They play hoops in college basketball’s mainstream. You know them. They’re the big boys.

We’re talking mainly of the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC.

Certainly in Pittsburgh, it’s no secret Duquesne plays second fiddle. The Dukes routinely operate in obscurity in the lightly regarded Atlantic 10.

Even within their own league, they are an afterthought, save for two years ago when the men’s team took the conference by storm and won its first league title in more than four decades.

“We’ve got to kill that perception amongst the entire league and media that there’s any drop-off when it comes to A-10 basketball,” Duquesne men’s coach Dru Joyce III said Tuesday amid a flurry of interviews with the league’s 28 men’s and women’s coaches and selected players at the league’s annual media day at PPG Paints Arena.

Down the road from Duquesne, there’s the ACC, where the Pitt Panthers reside. And then, there’s the A-10 (Spoiler alert: The ACC was ranked fifth, just one spot ahead of the A-10 in the final NCAA Division I power rankings among 31 D-I conferences.).

“This is high-level basketball,” said Joyce, who entered his second year as Duquesne’s coach by quietly dismissing his team’s ninth-place prediction.

The Dukes will try to turn around a disappointing 13-19 record in Joyce’s first year with the return of starters Cam Crawford and Jakub Necas and a host of other regulars.

Add to it an infusion of eight newcomers, including John Hugley IV, who spent three up-and-down years at Pitt and one each at Oklahoma and Xavier.

“I’ve been playing college basketball for six years now,” Hugley said. “This is still the highest level of basketball.”

Said Joyce: “When you help young men achieve their goals and dreams and put people in the professional ranks, this is high-level basketball. I don’t want that notion going around anymore that it’s not. This is a great brand of basketball. It’s been unfortunate at times that it hasn’t had the right spotlight and hasn’t been given credit. We’ll go against any league. We don’t get credit for coming into the season with (a number of) teams being in the top 100. We should get a ton of credit for that. Sometimes it gets swept under the rug entirely too much.”

When it was suggested that folks harbor a perception of the A-10 as anything but elite, Hugley was quick to repel.

“I say, ‘You are absolutely wrong,’ ” the 6-foot-10, 265-pound Hugley blurted.

He should know. He turned in a fairly monstrous season as a sophomore at Pitt in 2021-22, averaging 14.8 points and 7.9 rebounds per game before injuries and personal issues stunted his progress, and he finally left the program.

“Coming back to Duquesne was a no-brainer. It’s been good for me,” said Hugley, a Cleveland native. “Ever since I’ve stepped into the building, it’s been love. Just knowing the city accepted me back here is a huge thing.”

While the Duquesne men will be looking to recapture the magic of that championship season of 2023-24, the women have moved on from a successful campaign that produced a 21-13 mark and yet another postseason appearance in the WNIT.

The leader of that team, former Chartiers Valley star Megan McConnell, became the first A-10 player in eight years to sign with a WNBA team. But her time with the Phoenix Mercury was cut short by an injury.

“Obviously, that’s a big piece to graduate,” Duquesne coach Dan Burt said. “Since Meg made the roster in Phoenix, our kids have understood that this is now their team.”

With no returning starters, Duquesne was chosen to finish eighth in the league’s preseason poll.

“Meg was such a great captain in leading us in so many different ways, and it’s really rubbed off on our players,” Burt said. “I feel like we have 13 captains on our team right now.”

The Dukes’ entire starting lineup is gone, but Burt pointed to a team that is “the youngest and tallest team in the Atlantic 10.”

And perhaps more talented than most would think.

He called 6-5 freshman Raevin Washington, from Harrisonburg, Va., “the most athletic post player I’ve coached in 29 years of Division I basketball.

“We’re really excited about what this year’s going to bring.”

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