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Richmond, VCU have little in common, except for the Sweet 16 Date published: 3/25/2011
By ADAM HIMMELSBACH RICHMOND--Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond share a city--but little else. Richmond is a small private university with a sprawling campus that surrounds a glimmering lake. There are tall trees, grassy fields and stately buildings. VCU, the second-largest public university in the state, is unmistakably a city school. Classroom buildings sit along Broad Street near the city's center, amid bus stops and parking meters. With more than 23,000 students, its enrollment is about seven times the size of Richmond's. But now these two universities are inextricably linked by basketball. Tonight, the Spiders and the Rams will play in Both the Rams and the Spiders arrived in Texas as underdogs, both are dreaming big, and both have their city going bananas. "These teams, these schools have made us so proud," Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones told a crowd of more than 1,000 people during a pep rally Wednesday evening, "because we are making history." SCHOOL COLORS Spiders T-shirts were strewn about three large folding tables at the front of Richmond's bookstore on Wednesday. A steady stream of people picked through the piles looking for Sweet 16 shirts--the Spiders have not reached this round since 1988--but they were mostly out of luck. Store manager Roger Brooks said 1,000 shirts, at $19.95, sold out quickly on Tuesday, and then another 1,000 were gobbled up on Wednesday. He planned to keep ordering them as long as people kept buying them. Outside the bookstore, the Pi Beta Phi sorority was looking to capitalize on the windfall by holding sign-ups for its annual charity basketball tournament. Students strolled along campus and made plans to watch the game together, stunned by their school's sudden run. "There's a lot of excitement right now," said Richard Muldrow, a junior offensive lineman on the Spiders football team. "It's good to see them do so well and bring a lot of attention to Richmond." VCU's bookstore is much larger than Richmond's, and its apparel assortment more vast. The school sells everything from foam fingers to fright wigs, but, much like at Richmond, everyone was looking for the commodity du jour: Sweet 16 shirts.
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