LIU Sharks men's basketball


The LIU Sharks men's basketball team represents Long Island University in NCAA Division I basketball competition. They play their home games at their Brooklyn Campus in the Steinberg Wellness Center, formerly known as the Wellness, Recreation & Athletics Center, and are members of the Northeast Conference. Their current head coach is Derek Kellogg who was hired after his firing from Massachusetts in 2017.
The LIU Sharks are the result of the July 1, 2019 unification of the athletic departments which had previously represented two separate campuses of LIU, the Division I LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds and the Division II LIU Post Pioneers.

History

Following Long Island University's founding in 1927, it soon entered intercollegiate athletic competition. Initially, its sports teams wore blue uniforms and became known as the Blue Devils. In 1935, a Brooklyn Eagle reporter saw the basketball team in its new black uniforms and stated that the team looked like blackbirds, and a new nicknale was born.
LIU was a national basketball powerhouse in the 1930s and 1940s under Clair Bee, who compiled the highest winning percentage in major college basketball history, and the 1935–36 team was retroactively recognized as the pre-NCAA Tournament national champion by the Premo-Porretta Power Poll.
After several players were implicated in the point-shaving scandal of 1951, LIU shuttered its entire athletic program. It returned to the College Division in 1957 as the LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds, and only returned to Division I in the 1980s. At the same time as the Blackbirds returned, LIU's C.W. Post College Pioneers began competing, in the College Division with the school being renamed LIU Post in 2012.

Rivalry

For 44 years, beginning in the 1975–1976 season, an annual Battle of Brooklyn has been a tradition for LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds and St. Francis Brooklyn Terriers men's basketball teams. Each season, a game is dedicated in tribute William Lai and Daniel Lynch, former athletic directors at Long Island University and St. Francis College, respectively.