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LIU Sharks Updated 03/20/26 |
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Location: Brooklyn & Brookville,
NY Enrollment: 12,000 Cost of Attendance: $65,000 Venue: Steinberg Wellness Center and sometimes Barclays Center Arena
Capacity: 3,000/17,732 Conference: NEC (1st) Record: 24-10 (15-3) NET Rank: Committee Rank: 64 Tournament History (as LIU-Brooklyn) Appearances:
7 Final
Fours: 0 Championships: 0 Win-Loss: 0-7 Most Recent: 2018 as a #16 seed where
the lost to #16 Radford in the First Four |
Long Island University Long Island University (LIU) is a private research university in Brooklyn and Brookville, New York. The university enrolls over 16,000 students and offers over 500 academic programs at its main campuses, LIU Brooklyn and LIU Post on Long Island, in addition to non-residential locations and online. The LIU Sharks athletic teams compete in NCAA Division I as a Northeast Conference member. Lehigh
University's first library, constructed at the cost of $100,000 in 1877 by
Packer as a memorial to his daughter, Lucy Packer Linderman About the Sharks The LIU Sharks are the athletics teams representing Long Island University's campuses in Brooklyn and Brookville, NY. The Sharks compete in NCAA Division I athletics and are members of the Northeast Conference. The LIU Sharks are the result of the July 2019 unification of the athletic departments which had previously represented two separate campuses of LIU, the NCAA Division I LIU-Brooklyn Blackbirds and the NCAA Division II LIU-Post Pioneers. The collective was to be operated by the Brooklyn campus and compete at the Division I level. They also announced that they d be retiring the Blackbirds and Pioneers branding for the individual campuses and replacing them with a new identity. LIU presented three new possible identities to their student body: Eagles, Falcons, and Sharks. They let the students vote for their favorite, and "Sharks" was announced as the winner. Cuz when I think of Long Island, I immediately think of Sharks (loan sharks maybe). Finley and Fins Up Finley emerged as the official LIU mascot in 2021, after the unification of LIU Athletics across all campuses in 2019.
(from LIU
Athletics website) The "Fins Up" thing was started by two guys who were looking for a New York area team to adopt. The two guys named David Pochapin and Cameron Koffman did NOT go to LIU. They started attending games when nobody else did. They tried the "Fins Up" gesture during free throws, and it caught on, becoming more popular as the team got better. Previously known as the Blackbirds Following LIU's founding in 1927, 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 that new
nickname was born. The LIU-Brooklyn Blackbirds
made the NCAA Tournament seven prior times, including three straight years
from 2011-13 and most recently in 2018. The Blackbirds men's basketball team won the National
Invitation Tournament (NIT) in 1939 and 194. However,
in 1951, the Blackbirds basketball players were involved in the CCNY Point
Shaving Scandal that resulted in five players receiving a suspended sentence
and one player a one-year prison sentence. The
basketball team was suspended for six years from 1951-1957. CCNY Point Shaving Scandal
CCNY had won the 1950 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball
Tournament and the 1950 National Invitation Tournament (NIT) over Bradley University
(still the only such double in history).
The scandal involved CCNY and at least six other schools, including
three others in the New York City area: New York University, Long Island
University and Manhattan College. It spread out of New York City to Bradley University in
Peoria, Illinois; the University of Kentucky and the
University of Toledo. The scandal would spread to 33
players and involve the world of organized crime. As
a result of the scandal, CCNY was eventually banned from playing at Madison
Square Garden. The police had set up an undercover "sting"
operation, and arrests were made in Penn Station when the players returned to
New York from Philadelphia, after CCNY had defeated Temple, 95 71. In all, 32 players from seven colleges admitted to
taking bribes between 1947 and 1950 to fix 86 games in 17 states. While Kentucky was forced to cancel one season of play
(1952 53), it was the only program that was not permanently hobbled by the
scandal. None of the programs would suffer more than
CCNY and LIU. Following the discovery of several
other irregularities, CCNY deemphasized its athletic program and dropped down
to what is now Division III. LIU shut down its entire athletic program from
1951-1957 and didn't return to Division I until the 1980s. |
The CCNY point shaving scandal of
1950 51 involved seven schools, with four in the greater New York area and
three in the Midwest, mostly centering around the NCAA and NIT champion City
College of New York (CCNY).