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brief and often frustrating history of Penn State basketball in the NCAA tournament without considering three factors: the high school and collegiate basketball mecca of the Philadelphia area, the con- tinuing changes in the college game since the late 1930s and the NCAA postseason records of four longtime rivals. The Philadelphia connection Coach Patrick Chambers is a product of Philadelphia's basketball hotbed. No one should doubt the quality of high school basketball in that area. Think Wilt Cham- berlain and Kobe Bryant. Both made the jump from high school to Hall of Fame ca- reers in the NBA. For one reason or another, Penn State struggled to recruit the Philadelphia area in the decades preceding Chambers' ar- rival. Chambers felt if he could overcome that dilemma, his team could become a serious contender for the Big Ten title and a frequent participant in the NCAA tour- nament. It took a while, but his plan is starting to work. Surmounting the recruiting obsta- cles at Roman Catholic High School was the key, and that meant overcoming the domination of Philadelphia's original Big Five – La Salle, Penn, Temple, St. Joseph's and Villanova – and the mag- netic allure of the fabled Palestra, Penn's home court, where the Big Five once played round-robin games. Staying home and playing for one of the Big Five teams seemed a better deal to many Philadelphia prospects than going to the state univer- sity three hours away in the heart of rural central Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Cham- bers and his staff used the breach at Roman Catholic to recruit better players from outside of Philadelphia, along the Northeast corridor. Basketball is quite a different game today than it was when James Naismith invented it in 1891, and the rules and cul- ture of the sport have been constantly evolving. The last two years of the 1930s were a turning point. That's when the Na- tional Invitational Tournament began. The NIT led to the genesis of the NCAA tournament, but until the mid-1950s, the

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