Ivy hoops roundup – June 29, 2019

  • The Brown men’s team officially hired Cooper Handelsman as an assistant coach and Sam Hershberger as its Director of Basketball Operations.  The Handelsman hiring was first reported at HoopDirt.com and later noted in IHO’s June 6 roundup.
    Handelsman was a point guard for Kenyon College (2011-2015), before spending the 2015-2016 season as Lehigh’s video coordinator.  He has been with the Hoop Group since the end of that season, and has been Director of Hoop Group Elite for the last two and half years.  Hershberger, a four year member of the Elon basketball team (2012-2016) spent 2017-2019 as a student manager at the University of Florida while he obtained his Master’s in Applied Physiology and applied Kinesiology.
  • Recent graduates from Brown and Penn, Erika Steeves and Princess Aghayere, were two of a record 585 female college athletes nominated by their schools for the NCAA Women of the Year Award.  The award, created in 1991, recognizes graduating female college athletes who have “distinguished themselves in academics, athletics, service and leadership throughout their collegiate careers.”
    The Ivy League will select one or two of the conference’s seven nominated athletes.  Then, the Woman of the Year selection committee, made up of representatives from the NCAA membership, will choose the Top 10 nominees from each division.  From this group of 30, the selection committee will determine the top three honorees in each division’s Top 30 and announce the nine finalists in September.  From that group of nine, the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics will ultimately choose the 2019 NCAA Woman of the Year.
    Steeves served as Co-President and Co-Chair of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. She also earned a Royce Fellowship for Sport and Society in the summer of 2017, spending 23 days traveling through China, while studying the market for amateur and professional basketball there.  Aghayere was named a recipient of the school’s President’s Engagement Prize for her work with Rebound Liberia, in which she will work with two other recent Penn graduates to use basketball as a tool to bridge the literacy gap between men and women and as a mechanism for youth to cope with the trauma and stress of daily life in post-conflict Liberia.
  • While Yale women’s team announced Megan Gorman as the team’s captain at the end of March, Yale Athletics profiled the senior Academic All-Ivy forward this week.
  • Harvard men’s assistant coach Donny Guerinoni participated in an assistant coaches panel discussion with Athletics Directors U.  He shared the dais with George Mason assistant coach Duane Simpkins and USC’s Chris Capko to discuss the state of college basketball in the wake of the recent FBI investigation and the Rice Commission, as well as the development of assistant coaches and the college coaching search process.
    Guerinoni has been an assistant coach for 16 seasons and has been on Tommy Amaker’s staff for the last four years.  After spending two years at West Valley College from 2002-2004, Guerinoni then went to Stanford for four seasons, LSU for four years and TCU from 2012-2014,
  • Recent Dartmouth graduate and co-captain Cy Lippold will be heading to Mercer as a graduate assistant.  The 5′ 2″ point guard started the last two seasons for the Big Green, averaging 12.3 points and 5.3 assists per game as a junior and 10.9 points and 4.3 assists per game in her senior year.
    In addition to winning the team’s Larry Leavitt Leadership Award and being named All-Academic Ivy this past season, she was also chosen to participate in the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s “So You Want To Be A Coach” program during Final Four weekend.
  • Columbia announced the hiring of assistant coach Anjale Barrett to replace Kerry Connolly Thursday.  Barrett, originally from the Bronx, was a point guard from 2008-2012 at the University of Maryland, where she made it to four NCAA  Tournament appearances and three trips to the Elite Eight.  She was chosen with the 26th pick by the Washington Mystics in the 2012 WNBA Draft and later played two seasons professionally in France with Club Basket D’IFS.
    After her first coaching job at the College of New Rochelle in 2015, Barrett spent the next two years at Maryland, where she served as Director of Player Personnel and Recruiting Operations.  Afterwards, she moved to LIU-Brooklyn as an assistant coach in 2018-19.
    According to a representative from Columbia Athletics, Connolly has not joined any other program and has left the Lions to pursue other opportunities.
  • HoopDirt.com reported on June 3 that that former Michigan director of player personnel Chinedu Nwachukwu was the leader for the open assistant spot at Dartmouth.  On June 28, the site followed up with a report that Nwachukwu was offered the job but declined to join the Big Green in favor of Youngstown State.  Dave McLaughlin and the men’s squad will now continue on their search to replace John Andrzejek, while Belle Koclanes and the women’s team look to replace Taja Edwards.
  • While former Harvard guard Jeremy Lin won an NBA title with the Toronto Raptors earlier this month, former Columbia guard Maodo “The Chairman” Lo (2012-2016) picked up his second German Basketball League championship.  Lo, a unanimous first team All-Ivy selection in 2016, won his first title as a member of Brose Bamberg in 2017 and captured this year’s trophy as a member of Bayern Munich.  The third highest scorer in program history and its best in three point shooting percentage averaged 7.1 points on 49.8 percent shooting, as well as 2.7 steals over 19.5 minutes per game.
    The Lions also offered updates on Jeff Coby (2013-2017), Nate Hickman (2014-2018), Lukas Meisner (2015-2018), and Luke Petrasek (2013-2017).
    Coby played for a year in Spain before coming back home to be a part of the G-League with the Austin Spurs.  Hickman played with the G-League’s Westchester Knicks towards the end of last season.  Meisner left the Lions after his junior year home to go home to Germany and played for Medi Bayreuth of the German Basketball Team.  Petrasek finished his season season with the Greensboro Swarm of the G-League.
  • Former Princeton Tiger Kareem Maddox and former Brown Bear Damon Huffman were part of USA Basketball’s Gold Medal team at last weekend’s FIBA World Cup in Amsterdam.  The victory was the second-ever for USA Basketball.  The team went 7-0 in the tournament, including a pool play victory over three-time defending champion Serbia and an 18-14 finals victory over Latvia.
    Huffman finished the tournament with 32 points (12rh best), while Maddox had 24 points (27th best) and a team-leading 42 rebounds.  Maddox will next play for the USA at the upcoming Pan American Games in Lima, Peru from July 27-29.
  • Harvard Magazine digs into its archives with a Fall 1997 article on the changes in athletic recruiting at the university.
    In a more contemporary look at Ivy recruiting, a junior, writing for The Crimson, weighs the pros and cons of athletics at Harvard and comes up with the conclusion that the nays ultimately outweigh the yeas.  This follows a similar article at the Brown Daily Herald from this past October.  At least the three Brown seniors would allow the men’s and women’s hoopsters to keep playing.