When you think of New York City basketball, certain names and places immediately come to mind. Walt Frazier, Bernard King and Patrick Ewing patrolling the Madison Square Garden cedar. Latter-day torchbearers like Stephon Marbury, Jalen Brunson, Chamique Holdsclaw and Breanna Stewart. The rich lore beyond the storied college haunts of Rose Hill Gym and Carnesecca Arena that stretches from Harlem’s Rucker Park to the Cage on West 4th Street to Dyckman Oval in Washington Heights, the blacktop domains of playground legends like Earl “The Goat” Manigault, Pee Wee Kirkland and Rafer “Skip To My Lou” Alston.
What you don’t normally think about is New York University, the downtown school better known for its academic clout, interwoven Greenwich Village campus, celebrity alumni and $5.9bn endowment than for any of its sports teams. Yet it’s here, inside a 2,000-seat basement gym tucked two floors beneath Bleecker Street, where the Violets have quietly built one of the most dominant programs in college basketball today.
Three years have come and gone since the NYU women’s team last lost a game. Over the weekend they brushed aside Messiah University in the second round of the NCAA Division III Women’s Basketball Tournament for their 89th consecutive victory – surpassing the all-time men’s record of 88 straight wins set by UCLA from 1971 to 1974.
Going nearly 1,100 days without defeat is remarkable enough. More extraordinary is where it’s happened: at a university with an enrollment of more than 60,000 students but no athletic scholarships, where until recently the team commuted by subway to “home” games held in borrowed gyms across the city.
The driving force behind the transformation is head coach Meg Barber, a former NYU player and team captain who returned to her alma mater in 2018 determined to turn the Violets into a national contender. The team didn’t play a true home contest during her first five seasons as they awaited the pandemic-delayed completion of an on-campus gymnasium. That wait finally ended in 2023 with the opening of the John A Paulson Center, the $1.2bn multi-use complex a few blocks east of Washington Square Park where a pair of national championship banners were soon raised.
“We’ve come such a long way, from not having a facility to be sitting there with hundreds of fans chanting against each other,” Barber said after Saturday’s record-breaking win. “It’s a great feeling for this program to be able to have an incredible women’s basketball environment in New York City for March Madness.”
On Saturday night, NYU wasted little time showing why the streak has extended this far, pressing for 94 feet on every possession, clogging passing lanes and chasing down rebounds with predatory urgency, turning defense into transition and transition into points – often from beyond the three-point line. It is a ruthless style of play built on depth, movement and constant pressure, the kind that has helped the Violets lead the nation in three-pointers and scoring offense while ranking among the top three in assists, steals, bench points and turnover margin.
During their unbeaten 89-game run over the last three seasons, NYU have dispensed of their foes by an average margin of 33.2 points. Only five times has an opponent even come within single digits. An elite, unselfish offense driven by crisp ball movement yields more than 20 assists per game, while an unsparing defense forces opponents into 23 turnovers on average – basically a takeaway on every third possession. Taken together, it produces a democratic system of basketball that is suffocating in every phase.
“Best defensive team I’ve ever seen,” said David Hollander, an NYU professor who teaches a course called How Basketball Can Save the World and whose shoulder-length silver hair is a regular sight in the Paulson Center stands. “They’re relentless. They play full-court defense the entire game. Nobody else in the country does that. But they’re also uncompromising in their standard of play. They will hit the open [player], even if they have a great shot – they will get a better shot.
“They play at a very high standard, and none of them will compromise that standard. For three or four minutes, it may go cold and it might not be happening. But because they play the right way, eventually it just can’t be stopped.”
College sports in the United States are governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which divides universities into three competitive categories. Division I is the highest level – name-brand schools like UConn, Duke or Kentucky – with national television deals, eye-watering NIL funds, NBA-size arenas and athletic scholarships. Division II operates on a smaller scale, with more limited budgets and fewer scholarships.
Division III, where NYU compete, is effectively the NCAA’s amateur tier. Universities are barred from offering sports scholarships, while athletes live mostly the same academic lives as their classmates. That means that most of the Violets’ players are paying close to $100,000 annually for tuition, room and board, though they may receive academic or financial aid. But despite any minor-league implications, the standard in D-III can still be extremely strong. Many players were standout high-school athletes who could have played at D-I schools but prioritized academics, location or playing time instead.
Caroline Peper, a 6ft wisp of a wing player who leads the team in scoring, fits that mold. The team’s lone senior – and the only player on the NYU roster to have ever lost a college game – grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, where many top players follow a familiar path to New England’s elite liberal arts colleges. But the 22-year-old mathematics major felt a pull toward Manhattan. “My dad’s from Long Island and my mom’s always worked in New York, so I always felt this tie to the city,” she said.
She toured several schools, including Columbia University, but found the year-round obligations of a D-I program no longer appealed. Her decision became clear once she visited NYU and connected with the coaching staff. “The minute I met Coach Barber it solidified everything,” Peper said. “Academically and athletically, you can’t do anything any better than here.”
Many of NYU’s players drew interest from Division I schools but chose the Violets for the chance to compete for national titles while immersed in one of the world’s great cities. For Barber, that balance is the essence of her pitch. Her recruits aren’t just athletes; they’re future lawyers, artists, analysts and entrepreneurs to be shaped by a city of more than eight million possibilities. The trade-off is that practices sometimes give way to rigorous courseloads. Junior forward Yasmene Clark, the team’s leading rebounder and a chemical and biomolecular engineering major, misses one team session each week while taking a course at NYU’s Brooklyn campus, making up the work with extra individual time in the gym. Another teammate regularly arrives late because of her academic schedule.
But Barber sees those complications less as obstacles than on-the-job training. In a city where subways are delayed and schedules rarely cooperate, she preaches that her players learn the same skills demanded by basketball itself: adjust quickly, stay composed and move together. It is a cadence that reflects New York City life and one that has increasingly defined the way NYU plays.
Hollander says the discipline behind the scenes is what truly sets the Violets apart. “They take practice really seriously. A lot of the work happens before they even walk on the court,” he said. “It may look like they’re blowing people out and it may look like they’re just that much better. But talent is one thing – no team in the country outworks this team in this culture.”
When Peper started at NYU, the team was still hauling their own equipment while traveling to home games on the subway. But by then Barber’s culture was already taking hold, creating a continuity that endured as players graduated and new ones arrived. “We’re all best friends on the court and off the court,” Peper said. “At the end of the day we just love being around each other.”
When the Paulson Center opened three years ago, the program finally had a home to match its ambition. The Violets have since become the juggernaut of the University Athletic Association, an eight-team league that includes several other urban schools including the University of Chicago, Emory University, Carnegie Mellon and Washington St Louis.
As the victories pile up and the milestones whiz past, the numbers suggest Barber’s team are only getting better, even as they endured a handful of uncommonly close shaves in recent weeks. Despite graduating two of the best players in school history in Natalie Bruns and Belle Pellecchia last season, the Violets’ defense has grown more disruptive each year, with steals per game rising from 8.0 to 13.5 to 17.5 and turnovers forced from 16.8 to 24.1 to 27.1 over the past three seasons. The offense has climbed with it, from 79.3 to 87.9 to 88.3 points per game, while their made three-pointers has followed the same trajectory (6.9 to 8.2 to 10.7).
Through it all Barber has stressed a one-game-at-a-time mentality as they have become a team everyone wants to beat. “Stacking together nights where we go 1-0”, as she puts it. One battle after another. The winning streak, she insists, is simply the byproduct of approaching each game the same way they did the first one. Nothing about that mindset has changed with her team back in the Sweet 16 for a fifth straight year.
“I think we’re past it,” Barber said of the streak. “There are all these numbers now – UCLA, the men’s record, the highest streaks – and we felt like we had our moment when we surpassed [the Division III record last month]. The [Division III] NCAA Tournament is such a big opportunity that it really has our sole focus right now. But along the way we obviously want to keep stacking 1-0 nights. When we reflect on it after this, I think the recognition will probably hit home in a really sweet way.”
Sustaining NYU’s level of success year after year is harder than it looks. Few coaches understand that better than UConn’s Geno Auriemma, whose program owns the only two streaks in college basketball history longer than the Violets’ current run.
“Doing something exceptionally well and doing it every day you have to do it is way, way, way more difficult than people think,” Auriemma said on Sunday. “People say, ‘Well, it’s Division III.’ I don’t care if it’s Division 12. People say it’s the conference they play in. None of those things are relevant. First you have to go out and execute to the best of your ability. And second, with every win the number gets bigger and bigger, and you have to keep your mind on what got you there.”
Auriemma knows the weight and psychology of those numbers. His Huskies won 90 consecutive games from 2008 to 2010 and later stretched the record to an astonishing 111 straight between 2014 and 2017. The first of those marks could be eclipsed over the weekend as the Violets go for their 90th and 91st straight wins.
“I’ve met some of the kids in the program and the coaches, and I have a lot of respect for them,” added Auriemma, who said that he has followed NYU’s run with admiration from afar. “I didn’t know they had gotten to 89, but I hope they get to 112. I think that might be unbelievable. I might want to be at that game.”
NYU resume their drive for a third straight national title on Friday night against Hardin-Simmons University. Fifteen bucks gets you in the door to sit anywhere you like. With the possible exception of the US Open qualifying tournament over at Flushing Meadows, there’s not a better deal in New York City sports right now.
“This is the best basketball in Manhattan and they’ve raised the visibility of the program 100%,” Hollander said. “Just this past month I think they’ve been on SportsCenter every night they played. They’ve become national news – whether it’s ESPN, Bleacher Report, everywhere.
“This gym is only two years old. So much of the building of this culture was nomadic, which is incredible in and of itself. That’s very unusual, to build something like this without a home. That shows the message – the way they play – it resonates. The players buy in.”
For Hollander, a lifelong hoop obsessive who is firm in his belief that basketball carries a higher calling, the way NYU plays reflects something larger about the city it calls home.
“Basketball is the ultimate social institution,” he said. “It’s a small space where anybody can walk in. You don’t have to know each other, and immediately you find ways of knowing each other. In a big city where the sidewalk is our campus, that energy matters.”
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