EDWARDSVILLE, Ill.— “The time is now”.

Signs with that phrase dot the campus of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, a school with an enrollment of just under 12,000 in Madison County.

There’s one near a $105 million health sciences building under construction, and it could just as well apply to the school’s men’s basketball program.

One week after winning the Ohio Valley Conference postseason tournament for the first time to clinch an automatic NCAA tournament berth, the No. 16 seeded Cougars learned their opponent. They’ll have a date with the top seed in the Midwest, the Houston Cougars on Thursday in Wichita, KS.

On Sunday, fans packed First Community Arena as the school continued to relish in the local and national spotlight since winning the OVC tournament on ESPN2 last weekend.

They were one of the teams featured on camera during the CBS broadcast, introducing a national broadcast audience to the SIUE brand in this way for the very first time.

Prognosticators had pegged a potential Cougar-Cougar matchup over the past week, to the point where Head Coach Brian Barone had already started some game-planning. It will be Barone’s first time coaching against Houston’s Kelvin Sampson but their relationship dates back decades. 

“My dad coached against coach Sampson when I was at Texas A&M, I was a player. He’s helped me in the offseason so many times. I respect the heck out of coach Sampson, and Kellen, his son and his program. I look at it, we both get to play each other,” Barone said. 

As a player, Brian nearly landed at Oklahoma, before opting for Marquette after his later father, Tony, was fired.

Most recently, Barone and Sampson have talked about defense and program building.

Studies have shown that a Cinderella-style tournament run can yield sizeable increases in enrollment

For SIU-Edwardsville, with a 2024 enrollment of 11,893, there is an expectation that what’s happened so far will lead to an increase in applications and convince undecideds to make a commitment.

The school has competed at the Division I level since 2012, but this year’s success is the result of a concerted effort over the past three years to be competitive on the court. It’s also been done with local talent leading the way. Collinsville’s Ray’Sean Taylor this year became the school’s all-time leading scorer and his cousin, Brian Taylor II, a De Smet graduate, was the team’s second leading scorer this season as a junior after transferring in before last season.   

“Rarely do we get to watch what I’ve referred to as a steady climb, and to have the kind of continuity in this program, to have the progress and the accomplishments be made in what the people in sports call a right way, it’s just really gratifying to watch,” SIUE chancellor Dr. James Minor told Spectrum News last week after the Cougars won the OVC postseason tournament.

“It’s really early to tell, but we know that when you have this kind of milestone for a basketball program it can really change the trajectory for a program,” he said. 

The boost for the school’s profile comes just as the university told faculty and staff of plans to reduce staff and cut programs in the face of a reported $10 million budget deficit. 

“While difficult, these changes will allow SIUE to modernize operations and align our budget in service to our goals of growing enrollment, delivering excellent academic programs, supporting a community of innovative faculty, staff, and students, and serving our communities and the region,” a school statement read. “SIUE remains committed to advancing our mission to deliver an accessible, high-quality education for students and families, and these actions are important to a resilient and sustainable future.”

Minor said the school isn’t counting on the basketball program’s success to have a “dramatic effect” on the steps being taken,” while offering assurances that the school is not in a financial crisis. 

The men’s basketball program’s focus moving forward will be to see if it can repeat this season’s success, regardless of where and when this season ends, amid the ongoing evolution of college sports with an arms race for Name, Image and Licensing deals for players, coaching salaries and facility upgrades.

Minor thinks SIUE can do that, touting high graduation rates for student-athletes and a school culture that attracts the right families and perspective recruits.

Whatever unfolds over the coming days will give the school a national platform to tell a story to a wider audience for potential students in general about what can be possible in Edwardsville.

“This is exciting not just for SIUE basketball but for the entire campus community and entire Edwardsville community as well, said State Sen. Erica Harriss, who played for the SIUE tennis program as a student-athlete and was among the throng of supporters at Sunday’s reveal, where Barone, Ray’Sean Taylor and his teammates were mobbed for photos and autographs in a way that would be the envy of any politician. 

“Edwardsville has always been a very welcoming community to the campus and I think that this event itself will just kind of continue building on that,” she said. Before the event started, she was picking Barone’s brain about how to prepare a team mentally for the task now ahead.

“It sounds like they are really great to go,” she said.