1985-86 NCAA TOURNAMENT BRACKET
JERSEY CITY, NJ (NJCUGothicKnights.com)…It was the team that started it all for Hall-of-Fame head coach Charles Brown. And 25 years after guiding the New Jersey City University men's basketball team to the first of two NCAA Division III Final Four appearances, the 1985-86 Gothic Knights will be honored at two events on campus on Saturday, January 29.
The quarter century celebration for the then-Jersey City State College squad will include a reunion brunch with former players and coaches at 1 p.m. in the Gilligan Student Union. At halftime of the NJCU/Rutgers University-Camden men's game, the Final Four team will also be honored in a ceremony on “Coach Charlie Brown Court” at the John J. Moore Athletics and Fitness Center.
After winning 18, 17 and 17 games in Brown's first three seasons at JCSC, the Gothic Knights won seven of their first eight games in the 1985-86 season en route to a 24-8 record and 15-3 in the conference. The team registered the first of eight 20-win seasons under Brown and captured the first of five New Jersey Athletic Conference championships.
The high-scoring Knights averaged 90.6 points per contest and scored 100 or more points in a game an incredible nine times—one year before the introduction of the three-point line in NCAA basketball. The club produced three winning streaks of five or more games, including an eight-game run in January 1986.
For Brown, the 1985-86 team set the frame work for some very successful teams throughout the rest of the decade and his career. “We established a tradition of family, and excellent individual and team play,” Brown recalled. “Those are things we established with those teams and it just carried on. Players came in and liked what we did, especially with the family atmosphere.”
JCSC posted comfortable wins over then William Paterson College (70-62) and Trenton State College (87-77) in the NJAC Tournament to claim the conference title.
In the NCAA Regionals, the Knights defeated Roanoke College, 67-61 and Upsala College, 69-64. On March 8, 1986 in an Elite 8 game played at Saint Peter's College, JCSC punched its ticket to the Final Four with a convincing 83-69 win over then- Southeastern Massachusetts University (now Mass-Dartmouth).
In the NCAA semifinals on March 15, 1986, JCSC had the difficult task of defeating #1 ranked and 1985 national runner-up Potsdam State, and the Knights held a modest lead in the contest before dropping a two-point heartbreaker, 91-89. Nebraska Wesleyan University topped JCSC in the national third place game the next day, 97-93.
Brown, who on January 28 will become the second person in school history inducted into the NJCU Athletics Hall of Fame for a second time—and the first to do so as a student-athlete and coach—knew he had a talented roster that season, including a core group that was part of his first recruiting class when he returned to his alma mater as head coach in 1982-83.
“I thought we could win the conference championship. Our goal was to win 20 games and the conference championship every year. By that time [the 1985-86 season] I knew we were a pretty good team and once you get into the NCAAs, anything goes. We lost to the team that won the national title and we outplayed them. We had a seven or eight point lead and lost it and lost the game by two.”
That talented squad included current NJCU Hall of Famers and team senior co-captains Dwayne West and Steve Wilder, co-captains of that club, and standout junior guard Johnny Mayers. Mayers and Wilder are the No. 3 and No. 4 ranked scorers in program history with 1,912 and 1,706 points, respectively, while West, whose brother David West is a current NBA All-Star for the New Orleans Hornets, generated 1,075 points in his career.
The late Dennis Goodson delivered 177 assists as a junior point guard that season while sophomore center Todd Schwartzman pulled down seven boards per game in the middle. Freshman forward Jack Cipriano, junior guard Derrick Watkins and junior forward Dennis Mayes scored 195, 187 and 123 points, respectively that season. The squad also received contributions from seniors Leon Banks and Franklin Taylor, junior Reggie Watkins, sophomore guards Joseph Macchi, and Rodney Rowland and rookie John Mercier.
Brown, who still keeps in contact with most of his players, often sees members of the team at alumni events, particularly annual alumni games, on campus. Players like West, Wilder, Mayers, Schwartzman and the Watkins brothers were part of his first recruiting classes.
Looking back 25 years later, Brown's first conference championship and the first of 12 appearances in the NCAA Tournament, came down to the dedication of the players and coaching staff.
“They came in as freshmen and it was the combination of their hard work over the years. We were successful because the kids worked hard.”
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