Seifter | Drexel boosts Bruised ego

You could peruse every inch of the Big 5 history books, and you would find no indication that Drexel has a men’s basketball team, let alone that its Daskalakis Athletic Center is only a block from the historic Palestra.

No one would accuse Drexel coach Bruiser Flint of being softspoken, but he knows that for all his bold words, nothing he says can change the way his team has been historically ignored as a part of Philadelphia college basketball lore.

To get his program the respect it craves, Flint has taken to making his statements on the court to force people to pay attention.

Fresh off the Dragons’ first ever three-game winning streak against Penn — and a Palestra game in which Drexel’s rowdy student section put the Red and Blue Crew to shame — Flint didn’t have to say a word to make his statement loud and clear.

But he is, after all, Bruiser Flint, so he had a word or two to say anyway.

“Our fans always come down for this game. I mean, they do, it’s right down the street,” Flint said. “It’s you [Penn fans] that don’t like to come down [to games].”

Flint has fought to get all of the Big 5 teams on his schedule, and he likes to point out that Drexel was the last Philadelphia team to defeat Villanova. But in order to compete in the Colonial Athletic Conference, his aspirations have to be higher than defeating a middle-of-the-road Ivy League team like Penn, or even Atlantic 10 teams like Temple and Saint Joseph’s.

“When I first came here, [Penn] had better players than we did,” he said. “But I feel as though we’ve gotta be able to … win a game like that because our players are a little bit better.”

Yet Drexel will still struggle to gain recognition since the Big 5 will probably never be converted into a City 6.

“It was something that was done way back in the day, so there’s nothing we can really do about that,” junior guard Jamie Harris said. “But when we go to play these teams, we use it as motivation that they kind of just count us out.”

Penn sophomore point guard Zack Rosen said that if the Dragons came in with a chip on their shoulder, he didn’t see the effects, and coach Glen Miller would not speculate on any potential inferiority complex.

“I consider them a part of the fabric of college basketball in the city as much as anybody else,” Miller said.

But Flint has struggled to convince Penn to play the annual matchup outside the friendly — and larger — confines of the Palestra on a regular basis. He has already secured a home game against St. Joe’s next year and hopes the Quakers will follow suit.

“That would be a miracle,” Flint said. “To get two Big 5 teams to come to the DAC in one year, oh my goodness, they’d blow up 33rd street.”

Despite the respect he’s gotten from other city coaches, Flint still has one more target — The Daily Pennsylvanian.

“We see what you all write about us — you all show us no respect,” Flint told me and a colleague. “I’m one of them guys, I let [the players] know.”

In fact, Flint went so far as to say that Glen Miller should blame the recent losses on our reporters for providing him with bulletin board material.

“No question about it, he should blame you guys,” Flint chided, “because y’all give us the material for it.”

So if Bruiser Flint is reading this now, he should know that he at least has earned my respect.

Compared to Miller, the lively, humorous Flint is a breath of fresh air. It makes me wonder whether he’d be willing to make one last trek down 33rd street and defect to Penn’s sidelines.

Ari Seifter is a junior computer and information science major from Ellicott City, Md., and is former Associate Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. He can be contacted at dpsports@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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