Winless Iona still fights good fight

NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. – The bagpipers, at least, have not given up on Iona basketball.

The Gaels are 0-19, the only winless men’s team in Division I. But Dan Noonan, Mike Glackin and the rest of Iona’s bagpipe band will be skirling in the stands today when the team tries to avoid its 20th straight defeat.

“It’s not like they haven’t been playing hard,” Glackin said. “They’re keeping their spirits up and playing Iona basketball, playing hard, playing all out.”

Like the school motto says: certa bonum certamen (fight the good fight).

If there’s such a thing as a competitive 0-19 team, it’s the Gaels. In each of their last four games, they’ve come excruciatingly close. They lost three games in overtime and the fourth by a point.

“It’s very frustrating, but you try to learn from it,” said Jeff Ruland, the ninth-year coach whose teams averaged 17 wins a season until this year.

Last year, the Gaels won 23 games and took the conference title to advance to the NCAA tournament. They hung with eventual Final Four team LSU for most of their first-round game, leading by five points at halftime. LSU won by 16, and the Gaels haven’t won since.

Fans on Iona’s tidy, tucked-away campus in New Rochelle, 3 miles north of the New York City line, seem to be understanding.

“Give them a couple of years,” said Noonan, who admitted that friends at other schools have been “rubbing it in my face a little.

“Maybe it’s not so exciting this year, but we won’t be down for long,” he said.

Ruland called the fan support “fabulous.”

Since 1974-75, when Iona had its fewest wins (four), the Gaels have had just one season with fewer than 10. The warning signs went up this year when the team’s three starting guards graduated and its two most experienced veterans went down with injuries.

Of the remaining players, “one played 20 minutes a game last year and one played eight,” Ruland said. “Everyone else hasn’t played Division I basketball.”

Another factor may be that Iona played its first eight games on the road and has played just five at home so far.

But to go winless would be an embarrassment for a team with a basketball tradition that includes eight NCAA appearances and such coaches as Jim Valvano and Tim Welsh. There is also Ruland, who was one of country’s top players at Iona and went on to become an NBA All-Star. Iona won a game in 1957 when the governor of Mississippi refused to let Ole Miss play Iona because Iona had a black player.

Now, Iona is in danger of joining undistinguished company. Prairie View in 1995 and Savannah State in 2005 both finished 0-28. Ruland pledges his team won’t go without a victory.

“The kids are working hard and we’re going to break through soon,” he said. “It’ll kind of get the pressure off and open up the floodgates.”

Ten regular-season games remain. Today’s is against 11-8 Loyola of Maryland. Iona still has home-and-away games against St. Peter’s, which is 3-16.