‘Roll Cavs, forever’: Cabrini hosts a final home basketball game and prepares for closure

How do you eulogize a school? What would the obituary say?

Cabrini University (née College), felled by declining enrollments and mounting debt, its 112-acre campus swallowed up by Villanova University, will close its doors and cease to exist after the school year. It was (rather, will be) 67.

The last eight months — ever since the schools announced their sale agreement — have been a slow march toward that eventual fate.

Campus is eerily quieter. Several hundred students left before the school year started, leaving Cabrini with 708 undergraduates to start the year. Small colleges already typically feature a large athlete population, but of the remaining students on campus more than 200 are athletes.

“There’s less people,” junior basketball player Donoven Mack said. “It’s weird.

“We’re a little community, and we understand we’re all going through the same thing. We won’t be here next year. So we just try to make the best of every day together.”

That’s if your team was able to play one last season. While most programs were able to field a team, women’s basketball and women’s volleyball were cut after not being able to fill out a full roster, and what was supposed to be the inaugural year of the men’s volleyball program never happened.

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Those who stayed, athletic director Kate Corcoran said, have displayed a great attitude in the face of adversity.

“The character and the class that they have represented this university, themselves, the coaches, and the staff with them has been inspiring to watch,” Corcoran said. “I’m so proud of what they’ve done and the ability to compete at a high level and be proud of wearing Cabrini across their chest one last time.”

In a school year filled with milestones and goodbyes, Friday night brought another “one last time,” as the last Cabrini Cavaliers basketball game inside Nerney Field House at Cabrini’s Dixon Center was played.

Every coach, Ryan Van Zelst admitted, will say any given game is “just another game.” It’s a way to maybe trick your brain into staying grounded and focused. To eliminate all of the emotions and noise and just focus on 40 minutes of hoops.

Friday night offered Van Zelst an unusual opportunity, though. The first-year Cabrini coach — rocked by the closure news two months after accepting the job — leaned into it. The postseason was next, and Cabrini was already locked into the sixth seed in the seven-team Atlantic East Conference playoffs.

“It’s impossible to ignore the gravity of this game, which is just sad,” Van Zelst said. “That’s just the nature of the deal, right?”

The school honored its seniors — Jayden Blakey, Isaac Brady, and Eric Neal — before the game, as well as Van Zelst for his dedication during his lone season.

“Roll Cavs, forever,” the PA announcer said near the end of the ceremony.

Van Zelst, a Conwell-Egan grad, is running out of days to give motivational speeches of sorts. The day before the final home game was another chance to remind his group to try to stay positive.

“Something good will come out of it,” Van Zelst said he told his players Thursday. “I don’t know when that will be for each of us — everyone that’s going through it, not just the men’s basketball program, throughout the campus, athletic department, you name it. Something will come out of this that’s for the better. You just got to get through it and learn from it and take it day by day.”

Friday night offered an added challenge: playing without Mack, the team’s leading scorer, who fell on his shoulder in an overtime loss to Immaculata on Wednesday in the penultimate Nerney Field House game. Now the Cavaliers were playing a Marywood team that beat them by 15 with Mack on the road in January.

Mack, a Delaware native, sat at the end of the bench, his right arm in a sling, calling out screens and urging on his teammates.

“Me being sad about that wasn’t going to help the team, the chemistry, the aura,” he said.

The positive energy had some impact. Cabrini trailed by just one at halftime.

» READ MORE: From 2022: With a mounting deficit, Cabrini University eliminates academic leadership positions, including the provost

Mack is a business major who wants to continue playing basketball wherever he lands next. That destination is still undetermined, as it as for a lot of athletes on campus.

Mack, who is averaging nearly 15 points per game for the Cavaliers, said his future plan is “always a thought.”

In an effort to minimize the burden and the stress, Van Zelst told the players that he would enter all of them into the transfer portal at season’s end. Most spring athletes, Corcoran said, are already in the portal to avoid missing out on the recruiting cycle.

The basketball roster was originally around 20 players when Van Zelst got the job, but the final number that he took into the season was 14.

The job was already going to be a challenge. Van Zelst was excited to try to establish a new culture, to get Cabrini back to its winning ways. The program had declined in the last few seasons but was just five seasons removed from a 25-4 record and 12 years removed from an appearance in the 2012 Division III national championship game. But he couldn’t have planned for this scenario when he took it in April. Van Zelst has spent the entire season coaching a group of players who know they won’t be on the Radnor campus next year. The last few weeks have featured conversations about the future. Do they want to keep playing? Do they want to continue with their current degree programs?

“Normally you’re the one recruiting them and trying to mentor them and help them become productive adults in society — and now I’m passing them on,” Van Zelst said. “It’s a little strange.

“At the end of the day, this is their life and this is their experience.”

» READ MORE: From June: Cabrini’s closing leaves this basketball recruit looking for a new school

Cabrini (7-18, 3-9) built a 12-point lead over Marywood six minutes into the second half. A happy ending was in sight.

But things started to unravel for the Cavaliers as Marywood made its push. Marywood grabbed a 49-48 lead inside five minutes to play and led by four with less than three minutes to go.

A Neal layup cut the deficit to one with 36 seconds left. Van Zelst decided to let the Marywood possession play out without fouling, a six-second differential between the shot clock and game clock. The decision worked. Marywood’s final possession ended with a turnover in the lane, and Cabrini freshman Bryan Warren stormed down the other end with time winding down. Warren’s shot near the rim was blocked, but fellow Cabrini freshman Keenan Reiss got the rebound and had a chance to win the game, but his shot clanked off the rim — Cabrini missed six of its final seven shots.

The horn sounded one last time. There would be no fairy-tale finish.

A season that Van Zelst called “bittersweet and a combination of interesting” is nearing its conclusion. Playoffs begin this week, but Nerney Field House won’t be hosting, and the team is unlikely to do the unthinkable.

All that’s left inside is decades of history. Banners line the gym’s walls, commemorating champions in field hockey, cross-country, soccer, men’s lacrosse — which won its first Division III national title in 2019 — and more. They house the names of 1,000-point basketball scorers, including the top scorer in men’s basketball program history, Tyheim Monroe, an Olney grad who scored 2,030 points from 2014-18.

What happens to those banners and the other trophies and memorabilia on campus is still being decided, Corcoran said. And what happens to the 112-acre campus that becomes Villanova’s property in June also remains unclear.

Cabrini University is survived by those banners and the names on them, the memories, the Macks, a first-year basketball coach who stayed, an athletic director who kept it all together, a diverse university community brought together by a cruel reality, who all guided a school and its sports programs through hospice.

In lieu of flowers, go see a lacrosse game.