READY TO SHOCK
Hernandez out to put LIU Brooklyn on the map
WHEN you earn your invitation to the Big Dance and you are New York City’s team, your legs don’t turn to jelly when you draw Radford on Tuesday night in Dayton ... and your knees don’t even knock when you learn that Villanova will be waiting for yo u in Pittsburgh on Thursday should you survive and advance.
“I want to pretty much put us on the map ,” Joel Hernandez was saying Sunday night in an office outside the LIU Brooklyn Wellness Center.
“I feel like not a lot of people in America know about us. I pretty much want to shock everyone and show them that we’re a good team, we can compete with any of the best teams out there.” Shock the world? “Yeah.” Hernandez is a 6-foot-3 redshirt senior guard from Teaneck, N.J. and the best player on a fearless Blackbirds team that believes it is peaking at the right time.
For Hernandez, this is a moment to treasure, because to get here, he was forced more than once to stop at the intersection of Devastation Drive and Heartbreak Highway.
There was a dislocated thumb suffered in the 2016 opener that cost him the season.
“I just looked a titan d I couldn’t look at it, like I had to look away really quickly,” Hernandez said. “So then after that, we went to the hospital and they did X-rays and stuff like that. And then the next day they let me know that I was gonna have to get surgery. “I was in class so I just went outside the class and I started crying ’cause I was so devastated ’cause I didn’t want to sit out that year.”
It is why, after carrying the Blackbirds to their NEC Tournament upset of Wagner with a dominant 32-point performance, he tweeted:
I FAILED, I CRIED, I WON, I LOST, I PRAYED, I PUSHED, I WORRIED, I LEARNED, I DISAPPOINTED, BUT I NEVER QUIT!!
“Ever since my freshman year, I’ve been having a lot of up-anddown emotions ,” Hernandez said. “I feel like freshman year ... I shoulda played a lot more. I was frustrated at times, but I still stayed the course. I stayed believ- ing in God, having faith in God.
“Even last year, when I got hurt, I was so devastated I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was mad ’cause that summer before I put in so much hard work getting ready for the season and I felt like all that went to waste when I got injured and I couldn’t play. So for the first couple of months I was really sad, but with the help of my family, they really taught me just keep faith in God and now look at me, I’m a champion now. So I feel like everything happens for a reason.”
But some things that happen, force you to struggle to f ind a reason.
Calvin Chamberlain worked with John Hernandez, Joel’ s father. Joel met him when he was 8 or 9. He became Joel’s godfather.
“He did a good job of putting the basketball in my hands at an early age when my dad wasn’t able to,” Hernandez said.
“Always positive, always wanted to look out for somebody, it didn’t matter who it was, not just me, it could have been a random person on the street, he just had a good heart,” Hernandez said. “He always wanted to make sure my head was on straight. He didn’t even really care about the basketball, he just wanted me to use basketball to get an education. When I signed to LIU it was very important to me, ’ cause I wanted to get an education for him, basically that’s what he wanted me to do.”
Chamberlain suffered a fatal heart attack in his sleep when Hernandez was a freshman at Teaneck High School. Hernandez will carry the memory of his godfather to Dayton with him.
“He would be proud,” Hernandez said.
His father, a bank manager, helped drive his son to this dream season.
“My dad would take me to the gym every day before he would go to work,” Hernandez said. “So we would have to go at 5 in the morning so he could have time to get ready and go to work. So it would be just me and my dad in the gym in the morning. I just wanted to make sure I was prepared for this upcoming season the best way possible. I’m glad it paid off.” Hernandez typifies this team. “On the court I’m hungry,” he said. “I feel like I have stuff to prove so when I get on the court I like to show people what I’m capable of doing. Just in case I had any doubters out there, I just want to prove them wrong and stuff like that.”
Now go and shock the world.