For only the second time in the 23-year tenure of James Jones as Yale’s head basketball coach, the Elis are adding a transfer student. Casey Simmons, a 6-6 swing from Milton, Mass., will join the Elis for the 2023-24 season. (Dominick Martin in 2002 marked the first such occurrence.)
As a senior at Milton Academy, Simmons was rated as the No. 1 prospect in Massachusetts and the No. 92 player in the country by 247Sports.
Yale recruited him out of high school, but he chose Northwestern over Yale, Penn, Boston College, Georgetown, Miami and Penn State.
Before commencing with the rest of the Ivy hoops roundup, a note of sorrow about the passing of James “Booney” Salters, the 1980 Penn grad whose dynamic scoring and passing made him one of the best guards in men’s program history.
Salters died July 7. He was 64.
Penn made the NCAA Tournament in all three of Salters’ three seasons with the Red & Blue. The Penn Athletics and Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Famer captained the often overlooked 1979-80 Penn team that advanced to the second round of the Big Dance, leading the squad in scoring and sinking the game-winning shot to triumph over Princeton, 50-49, in an Ivy League playoff matchup.
Our latest Ivy hoops roundup features critical hires amid new starts for Harvard and Yale women’s basketball, an especially promising recruiting class for the Princeton women, some big men’s graduate transfer losses and more:
Princeton women introduce No. 19 class of recruits
Princeton women’s basketball announced what ESPN.com deemed the No. 19 recruiting class in the nation:
The recently named 2022-23 Yale basketball captain is junior Michael Feinberg, a native of Hidden Hills, Calif.
Feinberg played for three seasons for Sierra Canyon High School, a national powerhouse. In his junior season, he played on a team with Marvin Bagley III, a former Duke player who is now with the Detroit Pistons, Cody Riley who played at UCLA and Remy Martin who had a great career at Kansas. Feinberg spent his senior season at Viewpoint School.
Dalila Eshe takes over a Yale women’s basketball program that reached new heights under Allison Guth but is looking to to supplant Princeton as the conference’s premier program. Eshe is the latest Ivy head coach to come from Princeton. (Yale Athletics)
The Princeton tree continues to sprout women’s basketball coaches in the Ivy League.
Yale named Princeton assistant Dalila Eshe as the 11th head coach in program history Monday. Eshe replaces Allison Guth, now head coach at Loyola Chicago.
Former Tiger assistants are now the head coaches at Yale, Harvard (Carrie Moore) and Columbia (Megan Griffith).
And it makes sense.
The Tigers are as close to a dynasty as one might find in the corridors of the Ancient Eight. Princeton won Ivy titles in 2018, 2019 and 2022, the last three years that the title has been contested, and have gone 40-2 during that period in the Ivy.
Eshe impressed at her opening presser today at John J. Lee Amphitheater. She gave immediate kudos to Yale president Peter Salovey, an American social psychologist who Eshe could identify with as a former college psychology major. She also credited Yale athletic director Vicky Chun and deputy athletic director Ann-Marie Guglieri on a very professional search.
“It is an honor and a dream come true to accept this position,” Eshe said, adding that the Bulldogs “will pride ourselves on putting in the work to win championships.”
Eshe comes to Yale from Princeton where she spent three seasons as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator, helping Princeton to a No. 24 national ranking and a NCAA Tournament first-round win over favored Kentucky.
The Tallahassee, Fla. native was a WNBA player with the Washington Mystics and Atlanta Dream and coached at Loyola Maryland, East Carolina and La Salle before her stop at Princeton. She knows talent when she sees it, having secured La Salle’s first-ever top 100 recruit. During her recruiting tenure at Princeton, the Tigers boasted three consecutive top-40 classes.
Eshe made it clear that she is a defense-first coach who also values the significance of a top-flight post presence like 6-foot-5 Yale junior Camilla Emsbo. Eshe knows her well, having coached her twin sister Kira at Princeton. The new Yale coach values post players who “can stretch out.”
The Florida alumna noted that in her first meeting with her new team on Tuesday night, team members urged her to help with community outreach to bolster women’s basketball attendance at Yale. Eshe also recognizes that the league has been, and can be in the future, a two-bid NCAA conference. With that in mind, Eshe wants to play a challenging yet realistic out-of-conference schedule.
Yale returns Emsbo and a large part of the squad which compiled a 16-11 record and a 9-5 mark in the Ivy this past season before falling in the Ivy League Tournament to Columbia.
Dalila Eshe is the new head coach for Yale women’s basketball after three years as an assistant coach at Princeton. (Yale Athletics)
The Dalila Eshe era has begun in New Haven.
Yale Athletics named Eshe head coach of Yale women’s basketball Monday, 17 days after Loyola Chicago announced that Allison Guth was leaving Yale to take over there.
Eshe comes from Princeton, where she was an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator for three seasons under Carla Berube.
Eshe will be introduced at a press conference Wednesday at 11:30 a.m., inside John J. Lee Amphitheater, Yale Athletics announced.
Guth had won 99 games in six seasons, during which the Bulldogs set the single-season program win record twice during her tenure at Yale.
Now it’s up to Eshe, a former WNBA Draft pick, to build on that success.
Devin Cannady is sticking around the NBA for a while.
Having signed a 10-day contract with the Orlando Magic on March 31, the former Princeton standout signed off on a deal to stay on with the team, the Magic announced Sunday ahead of the season finale Sunday night.
The team didn’t disclose terms of the deal.
Cannady had made the jump from the Lakeland Magic of the NBA G League, where he had averaged 15.8 points, 2.8 rebounds and 1.9 assists in 16 games and 11 starts.
In four games for Orlando at the NBA level, Cannady has shown off the sharpshooting skills that Ivy hoops fans know well, going 11-for-28 (39.3%) from three-point range and averaging 8.8 points, two assists, 1.5 rebounds, 1.3 steals and 27.8 minutes in four games. Cannady’s production has increased over the four-game span, including 12 points in 28 minutes in a loss at Charlotte against the Hornets Thursday.
Cannady averaged 14.6 points, 4.1 rebounds, 1.6 assists. and 1.1 steals in 31.1 minutes per game during 104 career games at Princeton from 2015 to 2019.
Cannady’s return to the NBA came nearly a year after he sustained an open right ankle dislocation with a severe lateral ankle sprain after landing awkwardly eight games into his previous NBA stint, which had come on a two-way contract after two years in the G League.
Cannady was named G League Final MVP after helping Lakeland win the 2020-21 NBA G League championship.
Devin Cannady is nearing the end of a 10-day contract with the Orlando Magic that has marked an extraordinary comeback from a devastating injury for the former Princeton standout.
Cannady signed the contract March 31, making the jump from the Lakeland Magic of the NBA G League, where he had been averaging 15.8 points, 2.8 rebounds and 1.9 assists in 16 games and 11 starts.
Allison Guth went 99-74 over seven years as Yale’s head coach, leading the Bulldogs to a program-record 19 wins in 2017-18 and 2019-20 and the 2018 WBI championship. (Ivy League Digital Network)
Allison Guth, arguably the most successful women’s basketball coach in the history of Yale’s program, is now the new head coach at Loyola Chicago.
Guth said that her decision to leave Yale was “a personal one,” as most of the Arlington Heights, Ill. native’s family resides in the greater Chicago area. Guth herself is an Illinois native and played college basketball at Illinois.
Allison Guth leaves Yale for Loyola Chicago in her home state of Illinois after seven years and a 99-74 record at the helm in New Haven. (Ivy League Digital Network)
After seven years at Yale women’s basketball’s helm, Allison Guth is headed home.
Loyola Chicago announced Friday that Guth has taken over as head coach of the Ramblers after winning 99 games and setting the single-season program win record twice during her tenure in the same role at Yale.
