Jim Engles has never taken a win for granted. Now, he’ll never take a schedule for granted, either.
Following another unbearable season of conference realignment — resulting in the disintegration of the Great West Conference — the New Jersey Institute of Technology found itself as the only team among 351 Division I basketball programs without a home.
Just a few months after claiming their first conference crown in their first winning season, the Highlanders were on their own. And the nation’s only independent team was left scrambling to find opponents.
“Everybody was like, ‘How are you going to put a schedule together?’ and the more everybody kept saying that to me, I got really spooked,” said the sixth-year coach. “I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ People were calling me, anybody, I was like, ‘All right, let’s play.’ There was no, ‘Is this team too good for my team at this point? Do we match up correctly with this team? What are the dates?’ When I got to the end, I was like, ‘I can’t believe I just did this.’ It was ridiculous.”
In retrospect, Engles wishes he had spaced the games out better, but he had little leverage and even less time. So, the season opened with five games in 12 days — all on the road — stretching from Louisiana to Maine.
Without his top three scorers from last season, Engles had no expectations. Then, the unexpected happened. His team jumped out to its best start in school history, winning six of its first 10 games, with underclassmen representing its top nine scorers.
“I was really worried going into the year,” Engles said this week following a team practice, on his way to coach his 12-year-old daughter’s team. “With a young team, if we get bombed [early] I don’t know if we ever get the season started. And then we go on and win three of the [first five] and I was almost shocked.”
Following Saturday’s game against Holy Cross, NJIT will play eight of the next nine games away from Newark, in a season that will take the Highlanders to 11 different states. But no one on the team seems to mind. It’s the beauty, Engles says, of “youthful naïveté.”
“They don’t know any better,” he said. “They think traveling is cool right now. I think they like staying in the hotels, and hanging out and if that’s the way they want to handle it, I’m good with it. That will go away, so we just have to take advantage of it while they want to do it.”
For a team that has risen to respectability from the hopelessness of their infamous 51-game losing streak, there is no possibility of a magical three-day run in March that could lead to an NCAA Tournament berth. But there is hope for a postseason tournament — the CollegeInsider.com Tournament.
“That’s kind of the carrot we’re working towards,” Engles said. “I wouldn’t have said that at the beginning of the season, but now I think that’s what we need to challenge ourselves with.”
The immediate challenges are nothing when compared with the long-term necessity to gain entry to a conference. Engles scheduled several games with teams from the Northeast Conference and the America East, hoping to develop familiarity and relationships with the school’s two most likely landing places.
NJIT is adding a lacrosse team — a near-requirement of both conferences — and the school is in discussions to build a new $85 million-$100 million athletic facility on its Newark campus. Athletic Director Lenny Kaplan said the school is looking at financing options and an architect will be selected in January, with the Prudential Center available to host home games while construction takes place.
“I don’t know what we’re not doing right now,” Kaplan said. “I wish someone would tell me.”
With more anticipated conference switching among mid-major programs, NJIT believes it is positioned perfectly to step into an open slot.
The greatest frustration comes from the lack of definitive guidelines. Kaplan said that though the school is encouraged to take multiple steps, it will not necessarily equal a conference invitation.
But the laughingstock days are long behind. There is no question NJIT belongs.
“Once we get into a league, we have a lot of potential,” Engles said. “We’ve been competitive and gotten lucky, obviously. We’ve recruited some kids that people have passed on, but we need to get in a league in order to attract [size]. The best teams, they have [size] and we don’t have that right now. That’s the hardest thing to get when you’re trying to sell what we’re trying to sell. We need to get in a league for us to continue our progress.”