Posted on: Friday, March 19, 2004
NIT takes long road to N.Y.
| • | UH extends its invitation |
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
The temperatures were in the low 20s and there were 15 inches of snow on the ground in up-state New York when the Niagara University men's basketball team beat Troy State Wednesday night.
So, when the media asked about being just a game away from going to Hawai'i, a witness said Niagara's dumbfounded coach, Joe Mihalich, exclaimed:
"What?"
What, indeed. For if the Purple Eagles (22-9) beat Nebraska (17-12) tonight in Lincoln, Neb., it turns out that Niagara's next stop will be the Stan Sheriff Center to play the University of Hawai'i (20-11) Monday night, an odyssey that will have taken it more than 4,700 miles and 60 degrees in two games.
Welcome to the National Invitation Tournament, where the real madness in March is in the mileage. The NIT doesn't just schedule games, it books National Geographic adventures.
Suddenly, either Niagara, which hasn't been west of the Mississippi River in five years and buses to a lot of its games, or Nebraska, which hasn't ventured much more than 2 hours — as the plane flies — from home this season, will have four time zones to cross tomorrow.
Then, consider the "reward" that awaits the winner of Monday night's game. Hawai'i, which just returned from Logan, Utah, or the Niagara-Nebraska winner, will then hop a series of flights to play at the winner of Michigan and Oklahoma Wednesday.
FedEx doesn't shuttle its packages around the way the NIT does its teams.
"I haven't seen anything like it in my 25 years," said Tim Waller, a Nebraska assistant. And, you can bet the NIT didn't plan on it, either. The carefully penned script called for the NIT's only nationally ranked team, No. 25 Utah State, to gradually work its way east to the semifinals at Madison Square Garden in New York.
But the Rainbow Warriors were the worm in that Big Apple scenario, knocking off the Aggies in Utah Wednesday, 85-74, a victory made all the more remarkable by the lengths to which they went to get it. That, coupled with Nebraska's win over Creighton and Niagara's victory, guaranteed some hectic times for the 20-member staff of Worldtek Travel in Connecticut, the NIT's travel agency, which coordinates travel.
It took three separate flights, one from Buffalo to Newark on to Omaha, the others through Chicago and Cincinnati, just to get the Purple Eagles to Nebraska. Getting the winner out and Hawai'i-bound Saturday will be the next trick.
When members of the Niagara traveling party optimistically packed before Wednesday's game just in case, coaches told them to take enough for two games.
"But nobody told us we might have to bring our swimsuits," said Michelle Dubert, the school's sports information director.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.
