NJIT, Nation's Only Independent, Seeks a Conference to Call Home

It’s not often that David gets a victory lap after slaying Goliath, but in the case of the New Jersey Institute of Technology men’s basketball team—who last Saturday stunned the college basket world by beating then 17th-ranked Michigan in Ann Arbor—a 68-66 win over St. Francis Brooklyn earlier this week at the Fleisher Athletic Center in Newark is as good as it gets.

“The Michigan win was tremendous and I was so happy for our guys,” said NJIT head coach Jim Engels, “but honestly the best moment I’ve had so far as a head coach was to get a win at home against a really good St. Francis team. We beat them in a really close game and the place was packed.”

“That’s what I’ll remember—the environment, the school coming together since we beat Michigan. That’s something that you can’t recreate.”

Besting the Wolverines, which the past two years advanced deep in the NCAA Men’s tournament, including dropping the 2013 final to Louisville, gave NJIT instant credibility. But sustaining that momentum—especially when your school does not have a conference affiliation—remains an ongoing challenge for the Highlanders.

“The only independent in the country just beat a ranked team like Michigan.” Engles said by telephone this week. “[That] puts us in the conversation again and hopefully people take notice and say ‘well a decent team, good academic school… why aren’t they in a league?’”

As the nation’s only in Division I independent the past two seasons, NJIT has been in a lonely place. Not that being an independent has hampered Engles’s ability to recruit talented players.

Assembling a young, disciplined team that includes sophomore Damon Lynn, junior college transfer Winfield Willis, and senior captain Ky Howard, Engles—who does all his team’s scheduling, as he did in previous stops as an assistant at Wagner, Rider and Columbia—has the Highlanders operating at a high level despite having to craft a schedule that extends through other program’s conference schedules.

“You know, [scheduling] is the biggest challenge and you have to be pretty creative with it,” said Engles, who listed the Ivy League, the Mid-Eastern Atlantic Conference (MEAC), America East and the Northeast Conference (NEC) as willing partners in his scheduling adventure.

“We’ve been lucky to put it together. My problem has been that some of these leagues might not allow their teams to play in January and February. If that happens I have no options.”

Being a part of a conference, which the Highlanders experienced for four years as members of the Great Western Conference until it dissolved in 2012, will clearly benefit NJIT. Engles said that there are some obvious choices.

“The first two that come to mind are the Northeast Conference and the America East Conference just because of location and the similarity of schools and the similarity of competition that we play.”

The Highlanders will play four NEC teams this season, including three over a 10-day span. There’s been talk of NJIT joining the NEC before; according to Ralph Ventre, Northeast Conference Director of Communications, NJIT officially applied for membership in 2007, but did not receive the required number of votes for entry.

In 2013 Monmouth and Quinnipiac both left the conference for the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC), generating recent speculation that now was the Highlanders’ chance to join. Earlier this week NEC Commissioner Noreen Morris threw cold water—for now—on that possibility

“At this point in time the NEC is very happy with the current composition of our 10-member alignment and as such we are not in active discussions to solicit new members,” Morris said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal.

Glenn Braica, St. Francis Brooklyn head coach, is also comfortable with the NEC’s current alignment.

“The thing I do like is that the league went to a balanced schedule [last season after the departure of Monmouth and Quinnipiac.] so I think it’s fairer now than it was in the past,” Braica said.

The Terrier coach, whose team opened in Miami last season and beat the heavily favored Hurricanes 66-62 in overtime, understands exactly what it’s like to capture an upset win on the road.

“Every game brings different challenges,” said Braica, whose team has started off slowly (2-6) this season. “You have to deal with different atmospheres, different styles of play, there’s travel involved. It’s very hard to sustain the momentum especially after you beat a Top-20 team.“

NJIT (4-6) travels to Brooklyn to face LIU (1-6) tomorrow in the Steinberg Wellness Center at 4 p.m., a game that Coach Engles once dreaded but now clearly relishes.

“These are really tough games,” Engles said about playing the Blackbirds, who have beaten the Highlanders in all three match-ups between the two teams. “Our players know a lot of their players, so they’ve become a natural rival.”

NJIT first played LIU when Jim Ferry was coach and the Blackbirds were one of the area’s strongest programs. Ferry, needing to fill out his schedule, asked Engles for a non-conference game. Engles initially balked, because, as he said on Friday, “LIU was really, really good.” Luckily for local fans, the NJIT coach came around, and his team has become a challenger that the Blackbirds cannot take lightly.

In the ultimate game of payback, Ferry—who left LIU in 2012 to take the head coaching job at Dusquesne— scheduled NJIT for a home game earlier this year. The Highlanders traveled to Pittsburgh in November and shocked the Dukes, winning 84-81.

Beating the Wolverines is what most casual basketball fans will associate with the Highlanders but Engles, now in his seventh season at NJIT, hopes that signature win will be a stepping stone to much bigger things.

“When you have a game like that the season ends, you get to enjoy it for the rest of the year. Normally that’s in your conference tournament [or] the NCAA tournament,” he said.

“The next step, actually will be the day we get in a conference tournament. That would be like winning the national championship.”

PHOTO CAPTION: NJIT players celebrate incredible win over Michigan in Ann Arbor
PHOTO CREDIT: New Jersey Institute of Technology Athletics