A top-three seed has won the CAA Tournament 34 times in the league’s 37-year history, including each of the last 19 seasons. So the odds are pretty good a lengthy NCAA Tournament drought will come to an end next Tuesday night, when the CAA championship game is scheduled to be played in Washington, D.C.

Watch The 2020 CAA Men's Basketball Championship Live Here

Three of the CAA’s five longest NCAA Tournament dry spells are owned by the top three seeds. Hofstra, which went 14-4 to earn its second straight regular season championship, hasn’t danced since the then-Flying Dutchmen won the America East in 2001, months before the school joined the CAA. Third-seeded Towson, which accompanied Hofstra (and Delaware and Drexel) to the CAA in 2001, hasn’t reached the NCAA Tournament since 1991, when the Tigers became the final team to win the automatic bid out of the soon-to-be defunct East Coast Conference.

And second-seeded William & Mary…well, if you’ve followed the CAA for any length of time, you probably know the Tribe is one of the four original Division I members, along with Army-West Point, The Citadel and St. Francis (NY), to never reach the NCAA Tournament. 

(Seventh-seeded Elon hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since moving to Division I in 1999 while eighth-seeded Drexel last reached the big dance after winning the America East in 1996)

Such history can sound imposing, especially at this time of year, when the season boils down to 10 teams vying for one NCAA bid in the single-elimination format — and when alums and boosters begin sharing their long-anticipated visions of net-cutting with the coaches who have been around for a fraction of the drought and the players who have usually been a part of the program for an even smaller period of time.

But for Hofstra coach Joe Mihalich, William & Mary head coach Dane Fischer and Towson head coach Pat Skerry, the task of finally returning to or getting to the NCAA Tournament can be put into context by recalling where they, and their programs, were upon being introduced to one another, and the task of building or maintaining a team that can consistently feel the roll of the dice can go its way during tournament week.

Skerry was doing press during his first week as the Towson head coach in the spring of 2011 when a reporter informed him…well, let’s let the ever-loquacious Skerry tell the tale.

“He mentions to me ‘How’s it feel to have the third-longest sub-.500 streak in (345 Division I) teams?’” Skerry said. “I remember saying ‘Is that right?’ I had no idea.”

Indeed, the Tigers hadn’t enjoyed a winning season since 1995-96, when they went 16-12. Towson went 140-302 in the subsequent 15 seasons, including 4-26 and 0-18 in CAA play the year before Skerry arrived.

And then things got worse. Towson, with only one returning player from the 2011-12 team, lost its first 22 games under Skerry to run its Division I-record losing streak to 41 games before beating UNC Wilmington on Jan. 28 for its only win of the season.

Towson was ineligible for the postseason in Skerry’s second season due to APR issues that predated his arrival, but the rebuild nonetheless arrived in a hurry as Georgetown transfer Jerrell Benimon won the first of back-to-back CAA player of the year honors for the Tigers, who were picked 10th in the preseason poll but finished second in the regular season while going 18-13 — the biggest single-season turnaround in Division I history. Skerry has overseen five more 18-win seasons over the last seven years.

“I take a lot of pride in that, obviously, because of me having been here nine years — you get through our first year and it’s like ‘Holy smokes, we’ve got work to do, what have you walked into?’” Skerry said.

When Mihalich arrived at Hofstra in the spring of 2013, he took over a program which had as many players arrested (six) as Division I wins the previous season and had just four remaining scholarship players. Earlier this season, Mihalich recalled a CAA assistant warning his top assistant, Mike Farrelly, to decline the chance to go to Hofstra “…because it’ll be five years before they can even become a .500 team.” The Pride went 10-23 in Mihalich’s first season to give it a 27-70 record over a three-year span.

But in 2014-15, three transfers — Juan’ya Green and Ameen Tanksley, each of whom played under Mihalich at Niagara, as well as former SMU player Brian Bernardi — arrived and helped Hofstra go 20-14 and reach the CAA semifinals. The Pride won the CAA regular season title the next season and recorded 19 wins and a third-place finish in 2017-18 before earning the top seed in each of the last two seasons.

“The ultimate thing is to try to get to the NCAA Tournament,” Mihalich said. “But before you get there, you’ve got to be one of the best teams in your league. Every year, the goal is to have a chance to win the tournament in March.”

Fischer had a task that was both far easier but also, in its own way, just as challenging as the ones faced by Skerry and Mihalich. When Fischer was hired last Apr. 2, he entered a program and fanbase reeling from the firing of longtime head coach Tony Shaver, who won a school-record 226 games over 16 seasons and directed the Tribe to four CAA title games from 2008 through 2015, and the subsequent decision of five players to enter the transfer portal. Four of them ended up transferring, apparently decimating a team that was primed to enter this season as the favorite to win the CAA title.

For a while, it looked as if Fischer might lose a fifth player, too. But All-CAA big man Nathan Knight opted to stay for his senior year after working out for NBA teams during the pre-draft process. Knight and Andy Van Vilet, a 7-foot-2 transfer from Wisconsin who sat out last season, provided Fischer a base more likely to be found at a high-major school. Fischer filled in the holes around Knight and Van Vilet with guard Luke Loewe, the one player who returned to the Tribe after testing the transfer portal, and a pair of graduate transfer guards, Bryce Barnes and Tyler Hamilton.

“There were a lot of question marks,” Fischer said. “I’m certainly very proud of our players for the way that they’ve handled the transition and this season.”

Skerry, Mihalich and Fischer each have a different approach to discussing with players their program’s pursuit of long-awaited history. Skerry prefers not to mention 1991 as he focuses on getting the Tigers to improve on a daily basis.

Mihalich’s coaching staff features a reminder of what Pride players are trying to achieve in Craig “Speedy” Claxton, who was a star point guard for the school and led the then-Flying Dutchmen to the America East title as a senior in 2000 — the program’s first bid in 23 years. 

And at William & Mary, the chance to be the team that ends the epic drought is something every player is aware of no matter what the head coach might or might not say.

After the Tribe followed up a 6-0 CAA start by losing five of its next seven games, Fischer spoke to the team about embracing the opportunity ahead of it. William & Mary responded by winning its final five games.

“We actually talked about expectations a little bit midway through the season, because I thought we were going through a little bit of a rough patch (and) I thought our guys were feeling some expectations,” Fischer said. “And we talked about it again on Monday of this week. We all know what the goal is this weekend, and every team in our league has the same goal.”

Only one team is going to realize it, which means at least two of the top three seeds are going to exit the CAA Tournament disappointed as their NCAA drought extends another season. But while it might not provide much consolation next week to whomever falls short amongst the group of Hofstra, William & Mary and Towson, regularly entering the conference tournament with a chance to end the dry spell represents an ascension of a mountain in itself for each program.

“I think that what always grabs the headlines are the teams that go to the NCAA Tournament,” Fischer said. “In a lot of ways it’s harder to have a program with sustained success throughout the course of the regular season on a year-to-year basis. Every year, there’s teams that go to the NCAA Tournament that didn’t necessarily have a great season but kind of got hot at the right time. That’s the beauty of the tournament.

“But the idea of building a program that’s (enjoyed) sustained success, it’s certainly a challenge.”