Kate Sramac will transfer to William & Mary after a three-season career at Cornell during which she established herself as one of the Ivy League’s most effective guards. (Cornell Athletics)
Cornell senior guard Kate Sramac has committed to William & Mary for her upcoming graduate year.
Sramac told Ivy Hoops Online she is headed for Williamsburg to finish her collegiate career after leading the Big Red in assists, steals and three-point shooting percentage as a junior in 2019-20.
“I chose William and Mary because the combination of great basketball, a beautiful campus, and a graduate program that I am really excited about and fit me well,” said Sramac, who will be pursuing a Master of Business Administration degree.
The slew of top-flight talent leaving the Ivy League just keep gets bigger.
Together again as Tar Heels
Princeton women’s senior guard Carlie Littlefield delivered the news on Twitter Monday that she’ll be reuniting with Courtney Banghart, the coach she played for at Princeton as a rookie and sophomore, at North Carolina. An Economics major at Princeton, Littlefield will play at UNC as a graduate transfer and earn a Master of Business Administration degree there.
M. Grace Calhoun is leaving Penn for her alma mater Brown. (Penn Athletics)
M. Grace Calhoun is making one big intra-Ivy move.
The seven-year Penn athletic director is leaving 33rd Street to lead Brown Athletics at her alma mater, Brown and Penn both announced Friday.
Calhoun, a 1992 Brown graduate and former track and field athlete there, will become vice president of athletics and recreation, a newly created position after former athletic director Jack Hayes left the university last month.
Rudy Fuller, Penn’s senior associate athletic director for intercollegiate programs and longtime former Penn men’s soccer coach, will serve as interim director of athletics and recreation until a permanent appointment is made.
Belle Koclanes is leaving Dartmouth to become the president of a Delaware nonprofit focused on leadership development. (Ivy League)
Belle Koclanes is moving on.
After eight years at the helm of Dartmouth women’s basketball, Koclanes announced on Wednesday her departure from the program to become the president of Strive: How You Lead Matters, a Wilmington, Del.-based nonprofit.
“This is an extremely unique opportunity for me to continue to share my passion for leadership development with an organization that inspired me to pursue a career in coaching back in 2002,” Koclanes said in a statement posted to the Dartmouth Athletics, noting that three program alumnae who played for Koclanes, Nicola Zimmer ’14, Emily Slagle ’18 and Lakin Roland ’16 (an assistant under Koclanes since 2018) have all participated as young coaches in Strive’s foundational program, Sports Challenge.
“Leaving Dartmouth for Strive is an inside foot pivot,” Koclanes said.
Koclanes will stay on at Dartmouth until March 31 before beginning her new position. A national search for Koclanes’s successor will start immediately, the school announced.
Dartmouth went 77-117 (.396) overall and 34-64 (.347) under Koclanes starting with the 2013-14 season, when she took over for Chris Wielgus, who became the all-time winningest coach in 28 seasons across two stints leading the Big Green from 1976 to 1984 and 1993 to 2013.
The Big Green never won an Ivy League championship or made a postseason or Ivy League Tournament appearance under Koclanes, coming just short of the tourney with fifth-place conference finishes in 2018 and 2019. Still, the Big Green were typically strong defensively under Koclanes, and 11 of Koclanes’s former players are now high school or college coaches.
Dartmouth’s other assistant under Koclanes is Kelcie Rombach, who like Roland joined the staff in 2018. Past assistants under Koclanes include Princeton ’11 standout player and assistant coach Addie Micir, who is currently associate head coach at Lehigh, and Portsmouth, N.H. native Maria Williamson, who took over at Chicago last season after five years as an assistant at Loyola Chicago and saluted Koclanes in a statement Wednesday.
“Her focus on having a growth mindset, being solution-oriented, and positive motivates all around her to act in this same way,” Williamson said. It is unique, special and why Coach Belle’s impact at Dartmouth will be felt for a long time to come. I’m excited for her to lead and develop the Strive community in the same way.”
Yale head coach Allison Guth also applauded Koclanes in a statement.
“This is a bittersweet day as I congratulate someone who is most deserving of her exciting endeavor as the newest President of Strive,” Guth said. There is no doubt she will tackle this opportunity with the same passion and character as she did coaching her young women at Dartmouth.
Strive focuses on character-driven leadership by partnering with young people and adults nationwide in schools, athletic leagues and community organizations to develop leaders, according to the nonprofit’s website.
“I’d like to thank the college, athletic department and our Dartmouth women’s basketball family across every generation and roster for the opportunity to wear the Green,” Koclanes said. “It was an honor to lead our women’s basketball program these past eight seasons, and I look forward to celebrating our 18th championship in the very near future.”
Brown men’s basketball last week announced the program’s five early decision admits that are part of the Class of 2025 and will join the Bears for the 2021-22 season:
Aaron Cooley, 6-5 G/F from Roxbury, Mass., All-NEPSAC Class A in 2019 and All-NEPSAC Class B in 2020
Lyndel Erold, 6-3 G from Boston, ISL Honorable Mention
Sam Klores, 6-1 G from New York, New York State Class B Player of the Year in 2020-21
Kino Lilly, Jr., 6-0 G from Glenn Dale, Md., Dematha Summer League MVP in 2018
Nana Owusu-Anane, 6-8 F from Burlington, Ont., won a gold medal with Team Ontario
The Ivy League is doing something unusual – at least for the Ivy League.
Reports emerged Thursday that the league will allow seniors to compete as graduate students due to COVID-19 for the 2021-22 academic year, a reversal of longstanding and unique Ivy policy of not allowing athletic redshirts or graduate students to play varsity sports.
As this Ivy non-season progresses, we thought it’d make sense for us to do an Ivy Hoops Online contributors’ roundtable looking ahead to next season, assuming there is one:
Now’s the time of year that an Ivy League hoops slate would be revving up, and since there’s no Ivy hoops action to come this spring, here’s an IHO contributors’ roundtable pondering what might have happened in the 2020-21 Ivy season on the men’s and or women’s sides if there had been one instead of an exodus of much of the league’s top talent via the transfer portal. Behold the one-year Ivy hoops universes we created:
After a career full of magic moments for Devin Cannady during his Princeton career, he’s poised for some Magic with a capital M.
The Orlando Magic announced Friday that they signed Cannady, who averaged 14.4 points, 3.9 rebounds and 2.8 assists in 40 games last season in the G League for the Long Island Nets. Per team policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Ivy League’s longstanding policy of only extending eligibility to student-athletes in their first four years of undergraduate enrollment, as expected, is prompting an increasingly long list of talented seniors becoming graduate transfers.
