For Brooklyn’s ASA, like all JUCOs, duties doubled on big day
BROOKLYN, N.Y. Down here on the east side of Lawrence Street, on the one city block between Fulton and Willoughby, you’ll find a Greek diner, a pizza place, a fried chicken spot and three Chinese restaurants, the latter side by side in a row. That in itself doesn’t make this strip unique; it makes it Brooklyn.
Across the street, on the other hand, stands an outlier. Tucked among the eateries, office buildings and high-priced residential properties is ASA College, a forprofit junior college distinguished among its peers for its commitment to athletics: It houses the only JUCO football program in New York City.
“It’s unique from a college perspective,” said first-year head coach Joe Osovet, who previously held the same position at Nassau Community College on Long Island. “You’re in the heart of Brooklyn. This is four buildings in downtown Brooklyn that’s a hidden gem.
“Once the word gets out, with all the resources we have in place, we can win here.”
The ASA College Avengers practice on the Parade Ground at Prospect Park, a 15-minute bus ride from downtown Brooklyn. They split their home games between the borough’s Lincoln High School and MCU Park, the summertime home of the New York Mets’ Class A affiliate.
Most of the team is housed in an athletes-only dormitory on Atlantic Avenue, the main strip cutting through downtown Brooklyn, sandwiched by a high-end French restaurant on one side and a twostory showroom on the other.
A typical day begins at 7:30 a.m., as the buses pull up to shuttle the team to practice, and continues here, on Lawrence Street, with position meetings and class — a schedule that mirrors the same at majorcollege football programs across the country, generally speaking: practice and meetings, followed by class, followed by homework, then repeat.
And that’s where the similarities end. This is junior college football, not the Football Bowl Subdivision; the levels share the basics but little else. Take the players, for instance, who attend ASA for two reasons: 1) to become academically eligible for a four-year school, or 2) for the shot at increasing their recruiting profile.
“We all have the same desire and motivation,” offensive lineman Thomas Lopez said. “This is a business. Literally, we’re playing to get offers. When you’re here, of course you want to get out, you’re thinking about that. We’re more focused on that, because if we do that we know we’re going to get to where we want to be.”
Added associate athletics director Steve Bernath, “They’re all striving for the same sort of thing.”
This push and pull of junior college football might be seen best in one of ASA football’s repeated messages: We want rings on our fingers, meaning a Northeast Football Conference championship, and diplomas in our hands, coaches say.
At ASA and other JUCO programs across the country, this dual purpose — balancing the act of winning games with ensuring that student-athletes earn their associate degrees on time — is never more evident than on national signing day.
For major-college football programs in the FBS, for example, signing day is a net gain: Coaches are only bringing in talent, selecting up to 25 or more players worthy of a football scholarship to add to their current collections. For junior college programs, however, it’s a two-way street: ASA must sign its own crop of players while finding landing spots for its graduated class — essentially doing twice the work of its four-year college peers.
“It’s a tougher place to recruit than at those Power Five conferences,” Osovet said. “You have to do all of your evaluating, one. Two, you’re not only recruiting kids into your program, but the lifeline or the bloodline is that you’ve got to make sure you’re getting kids out to marquee places.”
For much of the year, Osovet and his staff devote their off-field time to finding spots for their current graduating class. Since its debut in 2009, the program has sent student-athletes to every FBS conference, with this recruiting cycle no different: ASA graduates are set to play for Missouri, Indiana and Pittsburgh, among others.
In recent weeks, the program has played host to coaches from Mississippi State, Ohio State, Rutgers, Memphis and Florida State. In most cases, these coaches were inquiring about ASA’s 2018 class, headlined by Lopez and Badara Traore, a 6-8 left tackle who has scholarship offers from much of college football’s elite.
But in the homestretch to signing day, the ASA staff must address its own recruiting efforts. As at FBS schools, the staff has a recruiting board — a position-byposition list of potential recruits graded on a scale of 1-5, all believed to be junior college candidates as a result of struggling to meet NCAA eligibility standards.
“It’s unique that we’re here in Brooklyn and have many things at our fingertips that we can use as a recruiting tool,” said running backs coach Jason Depew, who doubles as the Avengers’ director of football operations. “You recruit all the way up until camp starts. But the meat-and-potatoes part of the recruiting thing is for the next two weeks.”
The plan is to sign between 15 and 23 prospects on signing day, holding another handful of scholarships in reserve for what coaches call the second wave of recruiting, a period beginning later in February as recruits who signed with four-year colleges discover they failed to become academically eligible.
At a recent recruiting weekend, ASA coaches played host to 25 of the top prospects on their board, with nearly three in four holding FBS offers, shuttling this group on a bus tour of the area before returning to Lawrence Street for an academics-themed presentation. They unveiled a hashtag: #FenceInTheBigApple.
“We’re going to sell that we can get you out in 15 months,” Osovet said. “We’re going to sell the exposure and recruiting aspect and that you’re going to play a national schedule. So there’s exposure in terms of getting yourself out there to get a Power Five offer.”
It’s a hard sell, and the pitch never stops. FBS coaches recruit and recruit, but in only one direction: inward. At ASA, coaches recruit other programs as much as their own prospects, sending out as many players as they eventually take in — making signing day for this junior college program, as with others, as much about who leaves as who arrives.
“The key to winning at a junior college is having a support staff that will stress academics, having an academic plan in place,” Osovet said, “because it’s all about graduating kids. Can you get your kids out in time?”
“We’re going to sell that we can get you out in 15 months. ... There’s exposure in terms of getting yourself out there to get a Power Five offer.” ASA College coach Joe Osovet