points shy against Robert Morris.
“You were there,” Braica said. “Have you ever heard a louder place?”
I was there. And I have not. My ears rang for five days afterward.
“We may have bent some fire codes those nights,” he said.
Soon enough, after he’s done helping his players, Braica will have to do as the other 20 ex-Terriers coaches must: find a new job. Braica is still only 58 years old. He has a lot of good coaching years left.
“I’m a coach,” he said. “It’s what I am. It’s what I’ll be.”
Sunday, he was already dreaming about Oct. 15, and the start of a new season. By Monday, he found out the hardest truth there is: There is no next season. No more basketball at St. Francis of Brooklyn, the oldest of all New York basketball schools. No more games at all.