In 2021 and 2022, the star basketball players took advantage of an extra year of playing eligibility they’d earned due to COVID to transfer to Fordham from Youngstown State and Georgia Tech respectively.

A Historic Run

They helped power the Rams to their best season in over 30 years; the team finished with a 25-8 overall record, including playoff games. The team tied for the second-best record in the Atlantic 10 conference, (12-6), and its 24 regular-season wins fueled speculation in the media of a March Madness appearance. The Rose Hill Gym sold out the last six games of the season, and the atmosphere led players to dub it “Rose Thrill.”

Loyalty to a Coach Pays Off

Quisenberry, who completed his undergraduate degree in three years and had two years of eligibility at Fordham, said the difference between last year and this year was day and night.

“We were ranked 11th in the preseason this year, but we believed in ourselves from the beginning. We knew what we were capable of,” he said.

The stats bore it out. Quisenberry reached double figures 28 times in 32 chances, and in twelve games, he scored 20 points. In those games, Fordham went 11-1. He fell just 39 points shy of eclipsing the 1,000-point mark in just two years with the Rams.

The success resonated in a special way because he was recruited in 2021 by Kyle Neptune, who left Fordham after a year to coach at Villanova University.

Quisenberry had established a solid relationship with Urgo, who was then assistant coach. So when Urgo was promoted to head coach in 2022, he knew he’d finish his college career at Rose Hill. He graduated with an M.S. in Media Management on Monday and hopes to play professionally.

A NYC Homecoming

For Moore, joining the Rams was a return to his roots. He grew up in Elmont, New York, and attended Archbishop Malloy High School in Queens.

Unlike Quisenberry, he was brand new to the team this year. When Coach Urgo reached out to him, he jumped at the chance to play his final year of eligibility in the Big Apple.

“I was trying to find a situation for me that I felt was the best fit for both athletics and academics. When I came home to visit, I felt like it was definitely a great opportunity for me,” he said.

“From day one, I felt like they welcomed me to be a part of the family.”

Moore finished second on the squad in scoring, with an average of 15.7 points per game, for a total of 519. He ranked second on the team in both field goal percentage (48.6%) and 3-point field goal percentage (35.1%) while connecting on 77.1% of his free throws.

Like Quisenberry, he earned an M.S. in Media Management, which he hopes to use to land a job in the field when playing for a professional team is no longer feasible.

“Towards the end of the year, the atmosphere in the Rose Hill gym was like one like no other,” he said.

“It’s definitely not something I imagined coming out of high school. I feel like everything just comes around full circle.”

On March 11, the team played in a taut, competitive semi-finals game in front of 10,000 fans at the Barclays Center against the University of Dayton. It was only the second time the team had advanced to the semi-finals since joining the A-10 in 1995 and the first time since 2006. The Rams lost 78-68, but the season, the first with Keith Urgo as head coach, was still regarded as a huge success.

Both players earned accolades: The Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association awarded Quisenberry a spot on the All-Met First Team while Moore earned a place on the All-Met Second Team. The National Association of Basketball Coaches also honored Moore, as well as Urgo, who they named  District 4 Coach of the Year. All three, along with Kyle Rose, a junior at the School of Professional and Continuing Studies, were honored by the Atlantic 10 conference, with Urgo being named their coach of the year.

Success That Will Carry On

Urgo said Quisenberry and Moore were key to this year’s success, and he expects the lessons they shared with younger players will carry on in the years to come.

“Khalid’s work ethic was second to none. We hit lightning in a bottle adding him to our program,” he said.

Quisenberry, he noted, was a natural leader who earned the respect of younger players.

“He decided in his final year that all he cared about was winning. He could care less about his numbers. He was going to do whatever it took to win,” he said.

“They’re two dynamic players, but more importantly, they’re dynamic people and leaders, and that’s more important than their actual talent on the floor.”

The team’s arrival was part of Coach Kyle Neptune’s off-court strategy to encourage a culture that values the student-athletes’ full development as well-rounded young men, as well as great players.

“There’s not a lot of places in the world they have these types of high-level experiences and while they’re here, we want to make sure that they have a chance to experience them,” Neptune told Forbes magazine in an article covering the trip.

Indeed, a Met opening is about as high level as culture gets in New York, and the 2021 fall season has been like no other. In the preceding months, the city saw the worst of the pandemic and was rocked by the killing of George Floyd, which led to dozens of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Institutions across the city reopened with works commissioned by Black artists, and the Met was no exception. For the first time in its 138-year history, the Met featured an opera by a Black composer, Terence Blanchard, as well as a Black librettist on its stage, Kasi Lemmons. The opera is based upon the memoir by Fordham Sperber Prize-winner and New YorkTimes columnist Charles Blow. In addition, the entire cast (singers and dancers) of Fire Shut Up In My Bones is Black.

“It’s just the age we’re living in. Things are changing now,” senior guard Antonio Daye said of the historic moment.

As the they entered lobby the team climbed white terrazzo stairs that snake up toward the Met’s multiple balconies.  Once inside the plush red velvet interior that seats an audience of nearly 4,000, the men gaped at the scalloped gold-leafed ceiling as the famed sputnik chandeliers rose signaling the start of the show.

“This definitely was my first time at the opera. We don’t have anything like this in Florida,” said junior Antrell Charlton later. “This opens up our minds. We all come from different places. I’m from Florida. We have Rostic who is from Ukraine. Abdul, he’s from Africa. Chuba he’s from New York,” he said, naming his teammates.

In addition to the Met, Neptune has taken the team on outings to dinner on Arthur Avenue, a paintball excursion in the Bronx, and a boat trip on New York Harbor.

Senior guard Darius Quisenberry said that the off-campus excursions were key to creating team chemistry on the court.

“We’re just going to different places most guys that are in college don’t get to experience,” said Quinsenberry.

He added that between school and practice it’s hard to get to get to know team members and coaches, even though they spend so much time together.

“It’s good to be able to have time with each other off the court and to be seeing a different side of the coaches as well, their different personalities,” he said. “Everybody has a different mentality on the court then they do off the court. Our coach is showing us how well-rounded all the other coaches are and how we can be, too.”

On seeing the team in the lobby, one audience guest, Terrence Diable, FCLC ’15 , shouted out “Go Rams!”

Diable, an alumnus of Ailey/Fordham program, is now part of the Harlem-based Limón Dance Company. For him, the Met’s return conjured a host of feelings. He said that he hadn’t attended a live indoor performance since the pandemic began.

“I was filled with this excitement being back in the space, seeing all my friends and colleagues, old bosses, new bosses, future bosses,” he said later. “It was so nice being back with people. I got into the arts because of what happens in the theater in front of an audience in real time.”

Diable said he enjoyed watching “so many legacies come together and unfold.” From the young boy soprano, Walter Russell III, who came from Diable’s childhood alma mater the Harlem School of the Arts, to the choreography of Camille A. Brown, Diable said the new opera was a landmark for Black culture.

The performance did not shy away from the complicated issues facing Black men, and Black men from the South in particular.

“It really addressed this super hetero masculine identity that’s considered the correct way of life,” said Diable, citing a show-stopping number where the lead character, a star basketball player, pledges a Black fraternity.

It was during that Act III scene that the team members, who had been up since 5:30 a.m., roused back to an upright position in their seats. After the curtain fell, the team filed out into the bright sunlight on the plaza.

“That was long!” was the consensus commentary.

Sophomore center Rostyslav “Rostic” Novitskyi was one of the few team members who had been to the opera before, back in his native Ukraine. He said the Met opera house was “pretty nice” in comparison to the one back home. And while he found the experience similar, there was one distinction with this trip.

“Here we’re together with the team, we’re like a family, and I think it’s going to help us be together on the court,” he said.