Tara Sullivan

Sports Columnist, @Record_Tara

PISCATAWAY – The atmosphere inside Henry’s Diner is quiet on this Thursday afternoon, a small lunchtime crowd reflecting the fact Rutgers students are on spring break. There are no televisions, so no obvious reminder of the college basketball cacophony that's taken over the sporting landscape during these first two days of the NCAA Tournament. But for Steve Pikiell, who has just finished his first season coaching the Rutgers’ men’s basketball program, there are no reminders needed of what he is missing.

The dormant Rutgers Athletic Center sits only a few hundred yards away, more than enough evidence that Rutgers remains on the outside of March Madness looking in, a frustrating, longstanding perch of basketball futility that dates back to 1991. For those of you not paying attention, that 26-year skid now represents the longest in the nation for any power conference school, a dubious mantle of distinction inherited from once fellow Big Ten member Northwestern, which made this year’s tourney.

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None of this is Pikiell’s fault, and none of it is his doing. But it is his burden.

So Pikiell doesn’t shy away from his newest basketball mission, doesn’t hide from the enormous challenge he faces in rebuilding this program. But perhaps most importantly, he doesn’t doubt for a second that a career already built on changing basketball fortunes can do so once again. After a debut season that included too many on-court improvements to list without making predecessor Eddie Jordan look like an amateur by comparison, after an almost unthinkable first-round win in the recent Big Ten tournament that left a rabid but underserved Rutgers fan base in a state of near euphoria, Pikiell has his sights set squarely forward, on what can still happen at this success-starved school.

“It’s tough to climb the mountain,” Pikiell said between bites of a chicken Caesar wrap and fries, the diet Coke to his left one of the few vices he admits he’d like to get rid of. With the amount of energy he needs for this job, the daily doses of coffee and cola are vital.

“Everyone wants to be in that tournament, there’s over 300 teams and what is it, 68 spots?” he said. “There’s a lot of people not going that are pretty good programs. You have to earn that right, by how you recruit, by how your guys develop, by fan support, you’ve got to earn it, it’s not your birthright. Earn it like Northwestern did. That’s a pretty good university, look how long it took them. They got a great group of kids, a good coach, and they made some history. And I look forward to making history here. It will happen. It really will. It will be exciting when it does, and I can’t wait to celebrate with these fans that have waited so long, the ones that are true blue.”

They are the ones who helped clog his phone with over 300 text messages after the Big Ten tournament win over Ohio State, the ones who stop him in the halls of the RAC and tell them they were about to give up their long-held season tickets but were energized enough about his arrival to change their minds, the ones who, by season’s end, were making the RAC come alive once again, wrecking opponents’ ears with sound cascading from the angled rafters. They were the ones who joined with a revitalized student section to wake up some of Rutgers’ best echoes, to remind the basketball world there is potential here for something more, something better. Pikiell sees that potential – he’s already talked to athletic director Pat Hobbs about pushing those student bleachers even closer to the court – and believes without pause he can do for Rutgers what he did most recently for Stony Brook, which this time last year was playing Kentucky in a first-round NCAA game.

“I’d die to be playing right now, but not so much for me, but for our kids and for Rutgers University,” Pikiell said. “I would die to have Rutgers University experience that right now. But that’s the challenge.”

The litany of embarrassment and institutional missteps plaguing Rutgers basketball for decades is long and ugly. From Jordan and his seeming belief he was running an NBA team, wherein opponents’ pre-game shootarounds were tougher than Rutgers’ practices, to his predecessor Mike Rice and his abusive practice behaviors and ugly language, there was enough recent history to understand the complete athletic makeover that has happened at Rutgers the last two years. But even before that, when Greg Schiano was putting the football program on the national map for all the right reasons, basketball never kept up.

There was Fred Hill, promoted from within and never really in control of his players, and Gary Waters, who deserves huge credit for a tenure that includes an NIT championship appearance but who never quite found his New Jersey recruiting chops, and of course there was Kevin Bannon and his naked free throw shooting contest. There was the time Bannon finally got fired (a year too late) and then-AD Bob Mulcahy let available coach Jay Wright leave campus without a contract, opening the door for Wright’s national title-winning tenure at Villanova.

That gets us to Bob Wenzel, and all the way back to 1991, when Rutgers last earned a ticket to the dance.

Really, for the first time since then, it feels like the tide is changing. Pikiell knows how to do this – anybody who watched the Scarlet Knights win an unprecedented three Big Ten games this season, including one on the road, anyone who saw them play defense with intensity and rebound with abandon, anyone who caught a moment of practice and saw the sweat-soaked jerseys and worn-out lungs, anyone who saw assistant coaches like Karl Hobbs, Jay Young and Brandin Knight working with players or pounding the recruiting pavement understands how much has changed.

“I said to our guys, ‘This could be the team that changes the narrative of Rutgers basketball,’” Pikiell said, eyes widening. “In order to do that, you’ve got to win a road game, got to win a tournament game, got to have a winning non-conference record, do some things other people haven’t done. I’m so excited for our kids. People don’t know, they’ve taken a lot of blows too. They get to puff their chest out, and they’ve earned that, and I’m proud of them. They earned that.”

What Pikiell doesn’t say, doesn’t have to, is that he can change the narrative, too.

“When I took the job, that’s what I want to do,” he said. “It’s a big responsibility. I want them to enjoy the winning. We’re going to do it. I know I got the right staff, and I know the way I think. We’re in the starting blocks of the process.”

Email: sullivan@northjersey.com