What if…Kenny Adeleke plays his last year at Hofstra?

I have too much time on my hands, so I knew Tommy Shaw of Styx had a solo album called "What If" without even having to look it up.

A few weeks back, I mentioned to my wife a feature idea I had for the blog. (I’ve yet to debut it, so you’re going to have to remain in suspense at least a little while longer) Like she so often does, she came up with an even better idea: Asking “What if?” about pivotal moments in Hofstra basketball history.

Not the obvious ones—like what if the 2006 Selection Committee didn’t feature George Mason’s AD—but possibilities we haven’t already spent years pondering. The plan was to hold these off until after the hoops season, when there’s less to obsess over, but, well, it’s finals week at Hofstra and there’s not much to talk about, so away we go with a “What if” raised, appropriately enough, by my wife:

What if Kenny Adeleke plays his senior season at Hofstra?

As much bandwidth as I’ve spent waxing optimistic over how many solid big men the Flying Dutchmen have this year, the truth is the best one Tom Pecora ever had is Adeleke. Most of the post players who land at Hofstra are projects. Not Adeleke, who was 6-foot-9, 250 pounds and a legitimate top-of-the-line Division I talent. He was a member of a DePaul recruiting class ranked among the nation’s best in 2001 (DePaul’s coach back then was current Towson head honcho Pat Kennedy) yet asked out of his letter of intent during his senior year to attend Hofstra.

Adeleke arrived a stud and got a lot better. He racked up 35 double-doubles and averaged 14.4 points and 9.3 rebounds a game in three seasons. He led the CAA in rebounding in his final two years and earned All-CAA honors as a junior. He was on pace to become only the third Hofstra player with 1,000 points and 1,000 rebounds (that Q&A is conducted by Hofstra, WRHU alum Adam Shandler, who was also my press box neighbor at Shuart Stadium in ’94 and ‘95) and likely would have moved into the top 10 on the all-time scoring list with even an average senior year.

We forget how good he was (remarkably, this is the first time I've "tagged" him in a post) because he played on teams transitioning to the CAA—nobody’s getting nostalgic over the Dutchmen going 34-56 with Adeleke, though their record improved every season—and because of how quickly and mysteriously he left.

If you ever want to know how the weather is at Hofstra, ask someone In The Know the real deal with Adeleke. The school cited his “violation of university and team rules” and announced his dismissal from the team for with a terse one-sentence press release on a Friday afternoon in September 2004, an old-school move intended to bury the bad news during the quietest news cycle of the week.

The school also distanced itself from Adeleke in the 2004-05 media guide, the front cover of which featured a photo of the huddling Dutchmen and the words TEAM FIRST! Inside, Adeleke’s departure was mentioned, in the briefest terms, on page 12, under starters lost. The reason: “Dismissed.”

Adeleke transferred almost immediately to Hartford, whose head coach, Larry Harrison, was an assistant at DePaul during Adeleke’s initial recruitment. And more than four years later, his departure is still topic non grata in Hempstead. Something pretty serious had to happen for 1,296 points and 837 rebounds to get tossed to the curb—even at a school like Hofstra with a no-nonsense school president who suspended Wendell Gibson and Rick Apodaca half a season for smoking marijuana.

The Flying Dutchmen sure could have used Adeleke in 2004-05, when he was probably the missing piece and the difference between a first-round exit in the NIT and a trip to the NCAA Tournament. Adeleke would have been a huge help that year, especially with Gibson limited to 18 games as he recovered from knee surgery. Can you imagine the inside-outside game with Loren Stokes, Carlos Rivera, Antoine Agudio, Adeleke, Gibson and junior transfer Adrian Uter?

Hofstra went 12-6 in CAA play and led Old Dominion by 10 points in the second half of the semifinal before falling to the eventual conference champs 72-58. How many more conference games would the Flying Dutchmen have won with Adeleke? How much higher would they have finished? How safe would a 10-point second half lead been with him patrolling the paint?

Some details about Adeleke’s tumultuous time at Hofstra trickled out after he landed at Harford, including chronic tardiness that got him yanked from the starting lineup during the final two games of the 2003-04 season and his arrest stemming from a fight in Staten Island the day before his dismissal (all charges were dropped). And his time at Hartford—which nearly came to an end before it ever began—was marred by more tardiness as well an incident in which he punched out a mirror in the locker room.

But he was predictably dominant once he hit the floor for the Hawks in 2005-06. Adeleke racked up 24 double-doubles (breaking by one Malik Rose’s single-season conference record), led the conference in scoring and rebounding and won the player of the week a record eight times (yet somehow did not win player of the year). But he got no closer to the NCAA Tournament in his lone year with Hartford, which fell to New Hampshire in the quarterfinals of the 2006 America East tournament than he did in his final year with Hofstra, which was knocked out in the quarterfinals of the 2004 CAA tourney by Old Dominion.

Hartford fans (I’m honestly not sure if they exist, my brother-in-law graduated from there and has never uttered word one about the hoops program) probably wonder what could have happened if he’d played there four years. We wonder what might have been if he’d played here one more.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com.

Soccer, The Hardy Boys and a whole lot in between

Do you think the Hardy Boys could have gotten to the bottom of the 2006 NCAA Tournament scam? I do.

Big night tonight for the soccer teams at Hofstra as the Flying Dutchwomen advanced to the CAA championship game by upsetting top-seeded William & Mary, 3-2. The Dutchwomen will play for their third league title (and NCAA Tournament berth) in the last four years Sunday when they take on sixth-seeded Northeastern, which also pulled off an upset Friday by knocking off second-seeded James Madison. Hofstra lost to Northeastern, 2-1, eight days ago.

The men’s soccer team, meanwhile, reached the CAA tournament by edging regular season champ UNC-Wilmington, 1-0, in overtime. The Flying Dutchmen, whose streak of three straight CAA crowns and NCAA bids was snapped last year, will be the sixth and final seed and will play third-seeded George Mason in the first round of the tourney Tuesday.

A couple other links and some reader emails before the weekend:

—With the men’s and women’s basketball teams scheduled to begin play a week from tonight, the Hofstra sports information department has posted the previews for each squad. These, presumably, will run at the front of the media guides. (Oh boy oh boy oh boy, it’s almost time for the men’s basketball media guide…like Christmas six weeks early. I wish I was kidding)

The Richmond Times-Dispatch previews tomorrow’s Richmond-Hofstra football game. The Spiders (great nickname, unless you found nothing entertaining about this movie) likely need to win out in order to reach the I-AA playoffs, so coach Mike London is saying all the right things about how his club can’t overlook the reeling Flying Dutchmen, who have lost three straight games and might be 0-4 in the CAA if not for a missed Rhode Island PAT in the last minute and a subsequent Cory Christopher-led drive for a game-winning field goal Sept. 20.

Dave Cohen, meanwhile, has two assistants who used to be on the Spiders’ staff, and he’s saying all the right things about how Richmond is borderline unbeatable. “I’m asking ‘Well, are these guys as good as they look?’” Cohen told the Times-Dispatch. “And the answer continues to be ‘Yes. Yes, yes, yes.’ So it’s not helping my confidence.”

Mine, either, I guess. I’d be happy if Chris Lang’s prediction in the Lynchburg News & Advance is accurate.

(This seems like as good a place as any to mention I’ve always been partial to Richmond since its men’s basketball team became the first no. 15 seed to ever beat a no. 2 when the Spiders knocked off Syracuse and sourpuss Jim Boehiem in 1991. Good times)

—Michael Litos had some CAA men’s hoops news this afternoon, including the suspension of three Towson players. That’s not a good sign of things to come for the Tigers: The Flying Dutchmen opened the 2002-03 season without Rick Apodaca and Wendell Gibson, each of whom were suspended 14 games for smoking marijuana, and went 2-12 in those games on their way to an 8-21 finish. It seemed like a ludicrous overreaction then and it seems like a ludicrous overreaction now, but what do I know?

Now for some mail from my Loyal Readers. Rob writes in to correct my Freak Formal post from a week ago. He says it was his ankle, not his knee, that he wrecked playing football before the Freak in 1994. Defiantly Dutch apologizes for the error and also for forgetting to mention that Rob went as Kurt Cobain, complete with a T-shirt that read “Corporate Magazines Suck.” Awesome. The things that grow fuzzy with time.

Publisher Cat notes an interesting Associated Press story about the sports world’s reaction to the election of Barack Obama and wondered if Hofstra can “…line up a non-league game against Oregon State at the site of the third debate?”

Oregon State, of course, is coached by Obama’s brother-in-law, Craig Robinson. The Flying Dutchmen have never played Oregon State—not even during the long road trip that was the 1992-93 season, more on that shortly—and have played only four games (none at home, of course) against Pac-10 foes. Hofstra is 0-2 against both California and UCLA, the latter of whom knocked the Dutchmen off in the 2001 NCAA Tournament.

Somewhere here I have a photo of the scoreboard that shows Hofstra leading at the eight-minute TV timeout in the second half. At that point, my future wife and I were wondering just how the hell we were going to afford staying two nights in North Carolina. Turned out the Dutchmen didn’t score another point and we had nothing to worry about, except a really long ride home. Let’s move on.

In addition, a game against Oregon State would be doubly historic since, according to a perusal of Hofstra media guides, only one Hofstra squad has ever played Oregon State in anything: The volleyball team fell to Oregon State in three games in 1992.

Next up is Gonzo Hofstra Fan, who reminds me of my first-ever visit to Hofstra by agreeing that a Final Four run will draw more future students than a presidential debate:

"When I was deciding between Hofstra and other LI schools such as Adelphia and Post, one of the biggest factors in steering me to HU was the fact that someday I hoped I would be able to watch my alma mater in the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, an opportunity I wouldn’t have had at any other LI school at the time. [Yeah, I’m so old that Stony Brook was still D-3 back then]"

Depressing. So am I. Gonzo’s email is particularly timely because I’m pretty sure it was this weekend 16 years ago—it was either the first or second weekend of November—when my parents and I took our first-ever trip to Hofstra for the fall open house. At that point, I was still pretty unsure where I wanted to transfer to after I finished community college back home.

Hofstra was the first D-I school we visited. It was one of those sparkling fall days that made the campus look particularly graceful. Dempster Hall blew my mind. Hofstra had me hook, line and sinker by lunch.

I remember walking out of the Student Center and looking at the clock when my dad asked if I was so quiet because I was unhappy.

“Not at all,” I said. “I think this is the one.”

“Good,” he said. “Me too.”

We cancelled a trip the next weekend to Adelphi and I applied to Hofstra, which somehow accepted me. Of course, had I recognized at the time that being an independent—which Hofstra was in basketball that season—was almost as bad as not being in Division I at all, I might have done something different. Like apply to UConn. Shudder. It’s easy to be a fan there.

We’ll close out the mailbag with Cake Sitter—don’t ask, I can assure you that you do not have the stomach for an explanation of that nickname—who was frightened to learn read that he and I both devoured Matt Christopher books as kids. He also writes to inform us how “…amazing [it is] that Matt Christopher…is still writing children’s sports books, despite having departed this mortal coil 11 years ago. I’m very much alive and can only imagine ever thinking about approaching his prolific output.”

Matt Christopher’s work, both during and after his time on this planet, is impressive. According to some quick math at his official website, he’s penned 136 books. No idea how many have been penned by his estate since his death, but I can’t imagine the ratio of his books/estate books is as lopsided as that of V.C. Andrews, the gothic author who wrote eight books before her death in 1986 yet whose estate has written 60 books under her name since.

But neither Christopher nor Andrews can even approach the output of Franklin W. Dixon, who, according to Wikipedia (which is never wrong), has authored a mind-boggling 435 Hardy Boys books, including the first real book I ever read. Not bad for someone who, to borrow Cake Sitter’s phrase, departed this mortal coil 31 years ago.

Unlike Matt Christopher and V.C. Andrews, there never was a Franklin W. Dixon, who was the pseudonym originated by the Stratemeyer Syndicate in the late 1920s. McFarlane was the first of many Franklin W. Dixons. By the way, did you know the W. stands for win? I kid you not. Edward Stratemeyer wanted every pseudonym to have some sort of inspirational meaning. Hence Nancy Drew author Carolyn Keene, Bobbsey Twins author Laura Lee Hope and Tom Swift author Victor Appleton.

I’ve had this information in my head for more than 20 years and now, finally, I’m able to use it on a blog about Hofstra sports! God bless the Internet.

Email Jerry about Hofstra sports as well as the Hardy Boys at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com.