On Tuesday, America caught up to basketball.

The United States joined the defending NBA champions and so many college teams – including the Craig-Robinson-coached Oregon State Beavers – in being led by a black man, a reality nearly everyone across the sports world seemed to grasp.

I watched Rider practice today and chatted with Harris Mansell and Ryan Thompson. Both said they watched Tuesday’s inauguration ceremonies and were moved by them. Mansell, who like Obama is biracial, said his mom, who’s black, called him first thing in the morning to make sure he was watching.

He said he didn’t need the reminder, that he was more than a little excited about the moment, and that as an economic major, he’d be paying close attention to the new President’s efforts to get the economy back on track.

I also talked for a half hour or so on the phone with Ed Cooley, and wrote this story for today’s paper. (My second annual homecoming game is tomorrow night, when Rider plays Fairfield in Alumni Hall).

Much has been made over the years of the lack of non-white students at Fairfield and of the administration’s failures to attract more black students.

That’s a complicated issue on which reasonable, fair-minded people have vastly different takes. But say this for the school: Cooley is, by far, its most visible and well-known figure. He is, as nearly every men’s basketball coach at non-football schools is, the de facto representative of the school to many in the public who have never heard of the Rev. Jeffrey von Arx, Mark Reed, my “uncle” Rev. Mike Doody, or any other important figures on campus.

That the school chose a black guy from the south side of Providence to be its representative, in my view, is not an insignificant factor when you’re talking about where non-white people fit in at the school.

Our conversation started with the multitude of injuries the Stags are fighting and moved on to Jonathan Han’s play and the Stags’ prospects for a good second half of the MAAC schedule.

I didn’t intend to write an Obama story, but I asked Cooley where he and/or the team watched the inauguration. He told me some of the players had class, preventing a team viewing gathering, but he made sure his wife, Nurys, was there watching with him.

He said he and Nurys were intrigued by Obama’s eloquence and potential when they watched his keynote address at the Democratic convention in Boston in 2004, and were positively moved by his candidacy, his victory on Nov. 4 and his inaugural address Tuesday.

I knew I had the makings of a story when Cooley said he planned to use a passage from Obama’s speech as a teaching tool for his players yesterday in practice.

I’m not sure if the quote will be hanging in the Stags’ locker room for the rest of the year, but you can bet Cooley won’t forget it any time soon, nor will he stop using it at the end of the year or even at the end of Obama’s presidency.

At first glance, you might not think Cooley and his predecessor, Tim O’Toole have much in common, but they’re actually quite similar.

They were both in their 30s when they were hired, they’re both firey guys who like to jump up and down and yell a lot on the sidelines, and they’re both history buffs who love using quotes from politicians, philosophers and whoever else they can summon – O’Toole once took his team to see “The Passion of the Christ” before a road game – to motivate and inspire their players.

But Cooley is different from all of his predecessors at Fairfield in that he crossed a racial barrier when he was hired – much like Obama did on Tuesday.