With her team struggling to get anything to fall, Meghan Huerter buried a pair of 3-pointers in the third quarter to spark a big run that propelled the University at Albany to a 45-40 win over New Hampshire on Thursday in Durham, N.H.

The Great Danes (24-4, 13-2 America East) were mired in a nearly seven-minute scoring drought in the the third quarter and had fallen behind when Huerter suddenly got hot from deep. Huerter scored nine of her12 points in an11-0 run that put UAlbany ahead for good.

New Hampshire (9-19, 3-13) lost for the sixth straight time and has a 10-game losing streak to UAlbany dating back to February 2020.

Karolina Andersson had nine points and Breezie Williams seven to stake the Wildcats to a 24-20 lead at halftime. Helene Haegerstrand scored nine of her team-high 14 points in the first half for the Great Danes.

The Wildcats went scoreless for the first 6:30 of the second half before Anders-son drained a 3-pointer from the corner to give New Hampshire a 27-23 lead. New Hampshire went 0-for-7 from the field and committed four turnovers to start the quarter.

But UAlbany struggled as well. After Haegerstrand nailed a 3-pointer 15 seconds into the second half, the Danes didn’t score again until Huerter converted a three-point play with 2:54 remaining in the quarter. Then she nailed two from beyond the arc to give UAlbany the lead for good.

ALBANY — What may seem like light years ago for the University at Albany basketball program in reality has been 33 days. That’s when the Great Danes scored perhaps their most impressive America East victory of the season, winning 86-79 Jan. 27 at New Hampshire.

How things have changed since then.

That was the last time starting forwards Jonathan Beagle and Marcus Jackson played a full game for UAlbany. Beagle, after playing eight minutes and eight seconds against Vermont, left the team, and Jackson has been sidelined with a hand injury suffered in practice before the Vermont game.

As they enter Thursday night’s rematch with New Hampshire at Broad-view Center, the Danes (12-16) have lost six of seven outings since winning in Durham. They have fallen into a tie with Binghamton for next-to-last place in the America East standings, still needing one victory to assure themselves a spot in the conference tournament.

If nothing else, UAlbany can look at film and rekindle memories of playing at full strength.

“We’re different, but right now you’ve just got to find ways to win,” coach Dwayne Killings said after practice Wednesday. “You can go through this team beat that team, and you can go through the metrics of it, you can go through the past history of the matchups, but at the end of the day, it’s all about what happens tomorrow at 7 o’clock.”

Since the departure of Beagle and the injury to Jackson, the Danes have become more perimeter-oriented. Point guard Sebastian Thomas scored a school-record 42 points Saturday, although the Danes lost 104-95 at UMass Lowell.

Graduate guard Tyler Bertram, whom Killings earlier had been touting as candidate for the conference’s sixth-man award, has moved into the starting lineup in Jackson’s absence. Bertram has averaged 14.4 points since becoming a starter, most of that at home. He has scored 27.7 points in three home games as a starter and 4.5 in his past four road games.

“The first couple games we had to figure it out,” Bertram said of the new lineup, “and more and more we started to get the hang of it. We played Vermont (94-80 home loss last Thursday) pretty good. We played UMass Lowell pretty good most of the game. We’re really starting to put it together now, and having two games at home, then a third game, right before playoffs, it gives us time to get comfortable with that.”

UAlbany plays its final home game at 4 p.m. Saturday against Maine, then closes its regular-season schedule Tuesday at Bryant. The America East quarterfinals are Saturday, March 9.

Another fifth-year player who has gained court time in recent weeks is 6-foot-7 Marcus Filien, the Albany Academy graduate who transferred in from Cornell. Filien, who has started the past six games and averaged 14 minutes, 6-5 junior Muneer Newton and 6-8 freshman Jack Margoupis have given the Danes at least some inside presence.

“We’re finding our groove defensively a little bit,” Filien said. “We’ve had to adjust the past couple weeks, but our guards have been fantastic offensively the past couple games. We’re still going to play confident and keep that momentum going into tomorrow and Saturday.”

The Danes will clinch a tournament berth with a victory or NJIT loss. They are mathematically still alive to overtake New Hampshire (15-11, 7-6) for fourth place in the conference standings.

“There’s a lot at stake,” Killings said. “You win out, you could have a chance to crack to fourth place. You win tomorrow, you clinch an opportunity, but my mindset has been let’s have a really good practice, have a really good film session.

“Instead of focusing on certain things that maybe we can and cannot control, let’s focus on the biggest controllable in college basketball, it’s having really good practices and getting better.”

UALBANY VS. NEW HAMPSHIRE

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Where: Broadview Center, Albany

TV/Radio: ESPN+ (streaming), WTMM 104.5 FM

ALBANY — A pair of development partners who own dozens of properties in the city’s student neighborhood are working to reopen the Washington Tavern, a beloved bar that declined after being sold by its longtime owner and never recovered from the pandemic.

John “Jay” Corallo and Justin Schmiemann, of J&J Investment Properties, are hoping to open in June after a gut-renovation of the building, located at 250 Western Ave.

“We’ve taken it down to the studs. It’s a complete overhaul in there,” Schmiemann said in an interview Thursday.

They are keeping the name. “There’s a lot of brand equity in it,” Schmiemann said.

He said they are partnering on the tavern project with Ben Levack, a corporate trainer for Marriott hotels. Levack will operate the revived tavern.

J&J Investment Properties’ 45 buildings include 163 apartments that are home to about 250 students, most in the immediate area of WT’s, as the bar was popularly known, Schmiemann said.

“They need a place to eat, to watch football and have a beer,” he said. He said the partners and Levack plan to upgrade the food and beverage offerings but still maintain a tavern feel for neighborhood professionals during the day and a hangout for younger crowds at night.

J&J bought the building last year. It is among a number of buildings in the Washington Tavern block of Western Avenue between Quail and Ontario streets that they now own and previously were owned by Michael Byron, a native of Ireland who took over WT’s in 1971.

Byron sold the tavern in 2018 to partners named Don Keeler and Joseph Salin, though it is unclear if both were still involved with WT’s at the time of the sale to J&J. The tavern foundered after being sold, then was in business intermittently during and after the pandemic. Its last service appears to have been in early 2023, though Schmiemann said he could not say precisely when.

SCHENECTADY — A credit rating agency has changed its outlook to “negative” on Union College, saying the college is heading into a multiyear deficit, is giving out too much financial aid and owes too much debt.

However, the college’s credit rating remains A1 — a strong rating for ability to repay short-term debt, according to the update from Moody’s Investors Service.

Unlike small colleges that are under extreme financial pressure, and in some cases closing, Union has not seen a decrease in enrollment and does not need to reissue bonds for debt with today’s much higher interest rates.

Instead, the issue is mainly that Union has given out too much financial aid, said Scott Jones, Union College vice president for administration and finance.

While that has kept the college’s enrollment steady, Moody’s said Union must do less “discounting” of full tuition to avoid an operating budget deficit.

Jones agrees.

“The biggest negative factor is our discount rate — that’s the amount of financial aid,” he said. “We’ve been talking about it for months. We’re talking about it this week with our board.”

Union gets two-thirds of its revenue from tuition and other student payments. That’s less than many colleges: The College of Saint Rose, which is closing in June, relied on student payments for 90 percent of its revenue.

But it still means the college is vulnerable and could fall into a deficit if student payments go down.

Moody’s is not confident that the situation will improve. Analysts dropped the college’s outlook from stable to negative because of “expectations of ongoing multi-year operating deficits requiring the use of reserves, resulting in weakening financial reserve levels relative to peers.”

Jones thinks the college is making investments that will lead to more students wanting to attend Union in the next few years. As demand increases, the college won’t have to give out as much financial aid.

Union has rebranded — changing its mascot and logo — and announced Monday a new hockey arena.

“The mascot, the logo, all of that is part of how we have a better discount rate going forward,” he said.

Union is also expanding its engineering and computer science programs.

“Having an engineering school differentiates us from the vast majority of our liberal arts fellow travelers,” he said. “There are schools facing true financial crises that would love to have an engineering school.”

He believes Moody’s thinks all small, private liberal arts colleges have a negative outlook right now. However, that’s not quite true: Moody’s gave Russell Sage College a positive outlook, for the first time ever, last month. But many other similar colleges are being downgraded.

“That sector is under a lot of pressure. They’ve seen a lot of negative downgrades and they’ve seen a lot of poor performance,” Jones said. “We have challenges, like others in this space have, but we have tools that others in this space don’t have, like our endowment.”

Union has an endowment of more than $520 million. The endowment is used for financial aid, among other expenses. By comparison, Saint Rose had a $44 million endowment, which it drew from heavily to stay open in its last four years.

But Union also is paying on $161 million in debt.

Moody’s wants that debt to be lower, calling it “high,” and saying that the college should “gradually de-leverage.”

Jones isn’t worried.

“There are things that keep me awake at night. Debt is not one of them. It’s fixed (interest rate), it’s in a reasonable amount,” he said. “We’re below 30 percent of debt to endowment.”

Moody’s acknowledged that Union has a lot of money: $544 million in total cash and investments, and enough unrestricted cash on hand to last 447 days.

“Wealth levels still provide excellent coverage of both expenses and adjusted debt,” Moody’s said, but added that analysts want even better cash flow.

“The ability to achieve fiscal balance will be largely determined by management’s ability to implement expense cutting measures without impairing the college’s competitive position,” Moody’s said.

Jones is confident that Union is improving its competitive position.

“Higher education is changing and the strong will survive. Those who are best in the position to educate students in future pedagogy like AI will survive,” he said. “We have to position ourselves even stronger in these investments. We are confident and bullish.”

“We have challenges, like others in this space have, but we have tools that others in this space don’t have.”
Scott Jones, Union College vice president for administration and finance

The College of Saint Rose women’s basketball team closed the regular season with a 46-43 come-from-behind overtime win against host Southern New Hampshire on Tuesday in Manchester, N.H.

Payton Graber’s buzzer-beating three-pointer tied the game at 40 to end regulation and force the extra period where the Golden Knights kept the momentum rolling and picked up the victory.

Saint Rose finished the regular season at 21-5 and 17-5 in the Northeast-10 which will give them the three-seed in the upcoming conference tournament.

Graber had a team-best 15 points and Kaelah Carter added 12 points, including four of the Golden Knights’ six points in overtime.

Adriana Timberlake scored 16 points for Southern New Hampshire, which finished the regular season 17-9 and 15-9 to earn the fourth-seed.

The Northeast-10 tournament begins Friday with the first round but Saint Rose has a bye and will start with a home game on Sunday in the quarterfinal round with a time and opponent to be determined.