Rebuilding New Orleans

When Joe Pasternack took his New Orleans team to face No. 21 NC State in Raleigh last weekend, observing the difference in the two programs' home arenas was pretty simple.

"Theirs is the Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons," he says. "Ours right now is the Motel 6."

And yet it was the Privateers, a program on its third coach in three seasons, who walked away with a 65-63 victory on the pristine floor of the RBC Center. Reserve T.J. Worley banked in a three-pointer with 1.7 seconds left to give the Privateers the improbable win over a team considered third-best in the ACC, behind North Carolina and Duke.

"A lot of teams probably would have been a little hesitant going into a top 25, ACC gym, but our guys really welcomed the challenge," Pasternack says. "They believed they could win, which was half the battle."

New Orleans has done nothing but battle since Hurricane Katrina struck the city, leaving a struggling program to face newly insurmountable challenges. The team spent one semester at the University of Texas at Tyler when the school shut down in the storm's aftermath. Upon returning, with the 9,000-seat Lakefront Arena in need of significant repairs, the Privateers were forced to play their home games at the Human Performance Center, a P.E. building on campus with 1,200 wooden bleacher seats. Two years later, the Privateers are still playing home games there, with Lakefront Arena scheduled to re-open next season.

So when Pasternack refers to his home court as ' Motel 6', that might be too kind. The Privateers share the floor with an adult volleyball rec league. The building, built in 1968, houses one team locker room, which is reserved for visiting teams. For two years the team used an assistant coaches' office, which was a converted classroom, to change. This year, they've partitioned off part of the gymnastics room for their locker room.

"It's not like a real locker room, but it is better than what we had," says senior Bo McCalebb, the reigning Sun Belt Conference Player of the Year

By contrast, NC State's RBC Center opened in 1999 with a price tag of $158 million. It houses 61 luxury suites, 19,722 seats, 580 television monitors, a 9,000-square foot restaurant and $5 million worth of JumboTron scoreboards, which is significantly more than the annual UNO basketball budget.

"I've been in Big Ten, Pac-10 and several NBA arenas, and it is one of the best I've ever seen," Pasternack says. "It is an NBA arena."

It also houses some future NBA players. Wolfpack forwards J.J. Hickson and Brandon Costner have a good chance to be in the league at some point.