Ivy hoops roundup – Sept. 25, 2019

  • Princeton’s Bella Alarie completed her last 3×3 tournaments with USA Basketball with a silver medal effort in  Edmonton this past weekend and a bronze medal showing in Montreal in early September.  Overall, her team came in seventh place in the 28-team field.
    The two-time Ivy Player of the Year, who also picked up a silver medal with USA Basketball at this summer’s Pan American Games, continues to improve her stock as she heads into her final year for the Tigers.  Michelle Williams of the WNBA listed Alarie as one of the 12 potential first-round picks in next years’s Draft, while Howard Megdal of High Post Hoops had her as the number five pick for the Minnesota Lynx.
  • Harvard men’s coach Tommy Amaker told Jon Rothstein that 2018 men’s Ivy League Player of the Year, Seth Towns, has been cleared for non-contact work.  Towns, a co-captain of this year’s Crimson team, missed all of last year due to a knee injury sustained in the 2018 Ivy Tournament final against Penn.
    Earlier this month, the senior from Columbus, Ohio, was one of 16 players attending the NCAA Elite Student-Athlete Symposium for Men’s Basketball in Indianapolis.

  • Amaker was recently interviewed for the Marching to Madness podcast.  In the 15-minute program, the coach gives updates on seniors Bryce Aiken, Noah Kirkwood, Chris Lewis, as well as sophomore Noah Kirkwood, the 2019 Ivy League Rookie of the Year, and first years Luka Sakota and Chris Ledlum.
  • With the departure of Courtney Banghart to UNC, Princeton Athletics’ Jerry Price ended The Court Report podcast and starts a new one with new Tigers head coach Carla Berube.  The aptly named program, Conversations with Carla, had its premier episode last week.  The former Tufts coach discusses her collegiate history at UConn, her first few months at Princeton and some initial thoughts on her new team.
    There is no definite date for episode number two, but Price expects it to occur about a week before the regular season begins.
    Berube can also be heard at the UConn Pod from late August.  The interview can be found at the 1:07:00 mark.
  • The longest-serving head coach in Ivy basketball history, Harvard’s Kathy Delaney-Smith, was interviewed by Matt Ward of High Post Hoops this week.  Delaney-Smith announced senior Mackenzie Barta and junior Rachel Levy as team captains for the coach’s 38th team in Cambridge.  She also discussed the inspiring play of her first year class, which will try to find a way to recover the loss point production and leadership of five guards, including three time first team All-Ivy Katie Benzan.
  • Stephanie Carideo was hired to join Penn coach Mike McLaughlin’s staff at the end of August and Brown head coach Sarah Behn announced the hiring of Brian Fleming in late September.
    Carideo started her coaching career as the head coach of John W. Hallahan Catholic Girls’ High School in Philadelphia and Penn State Abington.  Prior to joining the Quakers, she was an assistant coach for the men’s basketball program at Jefferson University.  Working for Hall of Fame Herb Magee, she was one of only two female coaches working with a men’s program throughout all levels of NCAA basketball.
    Fleming, who played at nearby Roger Williams University, from 1993-1997, has spent his entire coaching career in the great state of Connecticut.   He was a head coach at Glastonbury High School from 2004-2013, Connecticut College from 2014-2017 and Waterford High School from 2017-2019.  In addition, Fleming has been a statistical analyst and a member of the scout team for the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun.
    With these positions filled, the Dartmouth women are the last Ivy program with an open spot.
  • Brown men’s associate head coach T. J. Sorrentine will have his number retired by his alma mater, the University of Vermont.  Sorrentine and former teammate Taylor Coppenrath will have their numbers raised to the rafters on Oct. 26 as the Catamounts host the Bears in an exhibition game at 7 p.m.
    The Pawtucket native is entering his 12th season at Brown and his 9th as associate head coach.
    Sorrentine, a student at Vermont from 2000-2005, was the America East Rookie of the Year, America East Player of the Year, and a three-time America East All-Conference First Team performer. He is third all-time in points with 2,013 (Brown women’s assistant coach Eddie Benton is first with 2,474), second in assists with 548 and third in steals with 164.  His 354 career three pointers are tops at Vermont and in the America East, as well as 11th-most in NCAA history.
    In his senior season, Sorrentine led the #13 seed Catamounts to an upset victory over #4 Syracuse in the first round of the 2005 NCAA Tournament.  The 60-57 overtime victory was the first-ever for Vermont.
  • Recent Cornell grad, Matt Morgan, the #2 all-time scorer in Ivy men’s basketball history, reflects on his college career and looks toward the future at the IvyUntold website.  Morgan was a free agent with the NBA champion Toronto Raptors at the recent NBA Las Vegas Summer League, but was not offered a long-term deal.  Presently, he is back home in North Carolina, looking to catch on with an NBA team during the preseason.
    IvyUntold is a website founded by former Cornell student-athletes Jordan Abdur-Ra’oof (2014-2018) and Troy Whiteside (2015-2019) to eliminate prejudices by cultivating a more accepting environment for minority students through the sharing of personal stories and experiences.
  • Yale alum Earl “Butch” Graves has been named one of five recipients of the university’s George H.W. Bush ’48 Lifetime of Leadership Awards at the Blue Leadership Ball on Friday, Nov. 22, at the Payne Whitney Gym. The award, named after the 41st President of the United States, “honors alumni athletes who, in their lives after Yale, have made significant leadership contributions in their worlds of governance, commerce, science and technology, education, public service, and the arts and media.”
    Graves, Yale’s all-time and the Ivy League’s fourth all-time leading scorer (2,090 points), was a two time first-team All-Ivy and three time AP All-America honorable mention, during his 1980-1984 career.  After graduation, he was selected by the Philadelphia 76ers in the 3rd round of the 1984 NBA Draft, but cut during training camp.  He was quickly picked up by Milwaukee, but released 10 days later.  In January 1985, he was signed to two 10-day contracts by Cleveland and saw action in four games.
    Graves left professional basketball and went to Harvard, where he completed his MBA in the spring of 1988.  He joined Black Enterprise that year, eventually became President/COO in 1998 and CEO in 2006.  In 2018, his alma mater chose him to be one of the school’s two Legends of Ivy League Basketball.
  • Former Harvard guard Matt Fraschilla (2013-2017) was promoted to Video Coordinator for Villanova men’s basketball.  For the past two seasons, Fraschilla, the son of ESPN basketball analyst and former St. John’s head coach Fran Fraschilla, was a graduate assistant on Jay Wright’s staff as he earned his MBA.
  • Mike Blaine, an assistant coach on Bill Courtney’s Cornell staff from 2010-2014 and head coach of Division III Medaille College the last five years, has been named the new head coach at Plattsburgh State.  The 2016-2017 Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference (AMCC) Coach of the Year was Cornell’s primary admissions, alumni relations and game scheduling liaison and managed recruiting efforts in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions.
  • Cornell Admissions may have its Baby Wah Wah, but Penn Admissions may have one-upped the Big Red.  Dean of Admissions (and big-time Quaker basketball fan) Eric Furda is now Angry Eagles Fan after being caught using some choice words for the refs at Sunday’s Philadelphia-Detroit football game.
    If the dean was this upset at an early season football game, one can only imagine how he reacted when he heard that former men’s basketball head coach Jerome Allen took bribes to help get a student into Penn.

1 thought on “Ivy hoops roundup – Sept. 25, 2019”

  1. “Angry” is a way too vague and weak adjective for what we saw. Most news outlets have been referring to Eric Furda as Psycho Eagles Fan.

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