Sports

Fordham knows home court is key to taking next step

It has been a long 20 years for the Fordham Rams.

Since the 1991-92 squad made the NCAA tournament, the men’s basketball program has gone through an almost incomprehensible stretch of misery. The program has just one winning season during that timeframe, and has finished the year with single-digit win totals nine times — including the last three years in a row.

But as he enters his second year at the helm, coach Tom Pecora is starting to see the program begin to take steps to finally get things turned around.

“I definitely think so,” Pecora said before the Rams kicked off their season with “Midnight Madness” last night at Rose Hill Gym. “Now, the next step in that process is, obviously, us winning games at home. That’s how you build it.

“The first thing you do when you’re building a program is you learn to win at home, and you become a winning team on our home court. If we’re going to find some wins this year in the Atlantic 10, they’re going to be here at Rose Hill Gym.”

You could see the program begin to take steps in the right direction last year. The Rams pulled off a stunning, come-from-behind 84-81 win over St. John’s at home last December, and finally ended a 40-game conference winless streak when they defeated Massachusetts in their final game of the season.

But it still could be another season before the program truly begins to turn itself around. Although Pecora has increased the talent level on the roster, Fordham (7-21, 1-15 in the A-10 last season) enters the season with seven freshman and four sophomores. That leaves the Rams with one of the conference’s youngest teams, a major reason why it was a near unanimous pick to finish at the bottom of the A-10 in its preseason poll.

“I think a lot of guys in our league probably said, ‘I’ll put Fordham last this year, because next year they won’t be, after these young players mature,’ ” Pecora said. “Now, I think they’re going to mature quicker than people think, but time will tell.

“You’ve got to walk before you can run. . . . I’m not naive to that. We’re going to play these young guys, and let them play through their mistakes and get better.”

Along with those young players, Fordham again will rely heavily on junior Chris Gaston. The forward has been one of the program’s few bright spots over the last two seasons. He averaged 15.9 points and 11.3 rebounds per game last year, and has led the A-10 in rebounding in each of his first two years with the Rams.

“For me, I have to go out there every day and teach the young guys on a daily basis what it means to compete in the A-10,” said Gaston, a preseason second-team all-conference selection. “There’s a whole bunch of good teams, and you’ve got to know from the start that everybody’s good, and we’ve got to teach them that you have to compete from day one.”

One of the young players who is expected to have an immediate impact is Devon “Fatty” McMillan. The 5-foot-10 point guard from Brooklyn already has made an impression on his new teammates.

“When we play in open gym, he’s trying to go up and dunk on people,” Gaston said, laughing. “Just the way he plays . . . he plays like he’s been doing it for years. He’s going to be a big help for us this year.”

When Fordham convinced Pecora to leave Hofstra and take on the job of rebuilding the Rams’ program, part of what convinced him to come to Rose Hill was a commitment to improving the team’s facilities. That transformation is already in the works, as the school is in the midst of building a new film room and offices for the program, and it has already renovated the team’s locker room.

But improving the facilities only will go so far to improve the outlook of the program. The only way to truly reverse the two decades of frustration the program has endured is to finally bring some winning basketball back to Rose Hill.

“That’s behind us,” Pecora said. “Now it’s about building something, being excited about it and moving forward.”

tbontemps@nypost.com