Gateway Community & Technical College

NKU’s Trevon Faulkner. Photo by Brian Frey, LINK nky contributor Basketball Sam Vinson, seven-time Horizon League Freshman of the Week. We’re thinking the game that looked like it sped up a bit for Sam at the very end of last season will slow down next year as the mostly returning Norse look like they could be in a good position to dominate the Horizon League.

All they need now is some serious support. Pulling out of The Pavilion the other day, I saw a woman in a gold-and-black NORSE sweatshirt and almost drove up onto the curb. Had never seen that before. Getting out-fanned at least three-to-one in the ill-fated championship game in Indianapolis by a Wright State fan base with a similar drive to Indy and after a season when NKU had swept the Dayton team was not a good look. Having just one student in the NKU student section at tipoff was even worse.

But Marques Warrick & Co. play hard with some serious Division I talent. Getting 6-foot-4 senior guard Trevon Faulkner, a 1,000-point scorer who has started 116 career games, to return for a final season certainly helps. The Norse might be better than they even know. But NKU – the campus community – and Northern Kentucky at large probably need to realize that. Someone needs to show them as they prove that 16-point final 11:41 collapse was not the real NKU.

We do have one solution. And it’s a theme we’re not giving up on. How about a return to a rivalry that had fallen away for all the right reasons but should return now and would almost certainly create a great deal of buzz around here. How about NKU hosting a men’s-women’s December doubleheader against the crown jewel of both Northern Kentucky, and Kentucky, college basketball right now -- the Thomas More Saints.

Sure, Northern, with its NCAA Division I status, big arena and even bigger athletic budget, should dominate in what could be the first big basketball event at the newly renamed Truist Arena. But there would be plenty of the buzz that’s been missing around the Norse. And buzz is what NKU needs now -- and a connection to the community. And Thomas More will bring both.

There are 252 NAIA colleges and universities across the nation, 80 percent of them small, private and religious like Thomas More. And no one right now is doing it better than TMU, not in basketball anyway. After watching the NAIA Saints’ 1-2 punch of its national champion women – and semifinalist men built almost exclusively on local talent – you’d have to give the Saints a puncher’s chance. You’d never want to count out the women, under National Coach of the Year Jeff Hans, winning his third national title for the Crestview Hills school with a 32-4 team that outscored opponents in the national tournament by 19.4 points a game.

They return everybody but Alexah Chrisman and Taylor Clos and, as tough as it will be to replace the NAIA tourney MVP forward and All-American guard, respectively, double-digit depth and newcomer Jenna Lillard out of Ludlow may be one answer. Putting these Saints on the big stage, right here at home, would be pretty cool.

Putting them against an NKU women’s team that from the very beginning nearly five decades ago has been a beacon for treating women equally with the men as far as scholarships and budgeting should be welcomed by all of us here who care about such things. Which should be all of us.

Then there’s Justin Ray’s TMU men’s team, which, like the women, might be No. 1 nationally in the NAIA next December. They could bring pretty much everybody back from a 31-5 team that made the national semifinals before losing close with their No. 2 scorer, Reid Jolly, out injured, but with the nation’s top-five NAIA player, 6-6 redshirt junior All-American Ryan Batte doing what he does averaging 22.8 points a game in the national tournament. And they bring in the state’s No. 2 scorer, 6-foot-7 Justin Becker out of Robertson County.

If the game is played in December, the way it was when it was first set up way back when, we’ll have an entire offseason to build up to it. Might be a chance to have a sponsor step up – Skyline are you out there? – the way they have for the Xavier-UC Crosstown Shootout to make it a real Northern Kentucky civic undertaking.

No matter what, it would be a real tribute to Northern Kentucky college basketball.

And after last season, they – and we – deserve it.