On Thursday afternoon, the Rutgers Athletics program officially opened up the long awaited RWJBarnabas Health Athletic Performance Center (APC). The new facility includes a parking deck, two basketball gyms (men’s and women’s), a new state of the art wrestling room and also a gymnastics practice facility.
Here at The Knight Report, we sat down one-on-one with legendary Rutgers women’s basketball coach C.Vivian Stringer to discuss the brand new facility, the recruiting advantage it brings and more.
“We’ve had grown men who have given a lot money towards this building and finally saw it in person and just broke down and cried,” Stringer told TKR. “Because of how proud they feel seeing what they’ve helped to accomplish. It’s amazing what you can do when we all are working on the same page.
“I think this is what I envisioned when I first got here, I looked at Rutgers and there are all these big Fortune 500 companies so why can’t we have the best facilities period. When I was in Iowa, they used to brag about that they had the best of the best. When I first came in they just opened Carver Hawkeye Arena and it’s a beautiful facility in itself.”
The Rutgers Women’s Basketball program has been recruiting pretty well over the past couple of years, landing such recruits as well known five-star guard Zippy Broughton. Now with this new facility up and running, Stringer believes that it could help land just about any basketball recruit out there.
“This is in a class by itself,” said Stringer. “I don’t think that we should lose any recruit from here on out. We have first class coaches and we have a first class facility. This is one of the most diverse situations we have over here. You can go to the Mets, Jets, Giants, Yankees games right down the road. Your parents can come up and go to a field hockey game, a first class restaurant, we have it all right here. You can get on a quick train ride and go to either Philadelphia or New York. Why wouldn’t a young person say “Oh yeah, Scarlet Knights”. This is the campus of the future. Add in all that with the education that you’re going to get here and you’re getting a first class experience.
“You wouldn’t believe that people right here didn’t know that much about Rutgers. On the outside when I go to recruit someone, they say “Oh Rutgers, that’s a special place.” They know that, but how many other people know that? We have to make this university to be that first preference, not in addition or second or even third. It has to be the first place that recruits think of. We need to get the parents to say “Why not Rutgers?”. The coaching staff isn’t here now, because they are already out on the road recruiting right now. We are going to recruit the best and bring the best to Rutgers. Now we have the facilities that a person that might’ve said before “I don’t know about Rutgers”, now they see what we built and they know.”
There are a number of new things about this facility and the practice area, that the program had previously, including new offices, NBA/WNBA scout lounges, closing room and more. However one small detail about the locker room stood out to coach Stringer above all else.
“The locker room is taking it to another level,” she said. “The players now come in the locker room they can play video game, they can watch TV, cook, and we can have team dinners in there, like are you kidding me. I really like it all, it’s hard to choose just one thing. We used to have a room before this that was a little bit bigger than my office here. I used to say they had to put baby doll hangers and they were little tiny hangers because that was the only way you could shut the door. You couldn’t have any natural fitting clothes because they would just fall off the hangers, now we’ve finally moved out of those baby doll lockers. In fact they even have lockers for the managers here. When their clothes get dirty they put in a shoot and it goes right down to the laundry room.”
Last season didn’t end as expected for the Scarlet Knights. While the team made the NCAA tournament, they suffered a 82-71 loss to Buffalo in the first round. Rutgers also was missing coach Stringer for the last 7 games of the year as she was sidelined due to health reasons.
However, the Naismith Hall Of Fame coach is back and ready to go for the 2019-2020 and coach Stringer believes that Rutgers is back.
“We are excited for this season, this team accomplished a lot last year,” said Stringer. “I say that because we lost our leading rebounder, our starting point guard and then I went down. All of those things happened, yet this team has some tremendous resolve. The coaching staff was just second to none and everyone chipped in to demonstrate what it means to be a Scarlet Knight.
"We have alway had expectations of being at the highest level possible. We always say if you want to be the best, you play the best. We are going to play those Stanford’s and the Connecticut’s of the world. I think we now have the players to bring this team back to where it should’ve been and can be. I don’t know anything about second place. I had a real hard time accepting that invite to the WNIT, I just don’t believe in that. We are back, I’m back and we are going to make some noise real soon.”
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