Basketball Fervor

With the Cal State Northridge men’s basketball team a victory away from clinching its first berth in the NCAA tournament after Friday night’s 91-74 win over Weber State, basketball fever on campus should be building to a pitch.

Well, let’s just say CSUN’s school spirit is under construction.

Long known as a commuter campus where older students juggle classwork with jobs and kids, CSUN is hardly a sports powerhouse with over-the-top bonfires, pep rallies and marching bands.

But this year, after the Matadors jolted the basketball landscape with a shocking win over UCLA and a close loss to USC, students began jamming the 1,600-seat Matadome gymnasium to cheer for the home team.

For a university that proclaimed itself “not just back but better” after the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake, building school spirit is just another brick in the wall.

“In 1998, hardly anybody went to the games,” said Tony Diaz, a 22-year-old kinesiology major, standing with friends outside the Matadome. “But last season they started coming, and now the games are selling out.”

So what prompted this burgeoning school pride?

Is it an increase of younger students who have more time to hang out on campus after hours and whoop it up for the Matadors?

Possibly.

Is it reaction to a 1999 campus survey that concluded that more than one-third of students are dissatisfied with the sense of community on campus and that half don’t take part in social or cultural activities on campus?

Maybe.

Is it Coach Bobby Braswell’s no-nonsense style that’s pushed his players to the brink of victory in the Big Sky Conference tournament?

Perhaps.

K.C. Robinson, 24, however, said the answer is academic.

“When we beat UCLA on their floor during their home opener, that’s when people opened their eyes to the fact that we have a basketball team, and they’ve been supporting the team ever since.”

The senior recreation major said the cornerstone of CSUN’s newfound school spirit was set hard on the lauded Pauley Pavilion floor as the Bruins, who are ranked 13th, shuffled off after a devastating 78-74 loss.

“That win brought the campus together,” said senior business major Josh Stein, 23. “We had a reason to unite and to come together for a common cause.”

The breakthrough game came during the Matadors’ fifth season under Braswell, whose up-tempo attack has molded the team into a formidable opponent.

With their victory Friday night, they need only to win tonight in their game against Eastern Washington to capture the Big Sky championship and a berth in the NCAA tournament.

Northridge freshmen Nils Nielsen and Stan Douglas, both 19, said they felt they had entered the world of Big Time college athletics Friday morning as they watched media trucks pull up in front of the gymnasium.

Even though CSUN, with its 28,000 students, hasn’t quite reached the basketball-is-life strata occupied by such NCAA dynasties as Duke, North Carolina and Indiana, Nielsen said the tournament was still a pretty big deal.

“You hear that because it’s a commuter school there’s not a lot of school spirit,” he said, “but people are excited.”

Douglas said he’s seen evidence of school pride: more people wearing CSUN sweatshirts, banners hanging in dorms and people looking for basketball tickets.

Still, there were some students on campus Friday who had no idea the Matadors were teetering on the brink of greatness.

“I don’t pay attention to sports at all. I just found out this morning that they were going to have a championship of something,” said Roger Crisanty, 19, looking up from a textbook. “I was like, ‘When did this happen?’ ”

But Chaunte Mayronne, 19, standing with friends amid the lunchtime crowd at the campus pub, said the tournament is “huge.”

“Usually no one comes back to campus on a weekend night,” the psychology major said. “Now, everyone’s coming back.”

The Matadors are champions regardless of the tournament’s outcome, said Jessica Williams, 18.

The players have helped to dispel CSUN’s public image as a quake-ravaged commuter school, the freshman psychology major said.

“We are not known for anything else; now we are known for something whether we win or not,” she said. “It feels good.”