BY ROBERT ELKIN | With the college basketball regular season in its home stretch with less than a month left, the powerhouse teams from the big schools are vying for berths in tournaments like the NCAA and NIT. But, locally, some smaller colleges are getting ready to compete in a post-season tourney of their own.
A four-team tourney at Baruch College featuring two Manhattan-based colleges — The New School and The Cooper Union — is set for Feb. 21 and 22.
The two Village-area schools play an independent schedule and are not attached to a league. The Hawks and the Narwhals have been getting ready for the Baruch competition as they wind up their regular seasons.
At Cooper Union, Head Coach Rami Said, along with his assistants, Dominick Goj and Josh Mayourian, have been very satisfied with the Hawks players, both individually and as a team.
“The key to our success is teamwork,” Said said. “When we play collectively we know that we are most successful. At the same time we have to help each other out.
The Hawks are led by senior forward Vlad Ciocoi, who, in his fourth season, is tallying an average of 18 points and 11 rebounds a game.
“He has been a fantastic leader, first of all, and is a great teammate, for the rest of the team,” Said stated.
And more important than those figures is that, academically, Ciocoi maintains a G.P.A. of above 3.75. Some of his teammates even have a G.P.A. of 4.0.
Andrew Keane, a sophomore forward, is runner-up in team scoring with a 14-point average and is averaging 14 rebounds a contest. Mathew Smarsh, also a double-figure scorer, is co-captain and a junior forward averaging 10 points and eight boards per game.
Said uses both man-to-man and zone defenses depending on the opponent and flow of the game. He designs his own offense to fit the players’ skills.
Ciocoi said he didn’t originally come from high school to Cooper Union expecting to play much basketball, but he has surprised himself.
As the season is wrapping up, in all the games Cooper Union has won, it seems that the players played a lot smarter, more organized and more disciplined than their opponents did, said Ciocoi, who is the team’s captain.
“We execute our plays and make good decisions,” Ciocoi said. “Most of the games that we do very well in, the point spread is very even. There’s really no big scorer, for it’s a team effort. That kind of communication and discipline that we have is reflected on the academic, too. That’s going to be the big key this season to the upcoming tournament.”
Sophomore forward Andrew Keane said the camaraderie is actually more important than the competition.
“The success of this team is not so much about how many wins that we have,” he said before their 82-47 win over Landmark College of Vermont to increase their record to 8-5. “It’s about the type of relationship we have with each other over the season, and some of us for the past couple of years. It’s nice to have a group of guys like this on the court. We developed friendships with each other through this team, which is more valuable and successful than a winning record.”
That said, there’s one team, in particular, which the Hawks admit they always have designs on.
“Our biggest rivalry over the last 10 to 15 years has been against the Rhode Island School of Design,” Coach Said said. “It’s always a great experience to play them and travel to their home court because they bring their entire school and fan base to the games. It’s the one game of the year that we mark on our calendar, and we want to bring our best game.”
Cooper won their last clash with RISD, 80-64.
Meanwhile, Assistant Coach Mayourian, who graduated last year, returned to help out the Hawks. He was the team’s captain last year.
“I wanted to come back because I knew that they were such great players and they were like family to me,” he said. “I wanted to see how they developed over the past few years. And they definitely improved working together as a team. And their captains — Vlad and Smarsch — have done a great job working with everybody.”
As far as Mayourian is concerned, playing hoops the right way means
“My goals in basketball are to be on a team where defensive communication, being in the right place and boxing-out result in rebounding, turnovers and pushing the ball in for easy baskets.”
