Chicago State on the road at St. Thomas
The Chicago State men's basketball team will travel to St. Paul, Minnesota to face the University of St. Thomas on Friday, November 11 at 7 p.m. at Schoenecker Arena.
The same two teams opened the 2021-22 season at the JCC in Chicago in Cougars head coach Gerald Gillion's first game and it also marked the Tommies first game in Division I basketball.
Chicago State earned a 77-72 win while St. Thomas would go on to a 10-20 overall record and 4-14 mark in the Summit. CSU had five scorers in double figures in that game, including Jahsean Corbett with 14 and Kedrick Green with 11. In a game of runs, the Cougars led by 11, 23-12, but went on a five-minute scoring drought and St. Thomas clawed back with a 14-0 run to take a 30-28 lead. CSU scored the next five points and a Tommies layup ended the first half with the Cougars leading 33-32. Tied at 69-69, St. Thomas pulled out to a short-lived one-point lead, 72-71, but the Cougars put on the defensive clamps and scored the last six points of the game, four coming from the charity stripe and Chicago State earned the five-point victory.
Independent Status
Chicago State and Hartford are the only two Divison I programs playing an independent schedule during the  2022–23 season. CSU left the Western Athletic Conference following the 2021–22 season while Hartford began a transition to Division III in the 2021–22 school year, and left the America East Conference in July 2022. Hartford has announced it will join the D-III Commonwealth Coast Conference in July 2023. Before 2022, the last D-I independent school had been NJIT, which was forced to go independent when its then-current home of the Great West Conference collapsed in 2013 due to conference realignment. NJIT would eventually find a home in the ASUN Conference in 2015, and is now in the America East.
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The Chicago State men's basketball team will host their season opener as part of a men's and women's basketball doubleheader on Monday, November 14. The women will face UIC at 5:30 p.m. and the men will host IUPUI at 7 p.m.
About Chicago State
Chicago State University Athletics is comprised of 15 intercollegiate teams involving over 150 student-athletes that compete in basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, tennis, indoor and outdoor track and volleyball. CSU held memberships in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) and NCAA Division II before transitioning to NCAA Division I in 1994. Melvin Bland was the first CSU student-athlete to gain NAIA All-American status in 1974 as a wrestler. Fred Evans became the first black swimmer ever to win a national championship in 1975. In 1991, the Chicago State women's tennis team became the first all-black college team to amass an unbeaten season at the NCAA level. CSU's women's basketball team earned a spot in the 2011 Women's Basketball Invitational and CSU's men's basketball team won the 2013 Great West Conference Tournament title, also making an appearance in the CollegeInside.com Postseason Tournament (CIT). The Men's Outdoor Track & Field 4x100-Meter Relay team were 2019 Honorable Mention All-Americans and WAC Champions. Their feat marked the first time the Chicago State's men's track & field program was represented at the national meet. Chicago State volleyball recorded a historic season in 2021, with Yanlis Feliz becoming CSU's first volleyball All-American and head coach Tony Trifonov earning selection as WAC Coach of the Year. During that same season, three different CSU teams earned victories over Big Ten opponents with men's soccer beating Northwestern, women's basketball upending Wisconsin and volleyball, which established a school record 17 wins and hosted a post-season volleyball tournament for the first time in program history, swept Indiana in Bloomington.
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