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Revenge is sweet.
Yale exacted some against Fairfield Saturday, 91-66, in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Tip-Off at the Mohegan Sun.
Last season, Fairfield stunned Yale, 75-71, at John J. Lee Amphitheater. The Bulldogs wouldn’t let that happen again en route to what became the 400th win of his coaching career.
“That was a really good Yale basketball win,” Jones said, adding that the 400-win achievement “[j]ust means I have been around a long time.”
Ivy Hoops Online caught up with James Jones as he begins his 26th year at Yale with early-season September workouts to prepare his team for the 2024-25 slate:
IHO: What are the strengths of your team this season?
JJ: Confidence, which comes from our success. We are smaller than we have been with a higher work ethic. Everyone on the team has it. Last season we had a good work ethic, but not like this.
IHO: Talk about John Poulakidas and Bez Mbeng, both seniors.
JJ: They are comparable to any of our top two seniors over the years. Like Brandon Sherrod and Justin Sears.
IHO: Who are some guys that you think might have breakout seasons?
There is no denying that Yale men’s basketball has tremendous talent. From the one through eight slots, Yale may have the best talent in the Ivy League.
But there is also no denying that another adjective applies to the Bulldogs. Coach James Jones used that word very pointedly in his postgame comments after a 75-71 loss to Fairfield at John J. Lee Amphitheater Wednesday night.
Remember Yale’s romp over Vermont last month?
Yale was down at the half by 30-27 and blitzed Vermont 46-14 in the second half. The Elis played a similar game against Fairfield at the Leo D. Mahoney Arena last night, winning 77-64 after being down 29-24 at intermission.
In a game marred by 41 foul calls and 55 free throws, Yale shot 62% in the second half in an eventually dominant win.
Fairfield (4-7) opened up a 14-5 lead, and it looked like the Bulldogs were still jet-lagged from their long trip back from Lexington, Ky. after a loss to the Wildcats, which included a three-hour layover in Raleigh, N.C.
”We got off to another slow start and we didn’t react well to it,” coach James Jones said. “[In] the second half, we got to play more Yale basketball.”
It’s a game that Dalila Eshe will never forget.
Eshe earned her first victory as Yale head coach with a hard fought 68-61 home win over in-state rival and Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference opponent Fairfield Monday night.
The Bulldogs (1-2) had opened the season with losses at Fordham and St. Joseph’s.
First-year guard Kiley Capstraw poured in 24 points on 6-for-13 shooting from the field.
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.
Yale had Camilla Emsbo and Fairfield didn’t.
That tells the whole story.
The junior forward completed her seventh double-double in as many games with 26 points and 11 rebounds as Yale outlasted Fairfield, 71-64, before a crowd of 1,529 at Webster Bank Arena in Bridgeport as part of a doubleheader with the Fairfield men.
With the win, Yale improved to 5-2 and 4-1 on the road. Fairfield fell to 3-3.
Yale opened strong and seized a first-quarter lead. That didn’t last long.
In what many Ivy overlookers consider a surprising move, Dartmouth fired Paul Cormier Monday six seasons into his second stint as Dartmouth’s head coach. Cormier went 54-116 (.318) overall and 23-61 (.274) in his second stint in Hanover after going 87-95 (.478) and 47-51 (.480) in his first stint from 1984 to 1991.
Last season, Cormier led Dartmouth to its first postseason appearance since 1959, as the team went 14-14 in the regular season to earn a fourth-place Ivy finish and CIT berth. The Big Green lost to Canisius in the first round of the CIT.