NEW YORK (AP) — The NYU women’s basketball team is on a run few teams have ever seen.
The No. 1 ranked Violets have won 50 consecutive games, dating to last season’s undefeated NCAA Division III national championship season, to tie for the 15th-longest run in NCAA women’s basketball history for any division. It’s the longest active streak in men’s or women’s basketball in the NCAA.
NYU got No. 50 on Friday night at home, 80-58 over the University of Chicago, to tie Amherst for the ninth-longest streak in Division III history.
Even with all the success, the last thing the team and its coach is focused on is the streak.
“The team this year is so different. The journey we’ve been on has been like putting together a different puzzle. In my mind, I don’t equate that we’re on a run as a program,” NYU coach Meg Barber said. “This team is doing its own special thing. Every game makes me nervous.”
The nerves don’t last long most nights. Before Friday night against Chicago, the Violets had only trailed once this season, a 5-2 deficit to Case Western last month. NYU ended up winning 107-31. Chicago held early 3-2, 5-4 and 7-6 leads before NYU pulled away.
Before returning to her alma mater seven years ago, Barber had given up on coaching. She went to law school for a year after spending time as an assistant at Temple. She was happy with her new career path until she received a call from her former coach at NYU, Janice Quinn, who was the school’s senior women’s administrator. Quinn offered her a chance to coach.
“I was like, you’ve got to be kidding me, if there’s one job that I would forgo law school that was it,” Barber said. “It’s not to just say the memories, but it’s just what I knew this place meant to me and what I knew it could be for the next generation. It felt like the perfect fit for me as a coach and just as a professional for my career.”
The school has undergone change since Barber’s playing days in the late 1990s. A few years ago, NYU rebuilt its athletic facility in Greenwich Village with a price tag of nearly $1.3 billion. It also has classrooms, student and faculty housing and state-of-the-art performing art spaces.
The teams had to play elsewhere from 2016-23 before the opening in 2023. It’s not just women’s basketball that has been successful. Men’s basketball is ranked No. 3 in Division III, and men’s volleyball is No. 1. Women’s volleyball reached the Final Four the first year that the building opened.
While it was being built, Barber had to convince recruits to come to the school. One of those is star Natalie Bruns. Barber took Bruns across the street from the current gym and showed her renderings of what could be.
“It was beyond a court, it was more about, the girls we were gonna be playing with, the culture we were being recruited to,” Bruns said. “So, you know, having this vision come to life means everything. But also just stepping into a program when you’re 18, with the kind of support that we had, is, immeasurable.”
Bruns was key in the championship run last year and had the opportunity to take advantage of the extra year the NCAA offered to all athletes because of COVID-19. She had a few Division I offers, but decided to stay at NYU to get a master’s degree in cybersecurity.
“I wasn’t able to find (the master’s) at some of the other options I was exploring and then obviously, I had a lot of success with NYU over the past three years, and, I had a lot of fun, too,” Bruns said. “So I just wanted to come back and do it one more time to be with these girls, play with some of my best friends, and like, get the most out of the year that I have left.”
She wasn’t the only player to take a fifth year at NYU. Barber saw Jamie Behar was in the transfer portal after playing four years at Lehigh. She was looking to get a second master’s in sports business, so NYU was the perfect fit. Behar made the rare transition from Division I to Division III.
“I just felt like this is the best fit in terms of basketball and academics,” Behar said. “I think there’s just a stigma around D1, D3 where it’s really just guiding the school.”
NYU has given Behar something that Lehigh wasn’t able. The Violets are in the University Athletic Association, which has teams in Chicago, New York, Boston, St. Louis and Atlanta, so the team flies to most of its conference games.
“In the Patriot League, everything was close enough to drive,” Behar said. “So I think the flying piece is something that is new to me. It’s a really cool experience to be able to fly and kind of do what they do here.”
Behar had an athletic scholarship at Lehigh and said that NYU finds other ways to help their athletes pay for tuition, which is just under $63,000.
“There’s definitely grants and other aspects from NYU that they look to help their student-athletes and just normal students with as well,” Behar said.
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