NEW YORK — You hear the refrain from college basketball snobs all over the nation this time of year, ‘It’s only the freakin’ NIT.’ A consolation prize for teams not good enough. I’ve said it myself and meant it. But if you opened your eyes on Thursday night, you could learn something new. When a team wins the National Invitation Tournament, it can mean and feel to the victors exactly like what it says on the trophy — Champions.
Jamelle Cornley held that trophy with tears welling in red-rimmed eyes, finally at the end of a twisting trail of frustration and pain and finally vindication that was his chosen avocation at Penn State. Ignored by his hometown school Ohio State and placed down the priority lists of other brand-name basketball programs, Cornley departed the plains of Columbus, Ohio, four years ago to attend school in the mountains. They all said, very reasonably, that a 6-4 kid could not hope to play power forward at a major school.
Jamelle took the advice of his mother Dorci: ‘I told him, ‘Go someplace where they want you first.’ And Penn State was at every AAU event. Every game, they had somebody there.’ Choosing Penn State meant setting a torch to tangled thicket and taking a scythe to make a way where there was none. He committed to join a program being sold by an unknown coach named Ed DeChellis that had gone 7-23 the year before, 1-15 in the Big Ten, the orphan of a conference he’d watched all his life.
The last four years has taken him through emotional and physical torture. Bouts of hopelessness and agony. A 2-14 Big Ten season his sophomore year, by which time he thought he could wrench toward a compass point the static barge of a program. A bone bruise in his left knee at the outset of his junior season that left him a pale imitation of himself.
This year, his left shoulder popped partially out of its socket three times, leaving him in excruciating pain and finally with a giant ace bandage wrapped around it the last two weeks just to allow him to play. But play he did.
In the season when it all finally came together this year for Cornley — a second-team All-Big Ten selection and just the second winning league record in PSU’s 17 Big Ten seasons, the dream of an NCAA tournament appearance fell just beyond his grasp.
This is the juncture when everyone says with easy sarcasm, ‘Whoop-de-doo, you’re in the NIT.’ Cornley wouldn’t. His team — and this is his team — followed his lead. Everyone else just got out of the way. You don’t mess with this 235-pound guy when he suggests a course of action any more than you’d be able to steal his snapped rebound. …