MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Pat Coleman]

I didn't get the opportunity to scout out locker rooms, etc. There is plenty of seating for a pod and it is a fantastic old-timey atmosphere. I would definitely love it if I were a North Central fan. But that doesn't mean it couldn't use some upgrades, yes.

I would think that if this building were declared insufficient to host a four-team pod that we would have heard by now.

I am sure that ADA issues prevent the school from doing some upgrades -- they would have to make the upper floors wheelchair accessible if they were to make changes to the building. (Apologies if I missed an elevator.)

[devildog29]

http://www​.peasoupandersens.net

Don't know how the split pea soup is in Skokie, but if you're ever driving up the central California coast in the wine country north of Santa Barbara, stop in here in Buellton for some phenominal pea soup. Then, you can drive 5 minutes over to Solvang and have some Danish aebleskivers and kringle.

[devildog29]

Trying to format that link on my phone is impossible, so if any of you HOFers want to fix it, please be my guest.

[USee]

NCC has to prepare to do battle with a UWW roster full of stars including:

Luke "Walton" Knoble
Eric "Snow" Bryson
Quardell "Only the good die" Young
Darnell "Devin" Harris
Alex "English" Merg

And off the bench:

KJ "Tyreke" Evans, Patrick "Ewing" Souter, Reggie "Miller-Chick" Hearn, Cody "Zeller" Odegaard

a balanced and deep squad to say the least.

[Rafi]

I didn't get the opportunity to scout out locker rooms, etc. There is plenty of seating for a pod and it is a fantastic old-timey atmosphere. I would definitely love it if I were a North Central fan. But that doesn't mean it couldn't use some upgrades, yes.

I would think that if this building were declared insufficient to host a four-team pod that we would have heard by now.

I am sure that ADA issues prevent the school from doing some upgrades -- they would have to make the upper floors wheelchair accessible if they were to make changes to the building. (Apologies if I missed an elevator.)

Pat - You didn't miss any elevators.....there aren't any.  That is the true issue with Gregory renovations.....but, I think they can get away with not making any ADA upgrades for upstairs if they don't touch that and only install some permanent bleachers downstairs.

I don't know what the school's priority list is (some others have weighed in on that), Gregory really does need something.  Except on game day when the temporary bleachers and chairs are set up, it just doesn't seem/feel like a basketball arena, which I think impacts how current students and basketball recruits view it.

[AO]

Greg:  I don't think you will find a post of mine concerning split pea soup.  I think someone commented, knowing that I live in Skokie, which at one point had more Holocaust survivors per capita than any community in the nation, has a large large Jewish presence.

Earlier in 2013 I visited the Holocaust Museum and Education Center to watch the world premier of Skokie: Invaded, But Not Forgotten.  The movie focused on the group of neo-Nazis that wanted to march in Skokie in the late 1970s.  The Illinois chapter of the ACLU, led by a Jew, represented the head of the "social movement."  The movie had lots of archival footage and interviewed survivors and the ACLU attorneys who are now at least 75 years old.  WTTW has aired the movie since.  I recommend the movie (59 minutes).

I find it kind of odd that Skokie's Niles North HS currently offers more sections of Hebrew than any other foreign language and does not offer Greek or Latin.  However, I don't think the varsity boys basketball team has a single Jew.  I went to their game last night against top-seeded Maine South.  NN's star, Malachi Nix, passed NPU alum Nick Williams as the program's all-time leading scorer earlier this year.  (Williams made a pre-game presentation after his scoring record had been broken.)  Nix, who scored 39 points in the regional final last week against Loyola in Loyola's own gym (30 in the second half), finished with 18 points en route to a 45-44 victory against Maine South. 

I'm trying to get Malachi to go to North Park.

How could a kid named Malachi not be Jewish?

[AndOne]

Daily Herald article on Saturday's North Central and Wheaton games with comments by coaches Raridon and Schauer.

http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20130306/sports/703069602/?interstitial=1

[matblake]

Earlier in 2013 I visited the Holocaust Museum and Education Center to watch the world premier of Skokie: Invaded, But Not Forgotten.  The movie focused on the group of neo-Nazis that wanted to march in Skokie in the late 1970s.  The Illinois chapter of the ACLU, led by a Jew, represented the head of the "social movement."  The movie had lots of archival footage and interviewed survivors and the ACLU attorneys who are now at least 75 years old.  WTTW has aired the movie since.  I recommend the movie (59 minutes).

It must be on PBS Stations nationwide because I believe I saw that here in Detroit on WTVS.  I second the recommendation.

[huckleberry]

Darnell "Devin" Harris

USEE thot I would see   Darnell "Bill" Harris here

[matblake]

http://www​.peasoupandersens.net

Don't know how the split pea soup is in Skokie, but if you're ever driving up the central California coast in the wine country north of Santa Barbara, stop in here in Buellton for some phenominal pea soup. Then, you can drive 5 minutes over to Solvang and have some Danish aebleskivers and kringle.

Never been, but my Dad continues to rave about it several years later.

[TitansIWU]

Greg:  I don't think you will find a post of mine concerning split pea soup.  I think someone commented, knowing that I live in Skokie, which at one point had more Holocaust survivors per capita than any community in the nation, has a large large Jewish presence.

Earlier in 2013 I visited the Holocaust Museum and Education Center to watch the world premier of Skokie: Invaded, But Not Forgotten.  The movie focused on the group of neo-Nazis that wanted to march in Skokie in the late 1970s.  The Illinois chapter of the ACLU, led by a Jew, represented the head of the "social movement."  The movie had lots of archival footage and interviewed survivors and the ACLU attorneys who are now at least 75 years old.  WTTW has aired the movie since.  I recommend the movie (59 minutes).

I find it kind of odd that Skokie's Niles North HS currently offers more sections of Hebrew than any other foreign language and does not offer Greek or Latin.  However, I don't think the varsity boys basketball team has a single Jew.  I went to their game last night against top-seeded Maine South.  NN's star, Malachi Nix, passed NPU alum Nick Williams as the program's all-time leading scorer earlier this year.  (Williams made a pre-game presentation after his scoring record had been broken.)  Nix, who scored 39 points in the regional final last week against Loyola in Loyola's own gym (30 in the second half), finished with 18 points en route to a 45-44 victory against Maine South. 

I'm trying to get Malachi to go to North Park.

Just a minor correction, it is called Skokie: Invaded but not conquered

Here is the trailer... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8X8Q0pzwyw

[Gregory Sager]

My ears were burning... I will remind those on the board that the feeling generally is not mutual from a Wheaton perspective.  We don't typically harbor severe animosity towards NPU

Yup. And all the more reason why you folks angry up our blood.

- except perhaps in recent years on the soccer pitch.

God bless soccer. And God bless Sweden. Vikingarna är bäst!

Where is North Park located anyway?   

North Park Universitet ligger i hörnet av Foster och Kedzie vägar.

Duh!

The NP alums at church here in Detroit seem to know when Wheaton has lost a basketball game.   Strange phenomenon.

The NPU grapevine never rests ... especially when Wheaton loses and, thus, Te Deums need to be sung.

[Gregory Sager]

I find it kind of odd that Skokie's Niles North HS currently offers more sections of Hebrew than any other foreign language and does not offer Greek or Latin.  However, I don't think the varsity boys basketball team has a single Jew.  I went to their game last night against top-seeded Maine South.  NN's star, Malachi Nix, passed NPU alum Nick Williams as the program's all-time leading scorer earlier this year.  (Williams made a pre-game presentation after his scoring record had been broken.)  Nix, who scored 39 points in the regional final last week against Loyola in Loyola's own gym (30 in the second half), finished with 18 points en route to a 45-44 victory against Maine South. 

I'm trying to get Malachi to go to North Park.

So are Tom Slyder and Cordell Henry.

How could a kid named Malachi not be Jewish?

Does he look Jewish to you?

(If he came to NPU, I think that Malachi Nix would be the coolest name in CCIW basketball history -- cooler even than C.J. Goldthree. Malachi Nix ... it sounds like the name of a secret agent or of a private detective out of a '40s film noir.)

[Gregory Sager]

One issue that has not been discussed, is a problem that has plagued North Central for decades, and that is name recognition.  Even when I attended NC in the 80s, you could go to the Fox Valley Mall and people had never heard of it.  When I moved to Florida and people asked me where I attended undergrad, and I told them North Central----it was 12-13 years before I ever ran into a person who had ever heard of the place (in the 80s it would help to tell them that it was in the same conference as Augustana, IWU and Wheaton).

This is a problem that affects the vast majority of D3 schools, not just North Central. Aside from the top-tier liberal arts colleges such as Williams, Amherst, Grinnell, and Carleton, and the big-name research universities like the UAA schools, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, and MIT, most D3 schools toil in anonymity. Those that are out in the country or in small cities tend to have good name recognition in their own backyards, but this is still a division in which most schools are not known by the general public outside of a pretty narrow radius around their campuses.

Wheaton is really the one CCIW school that enjoys wide name recognition from coast to coast, owing to its link to Billy Graham and its status as the de facto evangelical school of choice when it comes to media coverage of the evangelical movement.

So, while track and cross country will always be important to NC, and great sports both to watch and participate as an athlete, the 25 or so, national championships have never solved that problem.  But the interesting part is that in the past decade, a number of people have suddenly heard of NC.  A couple of years ago I ran into a two lawyers at the Miami courthouse who asked if I had attended NC and went on to tell me how one was a Mount Union alum (basketball player) and the other a Wash. U grad (baseball player).  I now regularly have this experience.  And, I recognize that my experience may or may not reflect the surveys on this issue---but I have to think that the football success has had some impact.

I don't think it does. The Wash U baseball player's knowledge of North Central is probably either because: a) he played against the Cardinals; or b) he was aware of the Cardinals due to regional rankings, since both the Cardinals and the Bears have had solid baseball programs in recent years. The Mount Union basketball player is probably aware of NCC because of d3hoops.com. As far as I can tell, that's where a substantial amount of public awareness comes from, as far as name recognition of D3 schools by alumni of other D3 schools is concerned. Don't underestimate the impact that the d3sports.com family of websites has had upon making D3 people aware of other D3 schools.

So what would a basketball national championship do for the profile of the school?  Especially, at the D1 Final Four site?  How about a final four?  How many marketing and advertising dollars is it worth?  Could you even buy this kind of name recognition? How would that impact donations, applications and good will?  If a million people learn of North Central on ESPN---what is the value?

Much, much less than you think. North Park's 1980 championship win was on ESPN back in the early days of the network (Dick Vitale called the game, in fact). North Park's 1985 championship was carried on a cable network as well. You'd think that five national championships in basketball within the span of a decade would dramatically improve NPC's public visibility. It didn't. There was an incremental increase -- some hardcore sports fans in Chicagoland would recognize the name of the school, due to the Vikings getting ten seconds at the end of the TV evening sports segment in March or a story buried in the back of the Tribune or Sun-Times sports section. But all that success hardly made a dent in the consciousness of Chicagoland sports fans as a whole, much less the general population. D3 sports took a back seat to pro and major college sports then (and to high school sports, too), and it still does today.

Don't kid yourself that a North Central national championship in basketball would make a difference in terms of your alma mater's name recognition.

[Drake Palmer]

I find it kind of odd that Skokie's Niles North HS currently offers more sections of Hebrew than any other foreign language and does not offer Greek or Latin.  However, I don't think the varsity boys basketball team has a single Jew.  I went to their game last night against top-seeded Maine South.  NN's star, Malachi Nix, passed NPU alum Nick Williams as the program's all-time leading scorer earlier this year.  (Williams made a pre-game presentation after his scoring record had been broken.)  Nix, who scored 39 points in the regional final last week against Loyola in Loyola's own gym (30 in the second half), finished with 18 points en route to a 45-44 victory against Maine South. 

I'm trying to get Malachi to go to North Park.

So are Tom Slyder and Cordell Henry.

How could a kid named Malachi not be Jewish?

Does he look Jewish to you?

(If he came to NPU, I think that Malachi Nix would be the coolest name in CCIW basketball history -- cooler even than C.J. Goldthree. Malachi Nix ... it sounds like the name of a secret agent or of a private detective out of a '40s film noir.)

First of all, Malachi Nix is an awesome name and would certainly make the Palmer All-MIAC Freshman name team in Minnesota. 

Secondly, let me point out former St. Thomas All-American



Isaac Rosefelt

Adopted by a Jewish family as an infant and the last I heard was playing professional ball in Israel.