INDIANAPOLIS — College basketball tournament time is almost here and the University of Indianapolis Greyhounds are ready for the Division II showdown.
The team has won 18 in a row, which ties a school record, and they're not done yet.
Stop by Nicoson Hall in the afternoon and you can feel the energy. It's contagious. The Greyhounds are building something special, and it all starts from within these walls.
"We gotta be our biggest fans and biggest motivators about how we carry ourselves on the court and doing drills and just our approach, so that just means having high energy, high intensity at all times," said guard Jesse Bingham, a redshirt sophomore.
Bingham graduated from Warren Central High School. In fact, more than half the guys on this team are from right here in Indiana.
"We've all been playing against each other since pretty much middle school, whether that be high school, AAU basketball, so it's fun just for us to be able to come here, come to UIndy and get on the same page and play together and a lot of camaraderie," he said.
Even the coach is homegrown. Paul Cosaro was a star player at Roncalli and played right here at the University of Indianapolis.
He gets it.
"Indiana is a basketball state," said Cosaro. "Indianapolis the capital of, in my opinion, the best basketball state in the country, and, you know, successful kids in Indiana basketball are gonna be successful at our level. Now, we'll still go outside and fill the pieces that we need, whether it's nationally or internationally, and we've done that as well, but our base is always going to be from our backyard."
The Greyhounds want more than a school-record winning streak. They want a Division II title.
"Everyone wants to look ahead," Cosaro said. "When we wake up, we've got to understand what just happened no longer matters and tomorrow doesn't matter either. It takes a very mature group of guys this age to embrace that type of philosophy."
And that day-to-day philososhy is working, one win at a time.