Of all of Greg’s Gigs, Hofstra remains closest to his heart

Bryant defensive coordinator Greg Gigantino doesn’t have to be preparing for Hofstra in order to be reminded of his days as the Flying Dutchmen’s defensive coordinator.

“I’ve got two of my linebackers in my office,” Gigantino said last Friday, a day before the Flying Dutchmen beat Bryant 40-24 in Rhode Island. “And I’ve got a picture of [Gene] McAleer, Jimmy Shannon, Jon Evjen, Pat Clark. They’re looking at them and I’m telling them about them. All those guys—they came with no scholarships and they turned out to be really good players.”

There will probably never be another experience quite like the Hofstra one for Gigantino, who arrived in Hempstead with Joe Gardi in 1990 and helped oversee the Dutchmen’s rapid transformation from a national championship contender in Division III to a powerhouse Division I-AA program.

But Gigantino finds plenty of familiarity as the defensive coordinator at Bryant, where the entire athletic program is in the process of moving from Division II to Division I. The Bryant football team, which began play in 1999, is a member of the Northeast Conference and will eventually offer 40 scholarships (the I-AA maximum is 63).

“The biggest difference is we didn’t know where we were going when I was at Hofstra,” Gigantino said. “We know we’re going into this league and what the parameters are going to be.

“We’ve got a president that’s like Jim Shuart: He’s a football guy and wants to do good in football and he understands what it’s going to take,” Gigantino said. “Obviously, we’re in the midst of moving all our sports up, so it’s a little more of a financial burden than at Hofstra. All we were doing was moving football up [to Division I], everything else was already there.”

Bryant has experienced immediate success, albeit not the sensational type Hofstra enjoyed in the early-to-mid 1990s, when the Dutchmen went 12-8 while playing partial I-AA schedules in 1991 and 1992 and 24-6-2 with one playoff berth during the program’s first three full seasons at I-AA from 1993-1995.

Bryant reached the NCAA Tournament in each of its last two seasons at Division II before it went 7-4 last year in its first season as a I-AA program, including 5-4 against I-AA foes and 4-2 against the Northeast Conference. The Bulldogs improved dramatically as the season went on: They went 4-1 in their final five games overall, during which they lost only to nationally ranked UMass and outscored Robert Morris, Duquesne, Iona and St. Francis 90-24.

As encouraging as such performances are to Gigantino, he remains aware of the long road still ahead for the Bulldogs and how patient he and the rest of the staff—which features another ex-Dutchmen assistant in quarterbacks coach Mike McCarty—must remain.

“You’ve got to know your limitations,” Gigantino said. “Philosophically, you can’t ask guys to do things they’re not capable of doing. A lot of defenses look good up on the board, but you’ve got to say ‘Can our people really do this?’”

Had things gone as Gigantino planned earlier this decade, he would have succeeded Gardi as head coach and stood on the other side of the field Saturday at Bryant. Still, despite the bittersweet nature of the reunion, Gigantino remains fond of Hofstra and the extended period of time he spent there. Gigantino spent 13 seasons at Hofstra (1990-97 and 2001-05 with three seasons as Cornell’s defensive coordinator in between), by far his longest stint at one school during a 32-year coaching career that has taken him to eight stops up and down the east coast.

“You can’t be somewhere for 14 years and not have some memories of it, one way or the other,” Gigantino said. “The way coach Gardi always treated me was just unbelievable. Jim Shuart and Joe Margiotta and all those guys, they were all great people that gave Greg Gigantino a chance.”

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch. 

Bits and Bytes: Poor time management confuses the mind…

The Hat is not in this video.

Twelve hours after I became the oldest rookie in WRHU history (blatant yet delayed self-promotion, many thanks to Christian Heimall and Jonathan Lauder for having me on the air) last Friday, Sully Ray became the oldest rookie in the history of our fantasy football league (in which, you’ll no doubt be interested to know, the conference names are Yankee, Patriot and Colonial) when he joined the rest of the Defiantly Dutch readership (and nine other people, too!) at our fine suburban residence.

You’re probably saying to yourself “Didn’t the season start Thursday?” Yes. Yes it did. But really, you’ve got to admit, drafting after the official start of the season makes a lot of sense for a league “run” by me.

Along those lines, Sully Ray had some sharp words as we waited for the draft to begin.

“Beach you were supposed to work all weekend last weekend and you didn’t,” he said in the familiarly admonishing tone of someone who arrives five minutes early for every appointment, pays all his bills two weeks ahead of time and gets his eight hours of sleep from 10 pm to 6 am instead of 8 am to 4 pm. The responsible adult is so boring.

Alas, the boring responsible adult Sully Ray is also right. I have been lax here, partially because of some paying work that was due last week but also because of awful time management skills that should earn me a starring role on some late-night infomercial.

“Hi I’m Jerry Beach, locally famous author and blogger. Before I took Timmy Time’s course, I spent all day surfing the Internet, watching old music videos on YouTube, watching episodes of old sitcoms and soap operas I’ve already seen 100 times apiece, crafting witty status updates on Facebook and obsessing over my fantasy baseball and football teams. My blog posts were made during caffeine- and exhaustion-fueled bursts in the middle of the night. But one day with Timmy Time has me working a regular 9 to 5 schedule, limiting my television viewing to live sports and living an otherwise productive existence! Thank you Timmy Time!”

Where in the hell was I? Oh yes. Anyway, please accept my humble apologies for the tardiness of posts this month as well as the declaration that I’ll try to be more on top of things. It’s no fun watching Extreme’s “Hole Hearted” and worrying the song was written about me, even if I was 16 when the song was written.

With that, let’s get to the news of the past few days:

— An out-of-town trip for Labor Day weekend and an imploding car, respectively, made it impossible to attend either of the Flying Dutchmen’s first two football games, so I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m some expert on what transpired. I will say that the wins over Stony Brook and Bryant seemed to go about as well as possible for the Dutchmen, who never trailed in dispatching of the Seawolves and Bulldogs and escaped the games mostly unscathed, injury-wise.

Still, the 2-0 start doesn’t seem to have filled the faithful with optimism. Perhaps it’s because the Dutchmen are supposed to beat Stony Brook, against whom they are 12-0 all-time, and a fledgling I-AA program such as Bryant. Or maybe it’s the specter of upcoming road trips to top-ranked Richmond, the defending I-AA national champion, and I-A Western Michigan and the possibility of back-to-back unmitigated floggings.

My hunch is the Dutchmen are, for the most part, playing with house money the next two weeks. A split would be outstanding (let’s not even get into the 1994-like euphoria a sweep would inspire). And going 0-2 won’t extinguish their playoff hopes, as long as the losses are reasonably competitive and not of the James Madison variety.

For the sake of a program that needs all the momentum it can get, here’s hoping the next two games provide some encouragement for the Dutchmen as well as some reason for Long Islanders to come out to Shuart Stadium the first two weekends in October. Otherwise, the bridge to basketball season could be a bleak one.

—Speaking of basketball, your good friend and mine Mike Litos has already begun unveiling mini-previews at his site, and the school batting leadoff in his series is also the school he’s picking to win the whole darn thing. I won’t ruin the suspense by revealing the team here (click the link!), but I will say it’s not Hofstra.

I’d like to threaten to unleash the full venom of Dutch Nation (snort) upon Litos for not picking the Dutchmen first, but the truth is, as evidenced by this pre pre-season poll conducted by the fine folks at VCURamNation.com, we’re in agreement. Of course, I only picked against Hofstra to ensure I wouldn’t hex them. Yeah. That’s the ticket.

—Interesting stuff, too, from Litos last week about the future of the CAA. We’re in agreement that a football conference that is almost laughably better than the rest of the I-AA field will determine the direction of the CAA, but while Litos foresees a I-AA landscape in which the CAA is the dominant football and basketball conference, I still wonder if the CAA will try to ride a handful of programs that could support I-A football into a seat at the big boys’ table.

Litos’ theory that the BCS schools will run away and hide sometime next decade, thereby allowing the NCAA to finally shed any pretense of equality and divide Division I into a I-A and I-AA, is something I’ve wondered about myself the last few years. But I change my mind on an hourly basis as to what it would mean to potential I-AA program such as Hofstra.

On one hand, it would be nice to have a legitimate chance to compete for a national championship, albeit a less glorified one. But I also remember the blank stares I got when telling friends about Hofstra’s outstanding I-AA football program in the mid-90s and how frustrating that was. Apparently, the carrot that lures one to Hofstra as a teenager remains just as dangly and attractive in his mid-30s.

Plus, as much as it sickens me to type this, George Mason proved in 2006 that it is still possible—bloody unlikely, but still possible—for a mid-major to overcome the odds and the obstacles placed in its way and crash the party. Of course, it also helps to have a crooked athletic director on the Selection Committee, but I digress. Why rob the rest of the mid-majors of that once-in-a-generation opportunity just to help the obscenely rich get even more obscenely rich? (Because college basketball is life, that’s why)

—It wasn’t a good opening week of the season for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the official NFL team of Defiantly Dutch, but Newsday ran a nice feature on new Buccaneers coach Raheem Morris, who tells the newspaper he is less than a decade removed from hoping he could someday become the defensive coordinator at Hofstra.

Instead, of course, Morris ascended the coaching ranks in remarkably fast fashion is now the NFL’s youngest head coach. He’s also single-handedly attempting to increase employment among Hofstra graduates: Ex-Dutchmen Kyle Arrington and Kareem Huggins made the Buccaneers’ 53-man roster and practice squad, respectively. If only Hofstra graduates ran websites and newspapers. Sigh.

—Lastly, I’ll end where I began with our fantasy draft, because I’m sure you want to know about my fantasy team as much as I want to know about yours, and let you know that while I may be an inconsistent blogger, I am consistent when it comes to following my own fantasy football advice. That’s right, I drafted the Colts’ Donald Brown, a mere 54 weeks after he carved up the Dutchmen in UConn’s 35-3 win.

Watch out world and watch out Sully Ray, who was in such a hurry to leave a draft that lasted several hours beyond his bedtime that he left his sharp Bethpage Black U.S. Open hat here. Sully Ray wrote me earlier today with a brief but forceful request: “Don’t wear my golf hat.”

Apparently, he’s forgotten how I infuse non-descript hats with character as well as world-wide fame.


Fine, Sully Ray. I’ll trade you your hat for Cowboys wide receiver Roy Williams. Otherwise, the hat and I are going on the road with Extreme.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Never Forget

Eight years since we saw the absolute worst humanity has to offer, and some of its best in the hours and days afterward. Think today of those who redefined heroism—the innumerable responders and the 2,998 who died in the attacks, including the 13 Hofstra graduates who perished in the World Trade Center: Lt. Glenn Wilkinson, Frederick Varrachi, Neil Levin, Alisha Levin, Edward Mardovich, Andrew Stern, Courtney Walcott, Alok Menta, Jeffrey Dingle, Richard Fitzsimmons, Noell Maerz, Glenn Winuk and Julie Lynne Zipper.

What if Saturday is just the start for the CAA in I-A?

Rodney Dangerfield would appreciate the plight this week of the Flying Dutchmen football team.

The first tip of the basketball season is more than two months away, but the Virginia-based CAA schools are already screwing Hofstra. Clearly, it was part of the Grand Conspiracy for Richmond and William & Mary to thrash Duke and Virginia in their season openers, thereby minimizing in the eyes of voters nationwide the Dutchmen’s routine win over Stony Brook in the annual (for now) Unwinnable Game.

And it worked! The Dutchmen fell out of the top 25 in the coaches poll—at the expense, I kid you not, of a pair of teams that LOST their season openers. Granted, Eastern Kentucky and Liberty gave I-A Indiana and West Virginia quite a scare before falling by six and 13 points, respectively. But still, they got style points for losing while the Dutchmen got the boot for winning. Why doesn’t Tom Yeager just go ahead and award CAA membership to Eastern Kentucky and Liberty!

Of course, all blog bias aside, it was pretty awesome to hear about Richmond and William & Mary beating Duke and Virginia. (I guess Villanova’s win over Temple counts as a win over a I-A opponent, even if Temple hasn’t been any good since Hofstra was pounding the Owls so badly it scarred Bill Cosby for life)

All good Americans loathe Duke, even if getting Schadenfreude-like joy out of the Blue Devils losing a football game—which Duke does better than just about anyone else in I-A—is a lot like laughing at Pittsburgh because of the Pirates. It’s kind of mean-spirited and the source of your contempt doesn’t even acknowledge its inept brethren, but in a pinch it’ll do. So hooray Richmond!

And it’s always nice to see arrogance—in this case Al Groh, who is one of those fools of minimal accomplishment who nonetheless thinks he’s superior enough to protect the identity of his starting quarterback as if it’s a bigger secret than the code to The Bomb—brought down a peg. Yeah Al, that really worked for you last week. Presumably, Eric Mangini—who followed in Groh’s footsteps by first inexplicably landing the head coaching job with the Jets and then approaching said job in hilariously secretive fashion—will learn that this week. So whoohoo, William & Mary!

The urge following a day like Saturday is to declare several CAA teams could compete in a I-A conference, or at least the ACC. Such declarations are usually foolish, because as invigorating as it is to bound off the porch and knock off the big dogs, such performances are rare outliers. The three wins by the CAA were the only wins for I-AA teams in 37 games against I-A foes last week and account for one-fifth of the 15 wins I-AA teams have recorded against I-A teams since 2000. Far more often than not, those 22 extra scholarships at I-A come in pretty handy.

But I’m not so sure it’s foolish to wonder if Saturday won’t further inspire and fuel CAA football to make an eventual move to I-A. It won’t happen any year soon, and this is pure conjecture on my part, but maybe CAA football—which placed eight teams in the preseason top 25 coaches poll and five teams in each of the last two tournaments and whose schools have accounted for four of the last 11 national champions—is outgrowing I-AA.

It’s always easy to spend somebody else’s money, and making the leap to I-A would be a staggeringly expensive proposition. The NCAA requires I-A programs to play in a facility that holds at least 30,000 butts, and only Delaware (22,000) and Richmond (21,329) play in stadiums with capacities of at least 20,000. Then of course there’s the matter of adding those 22 scholarships and upgrading the program in myriad other ways.

Popular convention is that leaping to I-A is a quick way for a school to make money and become relevant. The truth is it’s a get rich quick scheme that rarely works out. More than 90 percent of all bowl money went to the six BCS schools in 2002 and most of the non-BCS bowls are played in front of plenty of empty seats.

But to look at the CAA is to see six schools that would seem, from the outside looking in, to have the fan base and the tradition to at least consider the I-A move: Richmond, Delaware, Massachusetts, James Madison, Villanova and William & Mary. Assume, too, that the infant programs at Old Dominion (which played its first football game in 68 years Saturday to great hype and anticipation), Georgia State and Charlotte will, having already spent millions to begin playing football, be more open to making a further investment and skipping the usual lengthy apprenticeship at I-AA. That’s nine schools (eight if you figure Villanova leaves for the Big East), more than enough for a conference.

And with the approaching apocalypse in Division I sports, maybe the CAA views upgrading to I-A in football as its last chance to be known as more than just a really good mid-major conference. Perhaps, as we alluded to a few months ago, it also pares down a potentially unwieldy conference and allows schools that aren’t driven by football to deemphasize their programs as painlessly and smoothly as possible.

Of course, this is a lot more complex than anything we can write in 1,000 or so words, and New Hampshire and Maine, in particular, would not be thrilled to be left behind if CAA moved to I-A. And what to do with VCU and George Mason (must resist urge to say what the CAA can do with George Mason), neither of whom play football but both of whom are indelibly associated with the CAA?

But what if the CAA decides it wants to do a lot more than just occasionally spoil a September Saturday for Division I opponents? What if the CAA is headed for the day when it is a peer with the ACC in football instead of the cuddly underdog?

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

It’s just a little late, it’s still good, it’s still good! The 2009 Flying Dutchmen football preview

Lisa Simpson runs out of patience waiting for the Flying Dutchmen preview to appear and begins raising hell at home.

Like most football teams, the Flying Dutchmen are pretty good at parroting the one-week-at-a-time mantra of their head coach. But Dave Cohen is probably pretty pleased to know the Dutchmen plan to spend Thanksgiving at his house.

The first round of the Division I-AA playoffs is the Saturday following Thanksgiving and the Dutchmen expect to be among the 16 qualifiers for the first time since 2001, when Hofstra won the Atlantic-10 in its first season in the conference.

“Take it one game at a time,” Dutchman linebacker and All-America candidate Luke Bonus said. “But we want to be up here for Thanksgiving. No one’s making flight arrangements or going [away] for Thanksgiving. We’re going to be here for the long haul, all the way through December. That’s the plan.”

To reach the playoffs this season would represent quite a leap for the Dutchmen, whose postseason hopes perished in a hurry last year during an injury-plagued season that almost defied all logic and explanation.

Starting quarterback Bryan Savage suffered a career-ending back injury warming up prior to the season opener against UConn, and it didn’t get much better from there for the Dutchmen, who lost 12 players to season-ending injuries on their way to a 4-8 finish.

The spate of injuries forced the Dutchmen, who were already skewing young following the graduation of 14 starters from the 2007 team, to embark on a complete rebuilding plan. The results were predictably painful: The Dutchmen suffered three straight losses by at least 17 points, only the fourth time that’s occurred in the history of the program, were shutout twice and lost by a combined 96 points to the three top 10 teams they faced (James Madison, New Hampshire and eventual national champion Richmond).

The hope within the program is that this year’s Dutchmen will yield the benefits of last year’s growing pains, especially with 20 starters and 40 lettermen returning.  Sixteen of the Dutchmen’s starters will be juniors or younger.

“We played about 18 more guys than most programs did,” Cohen said. “We have a lot more guys with the starting experience because of the outside factors that were beyond our control. We have more people with experience and more people that will not be wide-eyed when the lights come on Saturday night. They’ve been to the dance [before].”

The experience of 2008 has fueled the returnees and made for a cohesive spring and summer of workouts. “The summer’s been real good as far as us learning the whole offense and defense,” sophomore wide receiver Aaron Weaver said. “We have a better grasp for the whole system and it’s looking good out there.”

“Obviously, injuries killed the season, but there’s a lot of stuff that people weren’t used to as a team, whether it’s because of youth or inexperience of just overall players not getting it done,” Bonus said. “This whole offseason, we focused on doing the small things that help you win a game in the fourth quarter or even in overtime. That’s been a big emphasis on our offseason and I think it’ll show [against Stony Brook] and throughout the whole season.”

Expectations are high outside Margiotta Hall as well: While the Dutchmen were picked to finish fourth in the CAA North in the preseason coaches poll, they were ranked 24^th in the preseason I-AA coaches poll and seventh by the Phil Steele College Football Yearbook, which also pegged the Dutchmen first in the CAA North.

The CAA is so deep, though, that even living up to the prediction of the national coaches may not be enough to assure the Dutchmen—the last of the eight CAA teams in the preseason top 25—a trip to the playoffs. The CAA has sent a record five teams to the playoffs in each of the last two years.

Conversely, Richmond finished third in the CAA South last year before winning it all. So anything can happen as long as Cohen is trying to figure out a way to prepare Thanksgiving dinner for several dozen hungry players

“We’re probably going to be at coach Cohen’s house,” said starting quarterback Cory Christopher, who came back from a season-ending hip injury suffered against Maine Oct. 18 to beat out sophomore Steve Probst and freshman Joe Sidaris. “I’m from Miami. I’m not planning on being on Jet Blue websites—no Deltas, none of that. I’m planning on being on Long Island.”

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

In which I will tirelessly work for you on Labor Day weekend

OK, that’s not entirely true. But I’ve got multiple deadlines today for actual, paying work, which is a nice and hopefully not fleeting feeling. So the Flying Dutchmen football preview/feature will have to wait until tomorrow. Come back then to read what Dave Cohen, Cory Christopher and Luke Bonus have to say about the upcoming season.

Also stop back, either tomorrow or Monday or maybe Tuesday depending on how slothful and/or completely wiped out I feel, for the debut of a new feature at Defiantly Dutch in which I look back at the pivotal pop culture moments of 1994. It’s a different idea, to be sure, and I’ll be the first to admit I’m curious to see if the execution matches the concept. But to paraphrase what the totally awesome Bill Lawrence—a graduate of William & Mary, BTW—says about the retooling of Scrubs: If it sucks, it’ll probably suck in a really large way. So it’ll be interesting either way.

As for the Dutchmen season opener against Stony Brook, I must shamefully admit we won’t be at the game Saturday as we’re heading to Connecticut for a gargantuan, I-swear-I’ll-start-dieting-for-real-Tuesday BBQ at my sister’s house. The pick here is Hofstra A Lot, Stony Brook A Little, though I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this suddenly embittered rivalry yields a mini-classic at Shuart Stadium.

I may try out the new on-demand live streaming at the Hofstra website though. If so, perk your ears. I’ll be the guy yelling about Paul Que.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

The Defiantly Dutch Primer! (Or: Everything You Wanted To Know About HU Sports But Were Afraid To Ask)

In 1937, the student-run newspaper at Hofstra, in an effort to find a good nickname for the university's sports teams...anyone? Anyone?...conducted a poll in which the students voted for...anyone? Anyone?...Flying...anyone? Anyone?...Dutchmen. Fly-ing Dutch-men.

So you survived the first day of classes, and here’s hoping the worst thing that happened to you Wednesday was the realization you will never get to occupy a $13,000 dorm room as long as you’re at Hofstra. (Back in my day, I had a view of the Garden City skyline and I liked it) You’ve got your syllabuses, your books, your notebooks, your new backpack and a day planner that’s going to get quite a workout. You are ready for success at Hofstra.

Enough of that crap.

We all know what will happen. The syllabuses will fall to the bottom of a pile of papers and remained untouched until Thanksgiving. Your books will remain in mint condition (doesn’t matter, though, the HUB will still only buy them back for 27 cents apiece at the end of the semester). Your notebooks will be used to write letters to your friends back home (wait, this isn’t 1993?). Your backpack will collect dust on the floor. Your day planner will return, unused, for the first day of the spring semester.

We know you’re here not for the academics but for the sports. And if you’re not, this is a PG-13 blog—most of the time, anyway—so keep your boozy, libido-fueled thoughts to yourself, mister/missy.

As an incoming freshman or transfer student, you want to make sure you fit in well when talking Hofstra sports with your fellow fans and Loyal Readers. So I present you the Defiantly Dutch primer. Learn it, live it, love it and soon you, too, will be an unemployed sportswriter with useless Hofstra knowledge oozing out of every pore! Let’s get started.

What is this Flying Dutchmen you so often speak of and why don’t you refer to Hofstra as the Pride?

Flying Dutchmen was the nickname bestowed upon Hofstra sports in 1937. From the 1993-94 men’s basketball media guide:

Ironically, the name originated, not from the athletics program, but in a Physical Education class in 1937, the second year of Hofstra’s existence. Instructor R. Burr Smith is said to have commented on student Robert Kreuger’s sluggish progress across the basketball court, sardonically quipping “Look at the Flying Dutchmen.” The name “Flying Dutchmen became popular immediately and was one of several nicknames voted on by the student body in a 1937 issue of the student newspaper, The Chronicle, and was the overwhelming favorite.

It was a perfect nickname, one that paid homage to Hofstra’s Dutch heritage while also summarizing the uphill battle the university’s sports programs would face as a perpetual underdog. And everyone was happy with it for more than 60 years.

So what happened? Why Pride?

The school’s booster/fundraising club was founded in 1989 and dubbed the Pride Club. The word “Pride” was added to the Hofstra seal and served as the closest thing the school had to a logo throughout the ‘90s (well, that or a Visa card, but that explanation is probably for another time).

All remained well until the turn of the century, when the school began referring to itself as the “Pride” but also continued to recognize the Flying Dutchmen nickname—at least until 2005, when committees convened and spent lots of hours and lots of money and devoured lots of takeout food to determine Pride was the official and only acceptable nickname for Hofstra. This also coincided with the unveiling of the “H” shield a new seal and a new logo, all of which was part of the university’s reimaging.

It’s a lot like the Malibu Stacy episode of The Simpsons. “But she’s got a new hat!”

Those of us who were so fond of the Flying Dutchmen had three choices: Accept the new nickname and the burying of Hofstra heritage, remain silent yet saddened by the change or start a blog called Defiantly Dutch and steadfastly refer to Hofstra athletics as the Flying Dutchmen and Dutchwomen.

So here we are. We’d be busting with—ohhhh nooooo—pride if we heard fans bellow “LET’S GO DUTCH!” but Pride, unfortunately, has been drilled into you since the first piece of Hofstra propaganda landed in your mailbox, so we won’t hold it against you if you yell “LET’S GO PRIDE!” I may cry a little inside though.

Geez that was a long-winded answer.

Yeah you might want to get used to that.

OK, anyway, let’s get on to the sports. What are the high-profile teams on campus?

Hofstra has a men’s lacrosse team that is perennially among the top 20 teams in the land, but here, in the hotbed of lacrosse, the diehards are disappointed the Dutchmen have never made the Final Four. They were ranked second in the country in 2006 but blew a five-goal fourth quarter lead against UMass in the quarterfinals at Stony Brook.

The football team was a regular participant in the Division I-AA playoffs in the years prior to and just after the turn of the century but has fallen on hard times lately and no longer has friends in high places (former school president James Shuart was a football player at Hofstra). As I wrote yesterday, this year is pivotal to the future of the program.

The softball team has become the top program in the northeast under Bill Edwards and had its record streak of 11 straight conference tournament championships snapped last year. The women’s basketball team was an also-ran in multiple conferences until 2005-06, when it reached the final eight of the WNIT. Several impressive recruiting classes have the Dutchwomen ready to emerge as a contender in the CAA.

The centerpiece of the athletic program is the men’s basketball team, which played in a conference without an automatic bid and was ranked as one of the worst programs in the land when I arrived on campus in 1993 (back when you damn kids were still getting around on your hands and knees) but has emerged over the last 15 years as the best program in the metro area—major or mid-major. The Dutchmen won the America East and made the NCAA Tournament in 2000 and 2001 under Jay Wright, who parlayed his success here into a gig at Villanova, whom he led to the Final Four last year. We’re all very—ohhhh noooo—proud of him.

Wright’s assistant coach and good friend Tom Pecora replaced Wright just as the Dutchmen were moving into the far more competitive Colonial Athletic Association. A few bumpy seasons ensued, but Pecora and the Dutch faithful were rewarded in 2006, when Hofstra made the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team and reached the Sweet Sixteen, where it fell to eventual national champion Florida by three.

Really?

No, but occasional forays into revisionist history keep me from losing my mind.

So what happened in 2006?

The rage-just-bubbling-beneath-the-surface version goes something like this: Hofstra went 12-2 down the stretch, losing only to CAA champion UNC-Wilmington (the second time in the CAA title game), and beat fellow at-large contender George Mason twice in an 11-day span, including in the CAA semis. In the final minute of the latter game, some punk on Mason punched Hofstra’s best player, Loren Stokes, in the nuts.  Said punk was suspended for Mason’s next postseason game.

Amazingly, remarkably, despite the absence of said punk and despite Hofstra’s sterling record against Mason, it was Mason that received an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament and Hofstra that went to the NIT. I am sure the fact Mason’s AD was on the selection committee had nothing to do with it. Mason went on to reach the Final Four and became America’s darlings in the process, proving, once again, that America is full of idiots. The wound is still a bit fresh and I spend approximately 63 percent of my time ranting and raving about Mason and its arrogant, Twitter-averse coach and hoping Hofstra wins its next game against Mason 198-2.

I see. So who, aside from George Mason, is Hofstra’s biggest rival in basketball?

Old Dominion is the rival you can respect. Always well-coached, always competitive, always free of players who punch other players in the nuts and always free of coaches who get all wounded when their Twitter posts are publicized. The Monarchs beat the Dutchmen in the quarterfinals of the NIT in 2006 to earn the trip to Madison Square Garden and edged the Dutchmen by one point in last year’s CAA quarterfinals, but they’re impossible to loathe.

How about in football?

It used to be Delaware, which engaged Hofstra in multiple memorable games—including a pair of I-AA playoff contests, both of which Delaware won—in the mid-to-late ‘90s. But football fuels the engine at Delaware while Hofstra views it as a drag on the bottom line, so the rivalry has faded in recent years.

The best rivalry may be one that could end Saturday. Stony Brook, under the direction of AD and former Hofstra football player Jim Fiore, is no longer content to follow Hofstra’s path and play in the shadow of the Flying Dutch. The Seawolves have big hopes and dreams, particularly in football, yet Hofstra has bigger things in mind for its men’s basketball and men’s lacrosse programs than playing local rivals. It also has a 12-0 advantage in football to protect.

A Cold War between the schools appears to be in progress: Annual games in men’s lacrosse and men’s basketball disappeared off the schedule this year. Is football next? Come out Saturday just in case.

How early should I get there?

Well, kickoff is at 7 p.m., so I’d say…6:59.

Really? Why?

Because meager student support for athletics is a Hofstra tradition unlike any other. Playing Division I-AA football (much like the Pride nickname, we don’t acknowledge FCS here) doesn’t get the juices flowing. There’s no bowl game to play for and the Dutchmen don’t face teams you’ll see every week on ESPN or ABC.

Of course, there is the opportunity to play for a national championship determined on the field, not by a bunch of computers, and the CAA is a remarkable league, one that placed a mind-boggling eight teams in the I-AA preseason top 25. So it’s your loss if you don’t attend football games…and your loss, too, if you don’t get right on the bandwagon when basketball season starts.

There’s national exposure to play for in men’s hoops, yet the pacing of the scheduling, with the bulk of Hofstra’s home games occurring during Intersession, makes it tough to build and sustain student interest. So every February, someone—usually a writer but occasionally Pecora—complains about the lack of support from the student body. Subsequently, students come to realize their time at a Division I school is finite and begin coming out in droves and embracing the team and doing goofy stuff like storming the court after a perfectly routine win. Do not storm the court after a perfectly routine win.

But I’m a big fan of Florida football and UNC basketball.

Don’t be That Guy. I know where you’re coming from—my wardrobe from eighth grade through my second year of community college consisted entirely of Tar Heels duds—but you’re at Hofstra now. Don’t be That Guy who watches I-A football on Saturday afternoons in the fall and Big Six basketball on Wednesdays and Saturdays in the winter and couldn’t identify a single Flying Dutchmen football or basketball player.

The beauty of Hofstra is it ISN’T Florida or UNC. You don’t have to camp out for days to get tickets to games. If you want to paint your chest and get on TV, you will, because nobody else is doing it. You can walk by Pecora on campus and go “Hey, Pecora, what’s up?” and he’ll shake your hand and implore you to come out to a game instead of expressing his displeasure with America’s unmannered youth by trying to kick the crap out of you.

Appreciate the tangible connection you can have with the athletic program, both during and following your time here. Appreciate the loyalty and investment one must make in rooting for a mid-major and embrace the role of the underdog. Because, let’s face it, in the end, we’re all mid-majors, abused by and at the mercy of the Floridas and UNCs of the world.

Wow, good stuff. I’m stoked. I’m going to Shuart Stadium Saturday night and I’m not going to miss a single basketball game in the winter. If I someday become just as passionate and unemployed as you and start a blog called Persistently Prideful, will you add it to your blogroll?

Get off my lawn.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.