Building A Blueprint?
The 2019-2020 season will mark the second basketball season for Hampton in the Big South. Both men’s and women’s programs finished in the top half of the conference during their inaugural seasons, and are expected to be competitive this year as well.
Interestingly enough, Hampton’s new conference tournament will be taking the place of its first conference tournament shortly. The Big South announced last month it will be playing its conference basketball tournament in Charlotte at the Bojangles Coliseum, which has housed the early rounds of the CIAA Tournament for the past several seasons. Marshall said he, Harvey and the Hampton athletic department are excited about the opportunities that await the program in Charlotte.
“Well again that’s our visionary president understanding the significance of having a neutral site tournament. Having been at the forefront of the CIAA’s heyday and then the MEAC’s heyday with them moving to different locations,” Marshall said.
“We believed that Charlotte was the best place for it, not only because the CIAA was leaving, but also because it’s a destination place. A lot of people want to go to Charlotte. We do have a lot of alumni there, but more importantly there are a lot of fans that I believe may not make the move to Baltimore and would like to come on and cheer on the Pirates.”
Hampton’s move from the MEAC to the Big South was a controversical one, with many questioning whether the school was turning its back on its roots as an HBCU. It’s hard to make that argument with the school strategically keeping HBCU rivalries. Marshall says moving to the Big South has been a learning experience for the school as well as its peer institutions.
“I do believe that people want to come to HBCU institutions. That’s not going to stop,” Marshall said. “But I also think they do like to see diversity in your conference scheduling. I think that it brings competition and that it’s also a cultural education. I think we’ve been able to educate a lot of our Big South members on how not so different Hampton University is from there universities.
It’s an eye-opening experience for them, that Hampton is one of the best mid-sized universities in the nation that happens to be of HBCU decent. I think people respect that and accept that.”
The question for many is whether or not Hampton’s move was simply a one-off, knee-jerk reaction or if it may be a path that more HBCUs pursue.
“I think that our success has made it more appealing or more accepting for other majority conferences to look at HBCU schools and to say that ‘you know what, we’d like to have one in our conference,” he said. “I don’t know if any other schools will leave, but I do think what we’ve been able to do is make it available.”
“Whether or not they do it, I couldn’t say. But I do think it’s now not as big a jump as people would have thought before.”