Matt Janning (left) and Chaisson Allen (with ball) helped Northeastern grab the second seed in the CAA tournament, which starts Friday. (AP)

It is no secret that Boston is not a college town, at least when it comes to basketball. Sure, UMass had its heyday with John Calipari and Marcus Camby, though it wasn’t exactly on the up-and-up. And Al Skinner has had some great success at Boston College and led the Eagles to the Sweet 16 as recently as 2006. But even BC has trouble luring fans to Conte Forum to watch teams from the powerhouse ACC, and the college game has a tough time competing with the popularity of pro sports here.

This makes it all the more remarkable that Skinner’s former assistant at both Rhode Island and BC, Bill Coen, has been able to turn the Northeastern Huskies into a force to be reckoned with in the Colonial Athletic Association in his four years at the helm. The Huskies head into the CAA tournament, which begins Friday in Richmond, Va., as the second seed in a conference that perennially produces a candidate with upset potential in March, evidenced by Virginia Commonwealth’s upset of Duke in 2007 or George Mason’s unbelievable run to the Final Four in 2006. This year, whichever team the CAA puts into the bracket again should be a threat, as the conference already has delivered some upsets this season.

“I think when you look at the type of out-of-conference wins that the conference as a whole has posted this year, you begin to understand the quality of basketball,” Coen said. “When you look at William & Mary beating Maryland and Wake Forest, and Old Dominion beating Georgetown, and so on and so on, there are some great quality wins in the conference. So whoever comes out of our conference tournament is fully capable of representing very well in the NCAA tournament.”

Many have Old Dominion, the CAA regular-season champion, pegged as the most likely team to fill that giant-killer role. But Northeastern, which finished the regular season at 19-11 and 14-4 in CAA play, has a chance to take on that title in the next few days. The Huskies earned a first-round bye in the tournament and will face the winner of Friday’s matchup between Hofstra and Georgia State. If they can make it to the championship game on Monday night, they will have a shot to do what no Northeastern team has done since 1991: make the NCAA tournament.

Coen waited his turn to get a chance to build a program of his own, spending 17 years alongside Skinner, including a stint as the associate head coach at BC from 2001 until he was hired at Northeastern in 2006. He has great respect for the BC coach, and has tried to instill similar attributes in his team as he has worked to rebuild this program.

“He gave me a shot at the Division 1 level and I learned so much from him,” Coen said of Skinner. “Probably the biggest thing I learned from him was patience. Patience in developing a program, patience in recruiting and patience as the season goes along. I think that has always been his trademark and I think I’ve tried to develop some of that wisdom here at Northeastern.”

What Coen has developed is a program that can compete with any team in the competitive CAA as well as many of the other mid-major programs in the country. The Huskies opened the season against two teams likely to be dancing this month, losing a close 59-53 contest to Siena — a team currently riding a 35-game home winning streak — in Albany to open the season and following that up with a 64-61 victory over Utah State, a team that will at the very least share the WAC regular-season crown. It is a testament to the players that Coen has been able to lure to Northeastern, including a talented five-man senior class that features three starters and a valuable bench player in Baptiste Bataille.

Those three starters, along with junior Chaisson Allen, represent the core of the team. Nkem Ojougboh, who transferred to Northeastern from University of Texas-San Antonio after one season, and Manny Adako give the Huskies size and rebounding up front, but it is Matt Janning who is the unquestioned leader of this team. Janning, who played for the same AAU coach in Minnesota as former BC guard Troy Bell, has developed into one of the best players in the CAA and is his team’s leading scorer at 15.1 points a game. On Feb. 10, in a 62-53 win over Georgia State, he joined Huskies legend Dave Caligaris as the only other player in school history to have at least 1,500 points, 500 rebounds and 300 assists in his career.

Janning and his teammates have taken Northeastern from a team that was 13-19 in Janning’s freshman year and helped shape it into a contender for a conference crown. The Huskies’ record has improved each of the last four years as Coen and his players have helped turnaround the program. It is something Janning and his fellow seniors take pride in.

“When we all get together 10-15 years from now and look back at what we initially started — anybody can look at their college career and say that, but being part of a brand new coaching staff and the group that kind of got it going, it’s going to feel great when we do look back at that,” he said.

While no one would confuse the run Northeastern has made these past few years with its turn in the late ’80s, when Reggie Lewis led the Huskies to four consecutive trips to the Big Dance, this senior class has made great strides each year it has been a part of the program. That includes last year, when Northeastern made the College Basketball Invitational, its first trip to the postseason since Jose Juan Barea, now a guard on the Dallas Mavericks, led the Huskies to the NIT in 2005. Though the Huskies eventually lost to the runner-up in the tournament, UTEP, in the quarterfinals, Coen’s team accomplished something no Northeastern squad had done since 1984: earning a postseason win, which came in the form of a 64-62 victory at Wyoming in the first round.

Still, this team has higher expectations for how it will close out its campaign this year. Last season, Northeastern stumbled down the stretch, losing four of its last six games and falling to the third seed in the conference before being upset by Towson in the second round of the CAA tournament. The players insist that they will not be thinking about that when they take the court in Richmond Saturday.

“I think we are a new team,” said Allen, who is the Huskies’ second-leading scorer at 14.1 points per game. “There is a new focus. We learned from last year but we just put that under our belt and go into the tournament with a lot of experience and hopefully move forward.”

The Huskies had been holding out some hope that they could be in the spot the Monarchs are in — sitting atop of the conference — but a slipup against Hofstra in the second-to-last game of the season on Feb. 23 left the door open for ODU to jump into the conference driver’s seat. Still, Northeastern was able to rebound from that loss and two other setbacks in the final minute — to conference foe William & Mary and Louisiana Tech on BrackBuster Saturday on Feb. 20 — by closing out its regular season last Saturday with a win at George Mason. It restored some of the confidence Coen’s team had built in winning 15 of 16 games in a stretch from Dec. 25 to Feb. 10, a streak that included a victory over ODU at Matthews Arena at the end of January.

“I felt that we really needed that win against George Mason to kind of get our energy back,” Coen said. “We lost a couple of tough games in the final possession — a rebound basket against William & Mary and about a 30-foot bank shot against Louisiana Tech. So when those things go against you, you can’t help but have some doubts in your mind.

“But I thought our game against George Mason — where we really kind of made some winning plays down the stretch and came back from a deficit and ended up winning the game — will give us some momentum going into the tournament.”

With its first win at the Patriot Center since joining the conference in 2005, Northeastern has the mindset that it can extend its season. The victory brought the Huskies’ season mark against the CAA’s Virginia teams to 6-1, though only one of those other wins came on the road. Still, this team has proven with the win last Saturday and the victory over Old Dominion that it belongs in the upper echelon of a tough conference. And despite the misstep against Hofstra that caused Northeastern to fall a notch in the standings, the Huskies still head into Saturday on a high note, even if they get a rematch with the streaking Pride, who have won their last six games.

“We would have liked to finish first, but going in second is not too bad,” Allen said. “Obviously, we got a bye and got those three games, so I feel like we’ve got a good chance.”

It is a virtual certainty that Northeastern needs to win the conference tourney to be a part of the field of 65 for the NCAA tournament. The Huskies just do not have the quality wins on their resume that the likes of a William & Mary possess. But win or lose, Northeastern has come a long way in the basketball world in the short time that Coen has been at the helm, something his players can appreciate.

“I think if we do make it, it’s just another level that we’ve proven we can go to — which I think we definitely have the group to do it this year,” Janning said. “Like I said, it’s going to feel great looking back if we can say we made the tournament my senior year.

“If we don’t, it’s part of basketball; it happens,” he continued. “We’re not really thinking about that, but if it does happen like that we can’t really dwell on that. I still put together a great career here, and a lot of these guys will look back and be pretty proud of what they put into it.”

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