In first Division I season, Queens makes it clear to Charlotte and beyond: ‘We belong’
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Queens’ move to Division I
One year removed from the start of a transition to Division I college athletics, just how smooth has it been for Queens University?
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In first Division I season, Queens makes it clear to Charlotte and beyond: ‘We belong’
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Grant Leonard said he’d never “seen anything like it.”
Gavin Rains called it “of course” one of the year’s most memorable moments.
Cherie Swarthout, who’s in her 17th year with Queens University of Charlotte and her eighth as the school’s athletic director, claimed Queens men’s basketball’s season-opening and Division I-opening 83-82 win over Marshall in November was about as close to perfection as there could’ve been.
“I’m not sure you could’ve scripted it any better,” Swarthout told The Observer earlier this week. “If somebody said, ‘What does your perfect game look like?’ I’m like, ‘Wow, that was it.’ ”
Same goes, perhaps, for the season that has unfolded since.
The Queens men’s basketball team has enjoyed success after success in its first season competing at the Division I level. The Royals (12-4, 2-1 ASUN) are undefeated at home and are on pace to notch their 13th consecutive winning season. More significantly, though: They’re on their way to proving that their leap from Division II dominance to Division I precarity in May 2022 was made on solid ground.
“Most of our players, they know what we’re trying to accomplish, and they have a healthy chip on their shoulder to try to prove to people that they belong at this level,” said Grant Leonard, the team’s head coach. “I think a lot of people doubted them, and we’re trying every day, every practice, every time we prep for another team, to prove that we do belong.”
Building on success
Queens has been a bastion of athletic success for years. The university’s campus can be traversed in a six-minute walk and is nestled in the neighborhood and historic district of Myers Park in Charlotte. It fields 26 sports teams.
Queens has long been an unparalleled power in swimming — the men’s and women’s swim teams have won the past seven national championships. And it has recently grown into a basketball power: The Royals have made the NCAA tournament 15 times in the program’s history, including the past seven in a row.
But 2022 posed new challenges for the men’s basketball program. For one, Queens saw the departure of all-time winningest head coach, Bart Lundy, at the end of last season.
For another, the university announced after the 2021-22 academic year that it would compete at the Division I level for the first time. Queens left the South Atlantic Conference and joined the Atlanta-based ASUN, home of some of the best mid-major basketball in the country.
Considering the challenges, 2022-23 has been remarkably fruitful.
Part of that has to do with its new coach. Leonard is a longtime Lundy assistant, now in his 19th season coaching college basketball. The Illinois native sports a beard and a smile and a day-by-day mindset that shines through in how he talks.
When describing why his program is successful, for instance, the coach used the kind of aphorisms that have been passed down among coaches for generations: “we’re process-oriented;” “we’re going to stack good days on good days;” “we’re trying to get better 1% every day.”
He said that this year’s team possesses the “most competitive spirit of any team I’ve ever coached.”
“We have eight state champions on the team and three or four more guys who have played state championships, so they’ve all won before, and they just don’t know anything else,” Leonard said. “There are times in games when we probably could lay down, and this team just fights more than any team I’ve ever seen. I think people saw it in the Marshall game, they saw it in the Austin Peay game.
“It didn’t matter that we were down double digits in either game. Our guys were going to do whatever they could to win.”
Local feel
One thing about Queens’ roster that differentiates itself from other in-state programs — and perhaps especially from Charlotte-based schools Davidson and Charlotte — is that 10 of its 14 players on the roster are from North Carolina.
Kenny Dye, the team’s senior starting point guard who recorded his 1,500th point against High Point earlier this year, is from Jacksonville, N.C.
AJ McKee, a sophomore starter who averages about 14 points and five rebounds a game, is from Independence High School in Charlotte.
Gavin Rains, a junior big man who went into Thursday’s contest against Bellarmine as the conference’s leading rebounder, is from Trinity, N.C., just outside of High Point.
Rains said that he hasn’t heard the condescending “Where is Queens?” question in a while. Moving up to D1 means a higher profile, even though it “stings” to not have a chance to play for an NCAA tournament berth this year — there’s a four-year mandated reclassification period that stipulates that Queens won’t be eligible for its first Division I March Madness until 2026-27.
The Royals’ inaugural Division I season might be remembered for their season-opening win over Marshall. And perhaps it should. It was a statement win and a triumphant arrival to the sport’s biggest stage all in one, which paved the way for the rest of the season. In Marshall coach Dan D’Antoni’s prescient postgame words: It was “homecoming three times over.”
And that’s part of what makes being part of the first Division I team at Queens special, Rains said, even if it comes with a blinding spotlight at times.
“Just come in and be the team — ignore the noise, ignore the distractions, the things that are happening around us because we are going in that D1 phase,” Rains said when asked how he’s approaching this season. “Just to come out and play how we’re playing throughout the past years I’ve been here. ... Once you step out on that floor, it’s you and your teammates versus another one. No one is better than you. They might have a different jersey; you got the talent, you can do it.”
This story was originally published January 6, 2023 at 7:00 AM.
