As many are well aware, the AIC Yellow Jackets Men’s Basketball team has been at the bottom of the Northeast-10 conference for the past 10 years.

But that is changing this season.

The NE-10 is one of the country’s toughest Division II conferences, if not the toughest conference in the east coast, where parity is more common in the conference than having an easy night. But through all the adversity and struggles former men’s basketball head coach, and now NBA scout for the Detroit Pistons Art Luptowski, stood by his former team, continuing to coach and teach these young men all about the game he loves dearly.

However after a long campaign of being at the helm of the Yellow Jackets Men’s Basketball program for 15 long seasons, Coach Art made a very difficult decision and decided it was time for change and time to move forward, leading to his resignation during the summer of July 2014.

When it comes to making changes whether it’s for the better of something, the fear of that change is always overwhelmed by the thought of relapsing and having the same result or even worse than before.

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”

Those words of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offer a great explanation of what the men’s basketball program has been going through. And so with the removal ripe fruit, seeds will be planted to rebuild what was lost. Now lo and behold a new era of Yellow Jackets Men’s Basketball was started with the addition of new head coach Andy Burkholder.

Coach Burkholder starts his Yellow Jacket coaching debut with his back against the wall and the pressure of bringing a team that was at the bottom of the conference to being able to compete with the best. And before the season could even start, before Coach Burkholder was given a chance to show the talents of the new team the NE-10 pre-season rankings said it all, AIC received no 1^st place votes and were predicted to finish last in the conference out of 15 teams.

And with a completely new team with only a few players left from the Luptowski era, and welcoming in 8 new players along with a new coaching staff who would put this team at the top of the conference, and expect them to click right away.

Like his fellow teammates, senior Guard Bobby Harris is looking to the positive.

“I didn’t know what to expect in the beginning, all I wanted was to have a successful season and a good way to end my senior career,” said Harris, who is from Berlin, New Jersey.

“I am not listening to what anyone else has to say about this team, I am just concentrating on us and what we need to do, and the sacrifices we have to make to be great,” Harris added.

Senior guard Marcus Porter said he is working to rise to the challenges.

“I knew it was going to be hard with all the new faces coming into the program, but I knew it was going to be a process and we all just had to stick with it, and stay together as a team no matter what,” Porter said. “We set the bar to how great we want to be, we don’t accept the standards that was set for us by other people,” he said.

Harris and Porter both serve as team captains for the Yellow Jackets and both being very competitive can only elevate everyone’s game to be more than mediocre.

The Yellow Jackets have been proving anyone that had any doubts about them wrong. They are now 14-3 overall and 9-2 in the conference, and were on a 6 game winning streak before it was snapped in double overtime by Southern New Hampshire Penmen who is #1 in the northeast division of the NE-10.

The Yellow Jackets are still #1 of the southeast division of the NE-10 and plan on staying there.