Saint Peters has a new coach and a mostly new roster, but the Peacocks still want to fly

JERSEY CITY, N.J. — Last spring, days after Saint Peter’s was eliminated from the NCAA Tournament following a nearly miraculous run to the Elite Eight, Bashir Mason was standing in a Starbucks when he received a call from Shaheen Holloway, then still the Peacocks head coach. Would he be interested in the job at Saint Peter’s, Holloway asked him.

It hadn’t even been a week since Saint Peter’s shocked the world, and change was underway. Holloway was already set to take over at Seton Hall, but he sought out his successor as one of his last pieces of work for the school he helped make famous during two long weeks in March.

Mason and Holloway had been friends for over two decades, each high school basketball stars in New Jersey and now college coaches, and Mason knew first-hand the rigors of leading a program in a low-major conference. He had been at Wagner for 10 years and won three Northeast Conference regular season championships. Despite Saint Peter’s recent success, Mason said he would be interested only if two key factors were fulfilled at a program known for operating on small budgets and in difficult circumstances. Both centered around a commitment from the school, not only financially, but in sustaining the kind of success it had achieved last season.

A week and a half later, Mason agreed to the job. He takes over at a prosperous time for Saint Peter’s. The school will raise an Elite Eight banner Monday night at Run Baby Run Arena, but most of the team that brought them so much is gone. It’s not unusual for the coach to depart after a Cinderella run, yet so has most of the roster. The stars of last year’s run are strewn across the country, a byproduct of the transfer portal era — Daryl Banks III is at St. Bonaventure, Doug Edert is at Bryant and KC Ndefo joined Holloway at Seton Hall. These Peacocks will have four new transfers and two freshmen.

Now, the year after its miraculous run, Saint Peter’s is trying to show it is for real and here to stay, empowered by the benefits of two weeks in March. Mason isn’t trying to disassociate from that, despite not being in Jersey City for it.

“Yeah, I wasn’t the coach here; but there’s an expectation, right?'” he said last month, sitting in his corner office at the Yanitelli Center. “Saint Peter’s made an Elite Eight run. On November 7, I’m anticipating it being a packed house of people wanting to see Saint Peter’s play. As a Division I basketball player, how cool is that? You got people that want to show up and see you play. Whether you were here or you weren’t here you have to embrace that. You want to rise to that level and perform and show that, hey, new head coach, different players, what I like to call it is the same old same Saint Peter’s.”

Bashir Mason had built a successful program at Wagner but embraced the opportunity at Saint Peter’s. (Matthew OHaren / USA Today)

This is a homecoming for Mason. He was raised here, growing up on Lexington Avenue, which he said is “probably the worst street in Jersey City.”

But when the job came open, Mason said he didn’t know much about the school. He toured the campus and the buildings for the first time in April, before taking the job, and saw its proximity to the downtown waterfront and New York City. He also started hearing about Saint Peter’s from his family and friends, too, listening to their tales about the famed 1968 team and seeing their pictures and excitement. Mason had lived his whole life without those stories, until then.

He has started to mold Saint Peter’s into his vision, which differs in some ways from how the Peacocks played under Holloway. Losing a significant portion of the team gave him a fresh start; he took over knowing he was likely to lose most of his main contributors to the portal and only tried to retain one player. He points out that last season’s team, which went 22-12 and finished second in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, averaged 67 points per game, while his Wagner teams scored in the 70s.

“If we weren’t scoring in the 70s last year, I was upset,” Mason said. “The roster with the transfers gave me an opportunity to bring some players in that I thought could defend and be tough, but also put the ball in the basket. It’s not ideal walking into a situation where you need to fill a roster with four or five guys, but I was excited about that because it gave me a chance to again make it in my image.”

Toughness and grit are still prized. He keeps a basketball from his first win at Wagner in his office; the score imprinted on it is prehistoric: 38-36. He wants to lead the MAAC in field goal percentage defense and rebounding.

At a practice last month, players nearly took out the scorer’s table at center court fighting for a loose ball during a drill. When the ball rolled under it, two players dived in, then a few more until there were seven of them, all scrapping for it and the table had to be pushed away from its position.

“F— that scorers table,” one player yelled.

𝐏𝐆'𝐬 𝐆𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐈𝐭 😤😤#StrutUp🦚 | #Toughness pic.twitter.com/r3fy8w83rW

— Saint Peter's Men's Basketball (@PeacocksMBB) October 25, 2022

Mason gets to experience the benefits of the newfound fame Saint Peter’s now owns. Recruiting is simpler, and he honed his pitch as he worked the transfer portal.

“It’s easy,” he said. “I didn’t have to (pitch). ‘Saint Peter’s went to the Elite Eight. Did you watch the game?’ No, but the name recognition early when I got here and you pick up the phone and you’re calling guys, there was excitement on the other phone that Saint Peter’s was actually calling, so that was pretty cool.”

There are tangible improvements, too, for a program that had always struggled financially, behind even its peers, let alone Kentucky or Purdue. Mason wanted to make sure that those would be in place before he left Wagner, a switch he at least initially considered a lateral move because of the conferences and his comfort there.

The tournament run has been a boon to the athletic department’s coffers. The department was so underfunded last year that Rachelle Paul, the athletic director, conscripted her husband to help out. The NCAA asked for the travel party list weeks ahead of the tournament, and Holloway wanted to keep it small; Paul offered her husband a spot only if he agreed to also work.

He became the one responsible for tickets. Saint Peter’s had a small family-only group for the first game, but it started growing with each game. By the Sweet 16, they were overflowing for the game in nearby Philadelphia. She and her husband were in their room until nearly tip-off fulfilling electronic ticket orders.

“It was totally outrageous,” Paul says. “I tell people this all the time. I still, on Nov. 1, have not yet digested all that happened. Because it happened so quickly.”

Saint Peter’s has been able to expand because of the money made during it, though. It added another person to the strength and conditioning department. The run helped move along conversations that led to a new healthcare partnership deal. There has been an increase in donor and alumni engagement, and season ticket sales for 2022-23 have tripled since last year. Brand recognition is up; opposing teams are finally all using the newest logo for Saint Peter’s on their schedules instead of the old one. The head coaching search, Paul said, had a better field of candidates than if there had been no March run.

Paul said she tells every interviewee they must know what they are getting into. “We are a limited-resource institution … Our budget leaves a lot to the imagination,” she said. But things are getting better.

Mason said the operating budget for the men’s basketball staff has more than doubled from last year. Salaries have increased.

Travel will be easier. The Peacocks used to take vans to local games and always drove back afterward; this season they will take buses, and any game more than an hour away is now an overnight trip.

“In terms of what the run did, I think it kind of caught us up to speed in terms of how we need to be operating to make sure that these players are having a really good Division I experience,” Mason said. He didn’t experience the hardships of previous administrations, but he said he’s been able to implement new ideas and what he had grown accustomed to at Wagner. “I think it was normal for everybody else,” he said. “But just the way things were being operated here were a little bit behind, so that even makes the run a little bit more just special. And in that regards, what they were able to do based off of how they had to operate was tremendous.”

The most important part in maintaining all of these improvements will be more winning. Mason is insistent on nothing less. At Wagner, he won with a recruit-and-develop approach he thought would allow him to compete for and win a conference title roughly every three years, and he did just about that.

He thinks, even with the portal changing roster construction across the sport, that he can “mimic exactly what we did at Wagner” and build relationships with players that allow him to break through.

Mason likes the pressure that comes with the new expectations at Saint Peter’s. Paul said that success is critical.

She doesn’t just want Saint Peter’s to be good. She needs it. For the school to be near the top of the MAAC and to compete for conference championships every year.

“In order to keep this trajectory going we have to continue to win, we have to continue to stay relevant,” she said. “We cannot fall back into irrelevance.”

(Top photo of Jaylen Murray: Trevor Ruszkowski / USA Today)

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