Which of the following U.S. universities compete in NCAA Division I basketball?

Belmont, Binghampton, Bryant, Campbell, Charleston Southern, Detroit Mercy, Elon, Gardner-Webb, High Point, Kennesaw State, Longwood, Mercer, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Oakland, Savannah State, Stony Brook, Towson, Wofford, Cal Baptist.

How many D1 basketball schools there?

It’s a sort of trick question.

Everyone one of those schools, many of them deeply anonymous outside their city limits, are D1 basketball schools.

Except for Cal Baptist, a private school in Riverside, California.

And the Lancers intend to join the D1 ranks, school officials confirmed on Friday, hoping to join the nation’s basketball elite for one of the feel-good, reputation-making forays into the 68-school NCAA D1 tournament — also known as March Madness.

The D1 basketball tournament is enormous, especially for schools that do not play football, and Cal Baptist does not.

When I heard about Cal Baptist’s D1 plans … I chuckled, because the Cal Baptist I knew in 30 years working in the Inland Empire, was good at this and that sport, for a little, NAIA-sanctioned school … but had no more business playing at the NCAA D1 level than Cal State Dominguez Hills has playing in the Ivy League.

But that was before I educated myself on the rather extraordinary rise of Cal Baptist, especially in the past decade, when I was mostly in the UAE and France.

Cal Baptist has a chance to be one of the better D1 programs in the lower half of what has grown to become the 351-school (!) ranks of D1 sports programs — with the main focus inevitably falling on men’s basketball.

Cal Baptist, beginning with the 2017-18 season, is going to go through the long and complicated process of joining NCAA Division I. It requires four seasons of living through a sort of limbo, which includes exclusion from NCAA title contention. In all fielded sports, men’s and women’s.

Along the way the school has to become competitive in the new, tougher environment, which means recruiting better talent, paying better coaches and playing in attractive facilities.

It can take up to 10 years to go through the process and claw your way to an NCAA berth in, say, the Western Athletic Conference, which Cal Baptist intends to join. Some schools have never quite managed it.

Situations Cal Baptist would do well to study?

UC Riverside, right there in town. UCR went D1 a decade ago but has never gotten an on-campus gym or a real buy-in from administrators, and it remains one of the least effective D1 basketball programs around, with one winning record in 16 seasons and an all-time record of 154-288.

On the other hand, there is Cal State Bakersfield’s decade-long battle to rise from Division II, in which they were reliably competitive, for a place in D1.

Bakersfield was further handicapped by not having a conference to play in, for three D1 seasons, before joining the WAC, but looking back it seems clear school officials as well as proud alumni and local fans, got a buzz off of the Roadrunners playing in the 2016 March Madness and scaring to death mighty Oklahoma before fading in the final minutes in the West Regional.

It was a week that very likely brought more national attention to CS Bakersfield than anything the school had done in its history.

Administrators and boosters of small-ish (and Cal Baptist is up to 9,000 students, from about a thousand, 20 years ago) would be ecstatic if their men’s team could do what Bakersfield did.

It takes a lot of steps, of course, and one of them is to have a nice venue to play in — and recruit to.

Cal Baptist is working on that, with a $73 million events center/arena coming on line in the next few years.

Since I left the country, Cal Baptist joined the ranks of NCAA D2 and did very well in it, making the NCAA D2 Western basketball regional the past three seasons, and winning 24 league titles in the PacWest Conference. This is their fifth season in D2, the minimum required before a school can shift to D1.

The Cal Baptist president, Ronald Ellis, clearly has big plans for what not long ago was a small, quiet, conservative school run by the Californian Southern Baptist Convention. And one aspect of it is playing at the top level of college sports — and especially in men’s basketball, of course.

A person leaves an area, he or she can lose touch with some of the upheaval below the surface, the schools coming to the fore after years of near-invisibility. That person was me and that rising power was Cal Baptist.

We could say “mark your calendars” for when Cal Baptist begins play in D1, but that won’t happen before the 2022-2023, and none of us has a calendar looking that far ahead.

Except, perhaps, at Cal Baptist.