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J.J. PostMar 20, 2026, 08:00 AM ET
NEW YORK -- David Pochapin and Cameron Koffman smelled chlorine.
On the night of Jan. 16, 2023, the two college basketball fans were on a mission to find an adopted team in the Five Boroughs. They had visited Columbia, Fordham, Manhattan and more, and on that day, Pochapin, Koffman and friend Ian Lipman were among the crowd at a "Battle of Brooklyn" game between the St. Francis Brooklyn Terriers and the Long Island University Sharks. Official attendance was 400, but the consensus among the friends was that it was significantly lower.
"The environment was terrible," Pochapin told ESPN. "You walk in, it reeks of a swimming pool."
That's right. The Sharks play directly above a swimming pool.
Long Island lost that game, one of many losses during a 3-26 season. But at the Steinberg Wellness Center, an innocuous multipurpose venue tucked just off Flatbush Avenue near Fort Greene Park, Pochapin and Koffman planted seeds that would take the college basketball world by storm.
That night, a fan section destined to go viral was born.
"Something was calling to us," Pochapin said. "We were like, 'What if we just started to become the fan section of this school? What if we just start coming? What would happen if we just started bringing our friends and getting loud and getting excited?'"
"There is just no place that we had been to that we felt so close," Koffman told ESPN. "We were pretty close at Manhattan. We splurged on $35 courtside seats at Wagner. But it just didn't feel the same as it did at LIU. This gym felt like you were up in there, as close as you could be to the floor."
Start coming, they did. They invited friends and family at every opportunity. With familiarity came traditions. Their courtside section became known as "the Reef." The gym became "the Shark Tank." The duo donated slogan-adorned T-shirts as promotions for a handful of games. Free throws became the moment for a hallmark tradition, where Pochapin yells "FINS UP," and fans clap their hands above their heads.
As the Reef established itself in the stands, the Sharks improved on the court. Koffman and Pochapin arrived during Rod Strickland's first season as head coach, with the former NBA guard turning in a better record with each successive season in Brooklyn: next 7-22, then 17-16 and now 24-10 -- with one of the best home records in the country.
After Long Island beat Chicago State in the NEC quarterfinals on March 4, a video of marching band director Spence Howell helping lead the "fins up" motion amassed more than a million views on X. Fans began flocking to the Reef for the semifinals. There, the Sharks clinched their NCAA tournament berth because the league's other finalist, Mercyhurst, was ineligible.
More than 1,500 fans then found their way to Steinberg to see Long Island win the NEC championship. And when the time came for the Sharks to shoot free throws, nearly every one of them put their fins up.
The moment felt surreal for Pochapin and Koffman, and a stark contrast to the circumstances of their original attendance.
"We finally got a chance to take a breather at 10 p.m. or so after the game, after the net cutting and everything. We grabbed a beer nearby and we just couldn't even speak for a second, we were pretty overtaken by emotion," Pochapin recalled. "It was pretty emotional to see the crowd was packed and everything."
Welcome to the Reef, where one of this year's Cinderella hopefuls has traded its tiara for a foam shark fin.
BEFORE THERE WAS "fins up," there was a minor identity crisis.
Long Island is a multicampus university, and in the fall of 2018, the university announced it would merge its athletic programs of the school's Brooklyn and Post campuses. There wasn't much overlap between the two programs' branding. LIU Brooklyn's mascot was the blackbird, and its teams' colors were black and blue. LIU Post was the Pioneers, playing in green and gold.
Not wanting to favor either school, Long Island opted for a hybrid approach. New colors would take inspiration from both campuses, and a new mascot would be voted on by the student body.
It would be a complicated process setting up all programs under the new singular athletic department to compete in Division I, with some of Division II Post's sports being promoted and others being merged with Brooklyn's existing Division I offerings. But Long Island's administration sought unity.
"We knew that if you picked one or the other you'd have one campus or the other sort of feeling like they were being left behind, or their history wasn't being honored," said Michael Berthel, LIU vice president for student affairs. "So we knew we had to go with something new."
The student body voted among three options: the Eagles, Falcons or Sharks. Sharks won out.
The ever-growing crowd during Long Island's run through this season's NEC tournament provided proof of concept that the new brand was taking root.
"We knew our strength was in the multiple campuses, that they each had great individual identity. We knew that if we could connect [them] ... we really felt like the rest would fall into place," Berthel said. "To be in the arena on Tuesday and see a full crowd, you think, 'Yeah, this clicked.'"
The mascot also provided the inspiration for Howell's marching band name -- the Unstoppable Sound -- which nods to shark trivia and fits the decision to unify the programs under one brand.
"Most sharks, if they stop swimming, there's not water going over their gills, which means they're not getting oxygen, which means they're dead. So, literally, a shark has to swim forward," said Howell, who acknowledged being a shark fanatic as a child. "We can't look behind us. We have to appreciate the history, and we have to acknowledge it and honor that, but moving forward we've just got to go into whatever tomorrow's going to bring."
Inside the Steinberg Wellness Center, on the way to the basketball gym, stands a daunting reminder of the school's chosen identity: a life-size plastic shark, courtesy of Koffman.
In 2023, Koffman's stepfather, Jeff Lipsitz caught and released a 12-foot bull shark while on a fishing trip in Miami. He had a replica designed of the prized catch to display at home. There was just one problem.
"When my mom found out, she was literally like, 'I'm going to divorce you if this shark lives in our house,'" Koffman recalled.
Koffman knew just the place that could use a life-size shark replica.
"I thought it was really fun," said Elliott Charles, Long Island director of athletics. "We want people to understand that that's something we're embracing. 'Fins up' isn't just a catchy moniker or dialogue for the year, we want people to really own what we think 'fins up' means.
"It's an awesome, kind of iconic thing to have."
After a stint in a hospitality suite above the court, the school relocated "Harvey the Shark" to outside the gym just weeks ago, where superstitious fans can now give its nose a rub before heading in to watch the game.
FOR A TRADITION rapidly ascending the ranks of 2026 college basketball lore, the story of "fins up" has a somewhat inconspicuous origin.
For decades, fans have tried to coax successful free throws with a tried-and-true routine: Both arms go into the air, reaching forward at a roughly 70-degree angle, and fingers are wiggled until the shot falls -- or doesn't. Repeat as needed for subsequent attempts.
The first "fins up" was a thematic spin-off of that tradition. The university previously had used the slogan on branding, and Pochapin thought to combine the phrase with the ease of making a mock fin with one's hands in the air. The story dates to a February 2024 game against Merrimack (Buffalo Wild Wings Night at Steinberg, recorded attendance of 521), which went to overtime and saw the teams shoot a combined 79 free throws.
"During that game we would put our hands up during the free throws that LIU was shooting, [the] hands up and twinkle the fingers sort of thing that you would do, and then one of the next games it just morphed into instead of hands up 'fins up,'" Koffman recalled. "David's going to yell 'fins up,' and then everybody is going to clap their hands together in unison."
Howell, in his first year leading LIU's band, looked for ways to evolve the culture and atmosphere among his small group and got in on the act, helping lead the cheer from the other end of the bleachers.
"We just pounced on it," Howell said. "It's really taken off on campus. ... I live close to campus and I go for walks with my wife and two days ago we were out walking by the baseball diamond, the whole baseball team stops practice, runs over to the fence, hangs over the edge and they're screaming, 'FINS UP, FINS UP, DO THE THING!'"
The Reef had brushed with social media fame before. Coleman Crawley, who posts mid-major basketball experience videos on TikTok, has shared videos documenting the experience at Steinberg. In February 2025, a video on X drew more than 2,000 likes. But the Reef really drew attention during the NEC tournament quarterfinal on March 4, when video of Howell & Co. went viral.
Mark Nash, a Brooklyn resident, saw the buzz online and took in his first LIU game at the NEC championship, grabbing a digital ticket at lunchtime and biking over after work. The experience? Well worth some initial confusion.
"To be honest with you, I wasn't sure if they did ['fins up'] for when the other team was shooting or when LIU was shooting," Nash said. "But the first time, everybody in the stadium was doing it, which I thought was cool. It was a really great energy."
Nash and other new fans weren't the only debutants in the tank for the season's final contests. Lipman and his girlfriend, Caterina Favino, brought their dog, Winston, to the NEC semifinal, complete with a miniature fin prop. By the championship, which coincidentally fell on Winston's second birthday, the miniature dachshund had secured a branding deal with the ticketing company TickPick and the fin had a sponsorship added.
"I don't think there's any other stadium where we would think we could get Winston into," Lipman said. "This is a place that Cameron and David have made home, and they were encouraging [us] to bring Winston too. So we brought him, put a fin on him, and the rest is history.
"If you were to ask me if I were to bring a dog to a game three years ago, [where it] would be on 'SportsCenter' the following day, the answer would be absolutely not."
There may need to be one tweak going forward, though.
"We need to find a bigger one, because he's gotten a little chunky," Favino said. "So that's a little high on him now."
POCHAPIN AND KOFFMAN are quick to point out that for all their cheers, the real story is the team's on-court play.
"No one would care about this if the team wasn't playing their ass off and wasn't so good," Koffman said. "The team deserves all the credit here."
"At the end of the day we want to make sure that [people know] that we're here because of how good the team is, and that's because of coach Strickland and the team," Pochapin added.
The plaudits are well-deserved. The Sharks are the highest-scoring team in the NEC. On the defensive end, they lead the conference in blocked shots per game and are second in steals. A well-balanced unit, four out of five starters average 10 or more points per game. Add in a commitment to extra effort -- as Pochapin points out, Long Island's win against Chicago State in the NEC quarterfinals may not have happened if graduate student guard Jamal Fuller didn't draw an offensive foul in the final minute -- and a winning formula becomes clear.
What's also clear is how well Long Island plays in front of its home fans.
The Sharks are 14-1 at home this season, a mark that sees them share company with the likes of Michigan and Florida. And while Long Island may not be the best at shooting free throws -- the team's free throw percentage ranks 344th out of 365 Division I teams, according to Bart Torvik -- "fins up" appears to have made some degree of difference. The Sharks shoot 7% better from the charity stripe when playing at home as opposed to on the road.
"Having this fanbase and having this support behind us while we play, it gives you plus-15 attributes to everything you got," sophomore forward Shadrak Lasu said ahead of the NEC title game. "It makes you want to go harder, get on the ground. Makes you want to just play hard because you got a whole bunch of people who are watching you and who want you to win. [The fans are] just cheering for you, and at the end of the day we're the players and we can't let them down because they're coming to support. So we've got to do what we've got to do."
LONG ISLAND WILL face a steep climb Friday.
The Sharks face the top seed in the West region, the Arizona Wildcats, who rank 214 spots ahead of them in KenPom. Just two No. 16 seeds have toppled a No. 1, with UMBC and Fairleigh Dickinson's upsets holding near-mythical places in college basketball lore.
But this is March. The page of the calendar where the typically constraining powers of math and logic seem to wane come tournament time. The month where dreams and hearts occasionally can prove as potent as an elite efficiency rating.
In San Diego, Long Island will take the court with its most dedicated fans cheering.
"The Reef will be traveling," Koffman confirmed.
"We're just tickled pink that we get to go. We are so excited. Every member of the pep band's just ready to rock," Howell said. "['Fins up'] is going with us forever, until someone makes us stop."
Viejas Arena's capacity is 12,414. Win or lose, at least a few dozen fans will have their heads -- and fins -- held high.
