The Student-Athletes on NYU’s Basketball Teams Are Relentless Winners, On-Court & Off

NYU, quite simply, is a Division III powerhouse when it comes to basketball. This season hasn’t been any different for either its men’s team or women’s team, and instead has cemented their legacies in a particularly heightened fashion.

While NYU is a longstanding member of the University Athletic Association, which includes other prestigious institutions such as Carnegie Mellon and the University of Chicago, both NYU teams–who go by the nickname the Violets–generally seem to wallop any foe that they face on the court. What is occasionally overlooked about the basketball team’s at NYU however, is the outstanding academic credentials of their student-athletes.

Nobody doubts their on court prowess. The women’s team, under long time head coach Meg Barber clinched the Division III championship after going 31-0. As of press time, they’re in the midst of another undefeated season, riding a 51-game winning streak stretching over two seasons. The men’s team, coached by Mike Walsh, finished last year’s season with a record of 21-6 and reached the second round of the D-III championship tournament, This year, they suffered only a single loss enroute to a 19-1 record. Both teams steamrolled their way through a recent road trip.

How does one balance academic ambition with the grind that leads to on-court success?

Barber, an ‘02 alum (and 5-5 Junior Coach of the Year) who has led the Violets since 2018, told Straus News that expectations are set during recruitment. “Being a student-athlete at NYU, it’s not easy,” she said. “It’s a lot to handle.”

“Life in New York City can be challenging,” Barber added. “What they’re doing as student-athletes is really profound, in terms of the success they’ve been able to obtain while balancing the rigorous academic workloads of NYU. We’re flying around the country every other weekend, as well.” This clearly doesn’t prevent in-classroom achievement, as the women’s team has a cumulative GPA of 3.6.

Barber described the schedule of Natalie Bruns, who is both one of the best players on the Violets and a recent graduate of NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, which is located in Brooklyn: “Her daily schedule involved commuting to Brooklyn from Manhattan, coming back over to Manhattan for practice at the Paulson Center, and going back over to Tandon if she had an evening class.”

Bruns, now a graduate student, did all of this while setting a program record of 98 blocks last season. She also scored 442 points, made 186 field goals, put up 226 rebounds, recorded six double-doubles, and started all 31 games. Unsurprisingly, she earned a variety of Division III awards.

Walsh, the men’s coach since 2022, echoed Barber’s analysis by telling Straus that his players must do “a great job of managing their time.” A lot of his players take their coursework on their grueling road trips, he added, making them “true student-athletes.” This multitasking clearly pays off, as the team had one of it highest GPAs ever this past semester.

Walsh himself certainly plays a significant role in such results, by relying on the foundational mantras that make an effective coach; he tells his players that they need to excel “on the court, in the classroom, and in the community.”

As for how exactly these players excel in their communities, it’s perhaps instructive to look at what career paths Violet alums have chosen upon graduation from NYU.

Walsh noted that some players end up going into the business side of sports, while others become doctors and lawyers. Barber said that her players have ended up “all over the place, both locationally and vocationally–whether it’s business, law, health research, pre-med, sports business, nursing, or engineering.”

As Walsh puts it, quite accurately, the NYU basketball program’s “student-athletes do very well. They’re a very driven, motivated, and talented group. Not just on the court, but off the court, too.”