VCU Rams Men's Basketball
The VCU men's basketball team is the intercollegiate men's basketball program that represents Virginia Commonwealth University. The Rams joined the Atlantic 10 Conference in the 2012–13 season after previously competing in the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA).
Since 1999, the team has played home basketball games at the Verizon Wireless Arena at the Stuart C. Siegel Center in Richmond, Virginia on the university's Monroe Park campus. Virginia Commonwealth has made it to the NCAA Final Four once in its program's history, in 2011. Additionally, the Rams won the 2010 CBI Tournament and have seven conference tournaments; three being in the Sun Belt Conference, and four being in the Colonial Athletic Association. Additionally, the Rams have won nine regular season championships; four from the Sun Belt and five from the CAA. The team is presently coached by Shaka Smart. The official student supporter group is known as the Rowdy Rams.
The team is best known for their recent Final Four run in the 2011 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. While the team had made nine NCAA Tournament appearances beforehand, never had the Rams made it beyond the second round of the tournament. In 2011, the Rams' journey to the Final Four began in one of the four opening round games, commonly called "play-in" games, intended to narrow the field from 68 to 64 teams. Thus, VCU became the first team to advance from the "First Four" to the Final Four.
Read more about VCU Rams Men's Basketball: History, Coaches, Facilities, Rivals, Players, Results By Season, NCAA Tournament Results, VCU Vs. The AP Top 25 (since 2003–04), BracketBuster Games, Players in The NBA, References
Famous quotes containing the words men and/or basketball:
“He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, of men in distant countries, and in past times.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)