Jay Wright wasted no time proving he had a gift for commanding attention and winning over a room on Apr. 14, 1994, when he was introduced as Hofstra’s new head coach and declared the Flying Dutchmen were “a sleeping giant.”
The giant was in such a deep slumber, a budding star basketball player 25 miles west in Brooklyn had no idea Hofstra even existed.
“Before Speedy Claxton committed there, I’d never heard of Hofstra before,” Norm Richardson said Wednesday night. “I’d never heard of them. Had no idea where they were located. When Speedy committed, I remember thinking ‘Why is he going to Hofstra?’”
A little more than a year after Claxton’s commitment in the spring of 1996, Richardson began teaming up with Claxton to not only put the Dutchmen on the map but keep them there.
Richardson scored 12 points in Hofstra’s most recent NCAA Tournament game, a 61-48 loss to UCLA on Mar. 15, 2001. The defeat in Wright’s final game with the school capped a four-year stretch in which the Dutchmen completed their climb from the edge of Division I extinction by winning 91 games — the most over a four-year period in the program’s D-I era — and consecutive America East crowns.
While Claxton graduated after leading the Dutchmen to their first NCAA Tournament in 24 years in 2000, the repeat champs were anchored by six seniors who’d spent at least three seasons with the program — the kind of continuity that was common in the pre-NIL era and allowed for a slow build.
Richardson and his high school teammate Roberto Gittens — whose commitment to Hofstra spurred Richardson’s desire to play at the school — combined for 2,917 points and graduated as the sixth- and 13th-leading scorers in Hofstra history.
Jason Hernandez, the point guard who transferred following his freshman season at conference rival New Hampshire in order to be closer to his wife and their newborn daughter, finished with 986 points while shooting 40.6 percent from 3-point land for a team that shot 35.6 percent from beyond the arc during his three seasons.
Abdou Sylla, Mike Feeley and walk-on Jeff Fox combined to play 167 games while center Greg Springfield, a two-year member of the program following his transfer from Western Kentucky, collected 92 blocks, the third-most in school history upon his graduation.
“The thing I’m most proud of is I think our class kind of helped turn that program into a respectable program,” said Richardson, who graduated from Grady in Brooklyn in 1996, the same year Claxton graduated from Christ The King, before he played a year at Milford Academy, a prep school in Connecticut.
While the ascent seemed pre-ordained in retrospect, it was anything but assured in real time. The Dutchmen harbored legitimate NCAA Tournament aspirations after finishing third in the America East in 1998-99, but Claxton got hurt during the conference tournament and didn’t play in an NIT loss to Rutgers.
The Dutchmen were picked second in the America East prior to the 1999-2000 season, when they won the regular season crown with a 16-2 record. Claxton was named the most outstanding player in the America East tournament, when he scored 24 points in the title game and Richardson scored 20 of his 26 points in the second half to help the Dutchmen overcome an eight-point deficit in a 76-69 win over two-time defending champion Delaware.
“Speedy being in his last year and being, to me, the best player ever to play at Hofstra — giving him the chance to go out as a champion of our conference and have a chance to play in the NCAA Tournament was a moment that I was extremely proud to be a part of,” Richardson said.
The Dutchmen were seeded 14th in the East but ran into some bad luck as well as a buzzsaw in an Elite Eight-bound Oklahoma State, which earned an 86-66 win in Buffalo. Claxton, playing through a dislocated left index finger, scored 20 points while Richardson, who got food poisoning at a steakhouse the night before, also had 20 points but on 6-of-21 shooting.
“He got hurt and I played like crap — I’m not sure if anybody played well except for him,” Richardson said. “Even though he got hurt, he kind of kept us afloat as much as he could. But he got no help that game.”
As was the case with the repeat East Coast Conference champions in 1977, the Dutchmen went back-to-back after returning everyone but one superstar in 2000-01. Hofstra opened 2-2 in America East play before running off 18 straight wins, the longest single-season streak in school history. Richardson, Hernandez, Gittens and sophomore Rick Apodaca all averaged in double figures while Springfield, Gittens and Richardson all pulled down at least six rebounds per game.
“We lost such a huge part of our team with Speedy leaving (for) the NBA,” Richardson said. “So we collectively got it done.”
Richardson said the winning streak and the chance to return to the NCAA Tournament left him more nervous heading into another title game at home against Delaware. But the Dutchmen led by multiple possessions for most of the second half and scored the final 10 points in a 68-54 win.
“I felt it more — it was our senior year, obviously, you don’t want to go out without having the chance to compete in the NCAA Tournament,” Richardson said. “So it was a lot of nerves, a lot of anxiety of myself, I didn’t sleep well the night before the game.”
The Dutchmen, seeded 13th in the East Region, nearly extended the nation’s longest winning streak against fourth-seeded UCLA in North Carolina. But as was the case in 1977, a traditional power loaded with future NBA players proved to be too much for Hofstra, which led by six points with 13 minutes left before fading in a 61-48 loss.
A win over the Bruins would have created a battle of Cinderellas in the second round against Utah State, which upset fifth-seeded Ohio State 77-68.
“That year we came in with a lot more confidence — we weren’t new to the tournament, we kind of got a taste of it from the year before,” Richardson said. “I thought that was a year that we could have made a good run if we got through that game.”
Apodaca led the Dutchmen with 16 points while Earl Watson, Dan Gadzuric (whose nickname was, no kidding, the Flying Dutchman), Matt Barnes and Jason Kapono accounted for 44 of UCLA’s points. The quartet combined to play a whopping 2843 NBA games.
The loss ended a trio of eras for the Dutchmen, who lost seven players to graduation and Wright to Villanova as they prepared to enter the CAA. Wright finished 122-85 at Hofstra after winning just 31 games in his first three seasons, including Claxton’s freshman campaign.
“Won 19 games, 22 games, 24 games and then 26 games,” Richardson said. “And obviously it’s a huge, huge credit to Coach Wright and his staff, who were phenomenal. But then you add Jay Hernandez, Roberto Gittens and Marc Petit — Rick Apodaca comes later, Danny Walker, Abdul Sylla and Greg Springfield, So you just add all of these guys to that group Jay put together and then it leads us to four really, really good years.
“I’m just so happy, so proud that we were all able to be a part of that and happy (with) our class. Obviously, Speedy spearheaded it, but our class kind of took it over the top.”
Richardson, who is coaching with Overtime Elite in Atlanta after serving as an assistant coach in the G League and with the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets, plans to attend Friday’s game against Alabama.
He’ll see an amalgamation of familiar sights: A precocious point guard, a conference player of the year and several glue guys, all playing in the NCAA Tournament with a chance to let the nation know where Hofstra is located — and coached by the player who first put Hofstra on the map.
“Cruz Davis was the player of the year in the conference, but Preston Edmead is just incredible and the role players played an incredible role as well — and it was like destiny for them to win,” Richardson said. “You couldn’t script it a better way.”
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