City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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MALVERN — It was quite the scene at Immaculata’s Alumnae Hall on Tuesday night.

The Mighty Macs’ bleachers, just nine rows deep, only on one sideline, were packed to the gills, a mixture of Immaculata students and the Philly basketball community, maybe 400 in total, no more able to fit in the seats. La Salle head coach Fran Dunphy came with a couple assistants, while West Chester head coach Damien Blair sat front row; most of the Phelps boys basketball squad came out too, and they weren’t the only high school hoopers in attendance.

That cross-section of the Philadelphia-area basketball community was all there for an unlikely contest, as Jayson Hyman’s Division III program played host to a Division I opponent, a University of Albany squad with no shortage of familiar faces of its own. And what they got might not have been the most aesthetically pleasing basketball game of all time, but an energetic crowd and two teams playing hard for 40 minutes made up for bunches of it.

“Ever since I got this job, I’ve been trying to build this program,” said Hyman, in his seventh season running the program he played for from 2006-08. “That’s one of the best experiences that a Division III coach can provide their team — we hosted a D-I, and we competed.”

The final result: Albany 74, Immaculata 47. That result, however, was just about the least important part of the evening, especially for a Mighty Macs program whose biggest goal is improving on an eight-win season from a year ago. Hyman was more concerned about making sure Albany wasn’t wasting its time by stopping by, even under unique circumstances. 

“I knew coming in, to win is a tall task,” he said. “I wanted to respectfully provide something for [Albany assistant coach] Bobby Jordan and them because yes, I know they want the game, but we want it too, but I don’t want them to just roll over. I hope they got something out of it.

“They’ve been good to us, and I appreciate that, I tried to make it comfortable for them here [...] and when we were in it for the first 10 minutes, I felt relief.”

No worries there for Jordan, a Roman Catholic grad, who is in his first year on the Albany bench; he was previously at Wagner as an assistant for three years. He got to see the Mighty Macs up close last season, when they traveled up to the Seahawks; that one was a 104-46 final. 

“Jay does a great job,” said Jordan, who’s serving as Albany’s head coach for the first five games while Dwayne Killings serves out a suspension. “His guys play hard, they’re relentless, they don’t care who they’re playing against. Our guys last year at Wagner, we played another D-I team right before that, and they thought that Immaculata came in and played a lot harder than the team we’d played the previous game.”

Former Roman Catholic guard Bobby Jordan (above) picked up his first official win as a college head coach. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

It was just the right set of circumstances that had Albany playing a true road game at its Division III opponent, a rarity indeed at the collegiate level. According to Immaculata’s media relations, it’s the only one of 130-plus D-I vs. D-III matchups this year to happen at the smaller school’s gym. The last time a Division I team played a regular-season game at a Division III school might have been in 2015, when Rowan hosted La Salle to honor John Giannini and his 1996 Final Four squad. A 2003 trip by Villanova out to Redlands might be the only other one in the last 20 years.

Albany’s home arena, SEFCU Arena, is closed for the season while it undergoes a multi-million-dollar renovation; the Great Danes are using nearby Hudson Valley Community College as a temporary home gym, but HVCC’s teams had home games scheduled for Tuesday night.

And since Immaculata hosted, it was D-III rules: no media timeouts, just five per squad. 

“(The uniqueness) is a big part of it,” Jordan said. “I think La Salle is the only other team I’ve heard of, I remember they went to Rowan at one point when John (Giannini) was there. The biggest thing, another reason why we played tonight is we have a bunch of guys from this region, from this area, and one of the promises we make in our program all the time is we’re going to take guys home to play in front of their friends, their families. That’s always not a guarantee necessarily with St. Joe’s, Temple, La Salle, Penn, Drexel, ‘Nova, so we saw this as an opportunity to get some of these guys home and play in front of their friends and families.”

(They’ll get two chances this year: Albany plays at St. Joe’s on Nov. 17).

The Great Danes featured a roster full of players who got to play at the elite levels of travel basketball, who hailed from as far away as Iowa and Florida, whose local players starred for Westtown (Ny’Mire Little) and Roman Catholic (Da’Kquan Davis) and Archbishop Carroll (Tairi Ketner), with former Carroll great Ryan Daly on the bench. Immaculata’s players are almost all from the Philadelphia area, a couple from South Jersey and a couple from Baltimore; their players once suited up for Kensington Creative & Performing Arts, at Carver Engineering & Sciences, at Cristo Rey.

That didn’t matter as they forced 24 turnovers and blocked four shots, coming in close to their opponents in fastbreak points (12-8) and points in the paint (34-24). Offensively it was a different story, but the Mighty Macs knew that would be the case coming in. Defense was the focus.

“I don’t think we had to talk about it much because that’s just how we play,” Coatesville grad and Immaculata sophomore John Proctor said. “We play hard, I mean we’re not just going to let anybody come in and roll over, especially in front of our home crowd. That’s just us.”

Immaculata proved from the outset it wasn’t going to surrender easily on its home court. The Mighty Macs scored first and forced one Albany turnover after another, trailing by single-digits at the break as the lead changed hands seven times in the opening 20 minutes. The gap slowly widened over the course of the second, Albany making sure the outcome was the expected one, even if it wasn’t nearly as easy as the respective size, athleticism and talent gap would typically lend itself to. 

The crowd stayed into it the entire way, one of the loudest cheers coming late in the game when Delco Christian product Jamal Hairston knocked down a pull-up 3-pointer with a minute to play. The IU cheerleaders “we are proud of you” chant as the teams went through the handshake line reflected the attitude of those in attendance.

Afterwards, Immaculata’s locker room was upbeat, encouraged by the effort.

“[We’re] optimistic,” Proctor said. “We hung in there for a good amount of time, we played good defense, we just offensively we struggled a little bit, but defensively I think we played well, and we’re optimistic for the season.”

The two programs will go their separate ways the rest of the season. Albany gets back to playing Division I opponents as it prepares for the America East Conference slate, starting with a rivalry game against Siena on Saturday. Immaculata has just a one-day turnaround before its first D-III game of the year, a visit from Washington College (Md.) on Wednesday night.

“I wanted to send a message that this is the level we need to play at, and [...] tonight we showed we can do it,” Hyman said. “We can play this way, and we can bottle that in, that’s what all our talking points are from now to tomorrow’s game — if we bottle that in and let it out for tomorrow’s game, I think we’ll be good. But we’ve got to let it out for an entire season.”