Saturday, December 11, 2010

Howard University Starts Over With Sports

The Bison's new athletic director, Skip Perkins, wants to turn things around.

Skip Perkins became athletic director at Howard University on Monday—a month earlier than scheduled. Perkins explained that he showed up ahead of schedule because there’s “a lot to do.”

Yup, there is a lot. Howard’s major sports have done a lot of losing for a lot of years. President Obama gave the school its greatest athletic exposure in forever last month by attending the men’s basketball team’s season opener against visiting Oregon State (a team coached by Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s brother). With the spotlight shining, Howard lost by double-digits. The team is now 1-7 under first-year coach Kevin Nickelberry, who replaced Gil Jackson, who somehow lasted five seasons despite losing at least 20 games every year and posting a 37-118 overall record.

Howard hasn’t won a Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference title or been invited to the NCAA tournament in nearly two decades. For a school located in a city with as great a pool of basketball talent as any in the country, such chronic losing seems impossible and wrong.

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