The St. John’s University men’s basketball team is relevant again. And all it took was a billionaire funder and a Hall of Fame coach.
The Red Storm, led by Rick Pitino, recently won the Big East Tournament for the first time in 25 years at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. Now attention turns to a bigger prize: returning to the NCAA tournament as a No. 2 seed with a shot to make the Final Four for the first time since 1985.
The Queens school, which had its heyday under the late coach Lou Carnesecca, will square off against Omaha Thursday, making just its fourth appearance in the ballyhooed March Madness tournament in the last 20 years.
How St. John’s got here, with the program turning around in two seasons and restoring some buzz to college basketball in New York City, spotlights the shifting landscape of NCAA sports in an era when athletes can transfer between schools easily and profit from their name, image and likeness, or NIL.
The NIL floodgates opened in 2021, upending decades of amateurism in college sports and essentially enabling universities and their wealthy benefactors to pay to recruit players from other schools through a program called the transfer portal.
Enter Mike Repole, a 56-year-old St. John’s alumnus who built a fortune founding and selling the Bodyarmor and Vitaminwater sports drinks. Repole, who grew up not far from the St. John’s campus, said he became tired of watching the team’s poor play and decided to do something about it.
“I always thought the basketball team was an opportunity to really market Queens and to market St. John’s University,” Repole said in an interview Wednesday.
St. John’s last made a deep run in the NCAA tournament in 1999, when they were led by Queens native Ron Artest, who went on to a long NBA career and won a title with the Los Angeles Lakers.
But more recently, the school had struggled to draw top players to Queens and was often an afterthought in the competitive Big East.
That changed with the hiring of Pitino who — thanks to Repole’s money — was able to recruit star guards Kadary Richmond and Deivon Smith from Seton Hall University and the University of Utah, respectively. Roughly $4 million was paid to St. John’s players this season.
The spending has helped restore the team to some of former glory from the 1980s, when Carnesecca’s teams with stars like Chris Mullin, Mark Jackson and Walter Berry were the darlings of Big Apple basketball.
“I feel like I’m in a time machine and it’s 1985 when I walk up and down New York City,” Repole said.
Quick turnarounds
The Repole blueprint, which is increasingly common across the NCAA, has allowed college basketball programs that ordinarily would lose out on recruits to programs like Duke and Kentucky to draw top players. And turnarounds can happen fast when teams work the transfer portal to remake their rosters.
“Now you have the opportunity to go play somewhere, make money, and actually be a talented athlete at another school,” said Tim Curran, an NIL agent whose clients have fetched seven-figure windfalls after entering the transfer portal.
The flip side, of course, is that teams can fall apart just as quickly as they come together, with players tempted each year by big offers to jump ship to other schools.
The transfer portal reopens for basketball players on March 24, which will reignite another frenzied hunt for available talent — smack in the middle of the NCAA tournament. Pitino recently said he’s no longer interested in recruiting high school players, meaning he’ll soon be back in the fray looking for talent on other college rosters.
“They’ve brought basketball back to New York City and the Garden, and the first championship in 20 years,” said Bill Carter, an NIL specialist who teaches student athletes how to leverage financial opportunities. “But how do they keep it going?”
