Defending champion Brooklyn College is the pre-season favorite to win the CUNY Athletic Conference men’s basketball championship, as voted on by the head coaches in the league. BC’s Richard Jean-Baptiste, a senior and two-time All-American, was voted as the pre-season Player of the Year.
Brooklyn College was named the top team on nine of the ten coaches’ ballots, and second on the remaining one, collecting 99 out of a possible 100 points. Predicted to finish second are the Baruch Bearcats, who gained 85 points, followed by the York Cardinals with 80 points. John Jay, who received the final first place vote, followed in fourth with 59 points, followed by Hunter and Lehman, each with 57. Staten Island (41 points), CCNY (32), City Tech (26), and Medgar Evers (14) round out the field.
In the pre-season Player of the Year voting, Jean-Baptiste, the two-time defending CUNY Athletic Conference Player of the Year, earned seven votes. The forward is a graduate of St. John’s Prep, and has scored 1,303 points in just 60 games at Brooklyn. York’s Marcel Esonwune, a junior center from Lagos, Nigeria, and John Jay’s Kashif Pratt, a 2006 graduate of Rice High School and transfer from Division I Iona College, also received consideration.
A year ago, Brooklyn College made an improbable run through the conference championship and won their first title since 1973, before all current student-athletes were even born.