City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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The funny thing about Rowan’s 1996 Division III national championship men’s basketball team, according to Joe Cassidy, is that it wasn’t even the school’s best.

Nor were the 1993 and 1995 squads, both NCAA Final Four participants.

No, he said, that would be the 1994 group, which was knocked out in triple overtime in the Sweet 16.

“Everyone on the staff will say it, and it will drive the players nuts,” said Cassidy, now the team’s head coach and an assistant for all the years mentioned above. “The ’94 team was the best team we ever had.”

But it’s the 1996 version who won it all, and that’s the team that’s being celebrated on Saturday with a unique event, as La Salle travels to Glassboro, N.J., for a regular-season game; tip-off is at 3 PM.

Explorers head coach John Giannini was Cassidy’s boss during that time, leading the New Jersey institution’s program during an impressive seven-year run before departing for a Division I job in Maine following that championship. Now he’s bringing his team back to the gym that set him on his path towards a Sweet 16 run in the Division I tournament in 2013 and a successful 11-year run at La Salle.

The game came to fruition during the offseason, when Giannini was talking with Rowan alum and supporter Dr. Marque Allen about how to properly honor the 20th anniversary of the championship. He realized he had an open date on the schedule, and was open to making the almost unheard-of trip to take a Division I program onto a Division III court.

“Immediately I knew it’d be an event because of the uniqueness of it,” Giannini said, and he was right. “The only game I got media requests to talk about in the offseason was the Rowan game.”

Cassidy served as Giannini's assistant for five seasons prior to taking over the program following his former boss's departure for the D-I landscape, and is now entering his 20th year at the helm of the program.

The two remain close friends, both still living in Mullica Hill (N.J.). Though it's difficult for them to spend much time together during the season, but when the recruiting calendar allows the two of them frequently get together to talk about life--and, of course, basketball.

“We say we’re going to go out to dinner for an hour,” Cassidy said, “and four hours later we’re doing low post moves and people are looking at us like ‘What are they doing?’”

Though they’ll have the home-court advantage and certainly the crowd on their side, Cassidy and the Profs know that they have a big task ahead of them in terms of pulling of what would be a monumental upset of the Atlantic 10 program.

Division II programs pull off the D-I upset fairly often. But a D-III school, without any athletic scholarships, starting two freshmen in the backcourt against one of the country’s leading scorers, is a tall task indeed.

“Obviously it’s a stretch any time a Division III goes up against a Division I in terms of talent and size and everything else,” Cassidy said. “I know our players are looking forward to it a lot, and we’re looking forward to it a lot. But we have to treat it like any other game.”

That, however, it most certainly is not.

After all, how often do you hear a coach pumping up the opposing school before a game?

“I wanted to let people know who aren’t like us and aren’t in higher education just what an unbelievable place it is,” Giannini said. “It’s nothing but 1,000 percent positive. It’s a great story and it’s already accomplishing what we want to do. We want a packed house and a great game and a great day for Rowan and La Salle.”