T. J. Sorrentine

UNC, Maryland and Paradise Jam highlight Brown men’s basketball 2021-22 schedule

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Feature: Tamenang Choh to Return to Men's Basketball in 2021-22 - Brown University Athletics
Tamenang Choh returns for one more year to lead Bruno to its first-ever Ivy Tournament appearance. (Brown Athletics)

After a year-plus hiatus, it looks like Ivy League basketball is ready to return!

The Brown men’s basketball team released its 2021-22 schedule on Wednesday with an early-season trip to Chapel Hill and a visit to the Spring Break capital of the northeast before New Year’s Eve.  Bruno will also head to the Virgin Islands before Thanksgiving to compete in the 2021 Paradise Jam.  (Hopefully, the Bears have a better travel experience than the Quakers did back in 2018.)

“This is probably the most challenging nonconference schedule our program has faced in my time as head coach and I think it is well timed,” head coach Mike Martin told Brown Athletics. “I believe that the roster we have in place will be prepared to take on every challenge and grow through the experiences as we ready ourselves for the Ivy League schedule.”

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Ivy League coaching carousel

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After three years without any head coaching changes, things changed in a big way at the end of April.  Princeton’s Courtney Banghart left after 12 seasons and seven Ivy titles to rebuild the program at the University of North Carolina. The Tigers search lasted a month, ending with the hiring of former UConn guard and long-time Tufts head coach Carla Berube.

On the men’s side, the conference almost lost James Jones to St. John’s, but the Yale coach finished as the Red Storm’s runner-up.  Weeks later, Jones signed an extension that will keep him in New Haven until the end of the 2025-2026 campaign.  In May, Brown’s Mike Martin was reported to be at Holy Cross interviewing for the Crusaders job, but a probable extension kept him in Providence.

Several Ivy assistants made the jump to head coaching positions with Columbia’s (and former Harvard’s) Kenny Blakeney heading to Howard, Penn’s Bernadette Laukaitis returning to Holy Family, Brown’s Tyler Simms going to Clark, and Brown’s Sara Binkhorst moving to Wheaton.

In the off-season’s strangest coaching news, Dartmouth promoted assistant coach Pete Hutchins to associate head coach on March 19th, only to see him jump to an assistant coaching position at George Mason on May 2nd.

The complete list of changes, from 2018-2019 to 2019-2020, for all 16 Ivy teams are noted below.

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Ivy hoops roundup – Sept. 25, 2019

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  • 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.

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