Playing Powerhouses and Doormats Has its Benefits

Brooklyn’s Polytechnic University, a member of New York’s Division III Skyline Conference, is not, by even the most generous of standards, an athletic powerhouse.

“I’d say we are most predominantly known for our engineering, not our basketball,” head coach Daniel Nigrosaid, with a laugh. “We’re still trying to build up our reputation a bit on the athletic side.”

It was a curious sight, therefore, to see the Blue Jays penciled in as Columbia’s opponent for a Dec. 29 game in Levien Gymnasium. The contest is scheduled one week after a game against national tournament regulars Villanova and three weeks before the start of the Lions’ grueling Ivy League campaign, and it seemed out of place in Columbia’s otherwise demanding quest for a tournament berth.

But such is the nature of scheduling games in the NCAA. While conference fixtures are predictable from year to year and largely scheduled by the league, a team’s nonconference schedule, for the most part, is left for the program to construct on its own.

What follows, then, is a fascinating and multifaceted process in which sporting philosophies, logistical concerns, and interpersonal relationships combine to shape and produce a team’s competitive calendar for a given season.

The Columbia-Polytechnic game is an emblematic end product of such processes. Nigro, in his first year at Polytechnic’s helm, contacted Columbia assistant coach Jim Engles months ago to inquire about the possibility of a game between the teams. Both Engles and head coach Joe Jones had known Nigro for some time previously and agreed that the game could benefit both sides.

“If you look at Division I ball, a lot of teams play Division III schools,” Jones explained. “It’s a great opportunity for those guys to have a chance to play us, and it gives us a chance to try some things that we haven’t tried before and give some guys who haven’t played an opportunity to play.”

Nigro echoed those sentiments and believed that the difficulty programs often face in finding quality games at home factored in Columbia’s decision as well.

“Columbia has us coming in on a Saturday over the break, as opposed to them having to travel thousands of miles to find a game somewhere else,” Nigro said. “I think logistically, it just works better for them.”

For some coaches, though, like Columbia men’s soccer head coach Leo Chappel, travel is a necessary undertaking for a team trying to establish itself on a national level. In August, the Lions opened their season in Virginia, taking on a Cavalier team that reached the Final Four last season. A month later, they faced UC Santa Barbara, the defending national champions, and Loyola Marymount in California. Out of the three games, the Lions emerged with two losses and a draw, but gained invaluable credibility and experience in the process.

“Until we get more established, we have to do a lot more traveling,” Chappel explained. “You have to go on the road, you have to prove yourself in and out of the region, prove that you can play good soccer, and take it from there.”

A strong schedule is even more important, Chappel noted, because of the ramifications it can have on a team’s postseason chances. Even if a team fails to win its league, for example, it may still have an outside chance to make the national tournament if it possesses a high score in the NCAA’s Ratings Percentage Index (RPI), which measures the quality of a team’s schedule.

Finally, there is no better way, in Chappel’s mind, to prepare a team for a strong conference run than by facing top competition in nonconference play.

“We play ranked teams on the road because we need those high-level games that are more physical and played at a higher pace,” Chappel said. “In the Ivy League, you only get one shot at each team.”

Yale basketball’s head coach James Jones seems to be of similar thought. This season, the Bulldogs have one of the toughest schedules for an Ivy League team in recent memory. They will face seven teams that played in the postseason last year, including Stanford, UCLA, Holy Cross, and Kansas. All of those games, furthermore, will be played on the road.

Jones regularly picks the brains of his graduating seniors to collect their opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of the program. One thing that routinely comes up, he revealed, is a fondness for the games they played away against big programs.

“Playing in Pauley Pavilion or at Kansas, those are the experiences they will never forget,” Jones said. “And I think it helps in recruiting, because everybody we recruit wants to play the best in the country.”

How, then, do such nonconference games ultimately come to fruition? At every level, it seems, the fostering of good relationships with other coaches is undeniably essential.

And examples of this abound in the experiences of the coaches interviewed for this piece: the Columbia-Polytechnic game, as discussed before, will be coached by longtime acquaintances. Chappel, who described the coaching world as a “small fraternity,” came to know Virginia coach George Gelnovatch when the former was a Cavalier assistant under Bruce Arena and the latter an assistant at Wake Forest, and secured this season’s opening match on the way to a recruiting trip to Florida. James Jones used a relationship with Mark Gottfried, with whom he coached last summer at the Pan-American games, to schedule a game at Alabama next season.

Additionally, both Joe Jones and Chappel have scheduled games this season against their former employers, Villanova and Santa Barbara, respectively.

“If it’s a good situation for both teams and there’s a guy you know well and you have a good competitive friendship, I think those games can happen, certainly,” Joe Jones explained. “But it has to make sense for both teams.”

Interestingly, until this year, it did not always make sense for top soccer teams to schedule matches against Columbia. NCAA programs often enter into “home and home agreements,” in which one team travels to play another, with the understanding that the favor will be returned the following season. This is one reason why the Columbia basketball team has so many road games on their schedule this year, after a glut of home games last season.

The problem, then, was that the Lions’ home, Columbia Soccer Stadium, was stricken with a notoriously bad pitch on which few teams were willing to play. But with a new FieldTurf playing surface this season, Columbia has reemerged as a desirable opponent.

“When I got here last year, teams did not want to come to New York City and play because of our field,” Chappel said. “We now have a world-class FieldTurf field, soccer only, so that tune has changed.”

It has changed so much, in fact, that both Santa Barbara and Loyola Marymount have agreed to reciprocate Columbia’s West Coast trip and play in New York next season, bringing a quality of soccer to Baker Field that has not been seen in years.

Though the quest for the perfect schedule can, at times, seem like a nightmare, ultimately, amid all of the travel arrangements and RPI anxieties and competitive friendships, there is always a game to be played—even if you are the extreme underdog.

“We’re excited to play at Columbia, even if they are bigger and stronger than us,” Nigro explained. “We have a bunch of guys coming into that gym that are going to play the game as if it was conference final, so Columbia will definitely get a challenge.”

And Joe Jones, with a squad to groom for the Ivy League season, would not want it any other way.