Hawaii, which misplaced to the Fighting Illini that night time, was the 330th Division I team Caswell noticed play. Three years and 34 groups later, Caswell accomplished his quest Saturday at Bender Arena, the place he watched American lose to visiting Lehigh with Meyer, his mom and his brother by his facet.
“This feels more like a milestone than a conclusion,” Caswell wrote in an electronic mail Sunday. “I’ll still go to more basketball games this season and beyond, only now with a fresh air of confidence with this achievement under my belt.”
Caswell’s college basketball odyssey spanned 21 years and took him to 442 video games in 131 venues. The first Division I college basketball sport he attended was Dayton’s 83-59 rout of George Washington on Jan. 9, 2002, at UD Arena. It was his second sport, as a wide-eyed freshman at Bowling Green almost seven years later, that lit the spark for his spectacular and weird quest.
A Detroit Pistons fan who didn’t pay a lot consideration to college hoops rising up, Caswell, 32, walked into Bowling Green’s Anderson Arena for the primary time in the autumn of 2008 and grabbed a seat in the entrance row for a sport in opposition to Wayne State. He felt a bit like Spike Lee sitting courtside at Madison Square Garden, and he was hooked. Caswell went to many of the Falcons’ house video games that season and once more as a sophomore, when he made journeys to see video games at Wright State, Akron and Kent State.
The quest entered Caswell’s thoughts throughout his junior 12 months.
“I thought: ‘I love to travel, and I love college basketball. How feasible would it be to see every team in Division I?’ ” he mentioned. “I was determined to basically consume as much college basketball as I could going forward. All the years since have involved a lot of deliberate planning to try to achieve that goal.”
In 2011, Caswell deliberate a trip to the Outer Banks the week between Christmas and New Year’s with Meyer, who was his girlfriend on the time. The itinerary included stops on the Virginia Aquarium in Virginia Beach and the Wright Brothers National Memorial in Kill Devil Hills, N.C. — in addition to video games at Richmond, Virginia and VMI. Caswell noticed six new groups on the journey, bringing his whole to 67.
“That trip to the Outer Banks was the first vacation that I took without my family,” Meyer mentioned. “We had such a blast, and I hardly remember any of the basketball.”
Meyer has joined Caswell at dozens of video games in the last decade since, and he or she has embraced his planning holidays across the college basketball schedule. They have developed a routine for the brand new colleges they go to collectively. If they arrive early sufficient, they wish to stroll round campus to take in the structure and go to the bookstore. In the world, they stroll the concourse, evaluating it with locations they’ve been earlier than. Once in their seats, Caswell checks out the sport preview on KenPom.com. Their basketball journeys typically contain stops at disc golf programs — a shared ardour — and sampling new cuisines.
“There’s no way I could’ve done this without her,” Caswell mentioned.
That was actually true on a harrowing journey to Niagara to see the Purple Eagles play St. Peter’s on Jan. 13, 2012. A drive that ought to have taken 5 hours took nearer to eight, due to a snowstorm that compelled Meyer to shout instructions “like a NASCAR spotter” from the passenger seat after they crossed the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.
“We roll up to the gate, 12 minutes before tip-off, looking completely haggard,” Caswell mentioned. “A woman came up and said: ‘Here’s two tickets. You guys look like you could use them.’ ”
On a subsequent journey to see Tennessee Martin host Samford, Caswell purchased common admission tickets. The couple discovered seats in his favourite spot — middle courtroom, eye stage with the rim — on a facet of the world that was in any other case fully empty. A sport day operations worker walked over, checked out them quizzically and requested, “Y’all aren’t Samford fans, are ya?”
Caswell instructed the girl about his quest. A couple of minutes later, he and Meyer have been introduced because the winners of the “Best Seat in the House” promotion sponsored by a neighborhood furnishings firm and have been relocated to a few courtside La-Z-Boys.
“We were laughing because we went from my favorite place to sit to the baseline, which is my least favorite place to sit,” Caswell mentioned.
Caswell tracked his progress by means of the years on a meticulously organized spreadsheet. During a visit to Las Vegas in March 2016, he attended 10 video games in 5 days at three venues internet hosting convention tournaments and added 15 groups to his quest. According to his grasp listing, Caswell has seen Bowling Green greater than another team (57 occasions), adopted by Wright State (52), Dayton (41) and Cincinnati (17). He has attended video games in 36 states and, as of Saturday, Washington.
“It’s kind of poetic, as a civil servant, to end it at American,” mentioned Caswell, who works as a program analyst for the Air Force.
Caswell has been to a number of traditional college basketball venues, together with Indiana’s Assembly Hall, Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium, Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse and Kentucky’s Rupp Arena, the place he sat courtside for a 2011 sport in opposition to Georgia. His favourite enviornment, Pittsburgh’s Petersen Events Center, may come as a shock.
“I’m 5-foot-5,” Caswell mentioned. “If I’m in an arena that is built out instead of up, like at Dayton, oftentimes I have a hard time seeing. Petersen Events Center has great sightlines and is a more intimate venue, and the Oakland Zoo is one of the most underrated student sections in all of college basketball.”
At the beginning of the 2022-23 season, Caswell was 12 groups shy of finishing his quest. He knocked out Lindenwood — one in every of 5 colleges making the transition to Division I this 12 months — in early November and noticed Kansas in person for the primary time eight days later. Caswell made December journeys to Dallas and the Bay Area for video games, and he drove to Indiana to look at Stonehill, one other Division I beginner, go to Valparaiso earlier than Christmas.
This month, Caswell and Meyer flew to San Antonio after which drove 4 hours to see Abilene Christian, his 363rd team, play Sam Houston State. That left American as the one Division I college Caswell had but to see.
Caswell and his household arrived in D.C. in a rental automobile Friday afternoon and visited the commentary deck at Washington National Cathedral. On Saturday morning, they explored the campus at Howard earlier than making their method to American and doing the identical. At the field workplace, Caswell bought tickets in Section 105 close to the free throw line. He mentioned Bender Arena reminded him of different Patriot League venues he has visited and mentioned that whereas it’s not terribly outstanding, it “carries its own independent charm.”
“Traveling around to these games, it’s almost like being let into a special tribe for a single night,” he mentioned. “It’s: ‘Welcome to our tribe. We’ll show you how we do it. We’ll show you our traditions. We’ll show you what’s important to us.’ I love that the majority of Division I toils away outside the spotlight, but N.C. A&T basketball is just as important to the folks that support N.C. A&T as Carolina basketball is at UNC.”
With no colleges making the soar from Division II to Division I subsequent 12 months, Caswell’s quest can be full for the foreseeable future. The listing of groups he has seen consists of Savannah State, which dropped to Division II earlier than the 2018-19 season, and Hartford, which is able to transition to Division III in the autumn.
Going ahead, Caswell will deal with including new venues to his spreadsheet. He is particularly keen to go to the Palestra in Philadelphia, UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, Kansas’s Allen Fieldhouse and maybe catch a glimpse of Lee at Madison Square Garden. Oh, and he has by no means been to Stan Sheriff Center in Honolulu, house of the Rainbow Warriors.
“We’ll get to Hawaii at some point,” Meyer mentioned.
