The Northern Essex Community College men’s basketball team got off to a ferocious start, winning its first 14 games with a mighty points-per-game average of 89.1 and a strong field goal percentage of 45.1%. The team unfortunately fell to Westchester Community College by only a four-point deficit, but they immediately got back on track, winning their next eight games to earn a very impressive record of 22-1. Returning stars such as Luis Reynoso and budding stars such as Karl Wolfgang and Javien Kirmil have fueled this time throughout the season, with Reynoso achieving a respectable stat line of 19.3 points and 13.6 rebounds per game.
Their coach, Darren Stratton has cemented this team into an absolute powerhouse, including achieving the ranking of #5 in the NJCAA Division III Men’s Basketball Rankings. Stratton has a successful history of playing for NECC and immediately joined the coaching staff after he finished his playing career. The team came up just short in the National DIII NJCAA Championship Bracket but is looking to return again stronger than before. Coach Stratton has been very proud of the way his team has been playing, and when asked about what makes this team so successful, he said “…recruiting good kids. Recruiting unselfish kids, good kids, high character kids. I think that’s the key contributing factor to what we’re doing here at Northern Essex. It’s all the players, like I’ve always told them from the beginning, players win basketball games. Coaches aren’t out there. All coaches do is basically put you in position to win basketball games. The success is all on the players. They’ve done a tremendous job. This year, we had very good leaders in Darwin Santiago, Luis Reynoso and Edwin SamMbaka have done an excellent job with this crew, and I think they come to work every single day, they come focused, and there’s no letups. They’re great bunch of kids to really coach.”
Of course, these players come from various parts of the world, and it really takes a great amount of time and effort to be able to find these stars. Enter Dan Blair, the athletic director who has received plenty of recognition for his ability to recruit high-quality athletes for all of the teams at Northern Essex. “It’s really finding the right coaches, and then, you know, they do the bulk of the recruiting and I help them out when they need it, you know, if it’s talking with the kids, talking with the parent, you know, just kind of if they need that finishing touch to get the kid here. But, you know, I let the coaches do most of it, and, you know, I’m just here to help them if they need it.” He has been described in one newspaper as the first to enter the office and the last one to leave.
This is very significant for Northern Essex, as the success of this basketball team only helps it to expand its popularity amongst aspiring high school basketball athletes who have bright futures ahead of them. Izeah, a student at Northern Essex, expressed the opportunities that this success could provide: “I think that basketball is a unifying sport that brings many together, so NECC is doing a good job putting the spotlight and attention on some of the highlights of what a community college has to offer, so, for them to have such a great basketball team, it really is putting us on the map.” Indeed, it is. The team is part of the Region 21 Division of the NJCAA Division III Conference. With these accolades and the conference that it is in, the program could serve as a phenomenal developmental program for players aspiring to play at a higher level in collegiate athletics in the future.
Stratton admitted that he learned a lot from the team’s visit to the championship last year and feels that his team is much more prepared to make a run for the title this year. “I think we’ll be ourselves if that’s the case. I think we have all the pieces to put it together, and obviously when you get to the national tournament, you take Brookdale Community College who’s number one in the country, they have six kids that scored over 1,000 points in high school. We don’t have one that scored over 1,000 points in high school. We recently just had Luis Reynoso do it, you know, at the junior college level, but, in high school, he didn’t do it. So, I think when you get to that level, you need some luck, obviously, but also you need to be prepared. I feel, last year, if we do get an opportunity to go there this year, there’s some things I’m going to do differently that I learned from my first experience going out there. But, also, we had a lot of weaknesses that, basically, teams could exploit. This year, we tried to play a tougher schedule. This year, we added a few pieces that were missing from last year’s team that I think that we can play any kind of style.” With a new, revamped team, there seems to be a lot of confidence that this team can win the championship this season. It is truly amazing that so many NECC teams have been able to achieve great success, and the future looks very bright, especially for this men’s basketball team.
