Dane Pound

Lady Danes collapsed in the second half after having a 6 point half-time lead. Hutch made all-tourney team. WOMEN'S BASKETBALL FALLS TO PEPPERDINE, 70-49, IN SUN AND FUN CLASSIC CHAMPIONSHIP GAME Miami, Fla. -- Tournament MVP Shandrika Lee scored a season-high 28 points on 11-of-23 shooting from the floor and knocked down five 3-pointers to lead Pepperdine to a 70-49 victory over Albany in the Sun and Fun/Herald Classic championship game on Monday, December 29 at the Golden Panther Arena. Pepperdine (5-6), who was an NCAA Tournament participant last season, trailed 28-22 at halftime but opened the second half with a 6-0 run to pull within, 30-28, on Lee’s conventional three-point play. The Waves took their first lead of the contest on Lee’s 3-pointer at the top of the key to make it 35-34 with 14:03 left in the second period. Pepperdine, who shot 52.6% in the second half, took control of the contest and never looked back as they built on their lead as they scored 15 unanswered points with four minutes remaining. Junior Shannon Mayberry, who scored 10 of her 12 points in the second half, tallied four points in that span, while Lee added eight with six points coming from long range. Albany (3-6), who held a 43-41 rebounding advantage, closed out the first half on a 5-0 spurt on junior Maree Jones’ layup with 40 seconds left to carry the lead into halftime. The Great Danes held their largest lead of eight with 11:07 remaining in the first period as Jones, who tallied nine points and grabbed a team-high 10 rebounds, knocked down a 3-pointer at the top of the key to make it 19-11. "We played well for 30 minutes," said Albany head coach Trina Patterson, "the last ten minutes of the game destroyed us. We have to get better at handling full-court presses." "We’re happy to be the runner-up and Dani being named all-tournament," stated coach Patterson. Sophomore Becky Ayres led Albany in scoring with a career-high 24 points as she was perfect from the charity stripe knocking down all ten attempts. Junior Danielle Hutcheson, who was named to the all-tournament team, added six points with nine rebounds.

Story in today's TU about tonights game and Mike Deane. Troy Record story.

I think I got it now, Wagner is in Staten Island, Monmouth is in NJ. Anyway, there's a story in today's Staten Island paper about Wagner that also mentions Mike Spisto who played his high school basketball nearby. Staten Island Advance Story.

I've been seeing the following ad in the paper for the last couple of days. It's good to see and hopefully there's a decent crowd tomorrow as I'm sure Mike Deane's return will be well covered. i especially like the "free parking" part.

Congrats to Iati. He better be careful or we'll start talking about him for Rookie of the Year. I don't understand why there's no women's awards this week. The AE site says there weren't enough games played this week but there have been other weeks with the same number of games-I don't get it. Just give the POW award to Hutch.

There was that big kid we were recruiting in Wisconsin that seemed to have a similar problem. They just double and tripled teamed him and the guards on his team weren't very good and provided no threat. Dyson should enjoy himself next year playiing on the same team with Wilson, Iati, Jordan and company.

Looks like they Minutemen fans expected a blowout yesterday and Lappas was disappointed with their effort. Minutemen cruise to win University of Massachusetts wasn't particularly impressive, but it now awaits No. 1 Connecticut. 12/29/2003 By RON CHIMELIS Staff writer rchimelis@repub.com AMHERST - The best part of yesterday's men's basketball game between the University of Massachusetts and Albany is that with tomorrow's game against Connecticut looming, it won't linger in the team's memory bank for long. Just as well. "This shouldn't be a hard game to forget," UMass forward Jeff Viggiano said after the Minutemen's 82-66 victory at the Mullins Center. "I think we all expected to blow them out by 25 or 30. They kept battling, so give them credit, but we didn't do what we were capable of doing." Impressive or not, the victory was never in doubt. It was the Minutemen's third straight win, and at 5-4, UMass is above .500 for the first time since Jan. 26, 2002. Fresh from claiming his third Atlantic 10 rookie of the week honor this season, UMass forward Rashaun Freeman scored 22 points with 10 rebounds - his fourth double-double. Freeman shot 10 for 13, and in his last two games, he's 19 for 25. That didn't send him home smiling, though. "I didn't do the things today that I need to do to improve my game," said the 6-foot-8 first-year sophomore, who grew up near the Albany campus in Schenectady, N.Y. "I didn't box out, and I really have to work on that. There's no way they should have gotten that many rebounds." Albany (2-6) is depleted by injuries, and showed up with only eight players, three of whom were walk-ons. After center Chris Wyatt picked up two quick fouls, the Great Danes relied on five players for nearly the entire first half. Yet Albany outrebounded UMass 34-33, with 6-6 junior Aquawasi St. Hillaire grabbing 12 boards. "Our rebounding was horrendous," UMass coach Steve Lappas said. "I told the guys, if St. Hillaire can get six offensive boards, how many are (UConn center) Emeka Okafor going to get?" UMass vaulted to a 21-5 lead, only to see Albany rally with a 15-4 run. It was 41-25 at halftime, and the lead fluctuated between 11 and 19 in the second half, a yawner all the way. "We're happy we're over .500," Freeman said. "But we're not satisfied." UMass guards Maurice Maxwell and Artie Bowers had been expected to start, but came off the bench as punishment for showing up a few minutes late to the first post-Christmas practice. Forward Brennan Martin didn't play at all, but Lappas said it wasn't a punitive decision. "He had a family issue in California, and got back Saturday night," Lappas said. "I'm not mad at him at all, but he wasn't around for the preparation for this game, so he couldn't play." The lineup shuffling gave Chris Chadwick his first start. The junior college transfer had six points and career highs in assists (7) and minutes (27). "I feel like I'm doing better," the junior guard said. "Coach is letting me play off the ball more, where I can do more things." Point guard Anthony Anderson tied his career high with nine assists, but shot only 2 for 9, and is 11 for 40 in his last four games. Other than the rebounding, Lappas downplayed the significance of this less-than-inspired UMass performance. He said he didn't get really upset until the end of the game, the Minutemen's last before tomorrow's monstrous test in Hartford against UConn, the nation's No. 1-ranked team. "There's absolutely no correlation between this game and Tuesday," he said. "We did what we had to do, and the game was never in doubt. I've been in a lot of these types of games, and sometimes you win by 35, and sometimes it's 15 the whole way. We got a little complacent, and that can happen." GOOD SHOWING: UMass received some good news Saturday night from a high school tournament in Rehoboth, Del., where signed recruit Olivier Lamoureux scored 16 points with six rebounds against Mount Zion (N.C.), a national prep powerhouse. The 6-foot-9 Lamoureux is a senior at Champlain St. Lambert. "They do things differently at the prep level in Canada, and he plays a lot of his games against guys who are 22 or 23 years old," Lappas said. "We're very optimistic about him."

I didn't think about this until I saw the Prof's post about Iati being more assertive. During the Lehigh game Iati went between two Lehigh players and took a pretty good shot to his shoulder. He grabbed his shoulder for second and then ran up the court like nothing happened. I didn't think much of it then but it may have taken him getting hit to convince him that his shoulder is OK.

Story in today's TU about the UMass game. UMass story in the Troy Record Story on the women's win over FIU.

Nice win over a pretty good Florida International team. Hutch with 17 and 11, Learn with 16, 7 boards and 3 blocks. They almost blew a 9 point lead in the final minute but held on. It says something to beat a team at their own tournament. Schumacher played well off the bench and Mookie struggled. She somehow fouled out in 13 minutes-I don't know that even Wyatt can pick up fouls that fast. Hopefully she'll bounce back in tomorrow's game against Pepperdine. Needless to say neither the men or women have won a tournment at this level so this would be a terrific win.

From what I was able to hear on the radio it didn't sound like a bad effort. Especially even shorter-handed than usual. If the stats on the UA site are correct the Danes actually out-rebounded UMass 34-33 thanks in part to a suberb game by Q. Sounded like Iati did a nice job of creating for others. Two questions for those there: Did anyone take the bus? Was there actually only 2500 people there? I realize we're not a huge draw but that is pretty sad for an A-10 team.

Dyson played but his team lost pretty badly. They had a ton of turnovers. They have another game this afternoon. Bing Tournament Field Game story

Welcome to the board APA73! Actually I wanted to thank you guys for linking to our page. I posted on your forum about our board a while ago and was happy to see you've created a link. If you go to the main page of this board and go to Danes history you'll see the TU article from the Albany-$iena game in 1977. Here's the picture from 1969 you mentioned.

Joe Dyson's Sanford School team will be in Binghamton this week to play in the Stop DWI Classic.. We'll have to check the AE Board to see if any of our Binghamton friends went to the games.

Happy Holidays everyone. Whatever holiday you celebrate make it a safe and happy one. DP and Lady DP

$iena has been playing some pretty good teams with the exception of the Marist loss a few games ago. They have just become very used to winning and this is foriegn territory especially to new (read: just jumped on the bandwagon) fans. I'm sure they'll get things straightened out for conference season. Before that though, if they lose to Providence and we beat Wagner next week we'll have the same record-Yikes! I had people in my office who wanted to fire Lanier after their first loss to Monmouth, I can't imagine what will happen then.

Thanks for the kudos guys. Everyone have a happy and safe holiday.

While I agree with your assesment of the security situation I do think we are going to get some suspicious characters during our next home game against Wagner. You'll be able to tell who they are because they'll probably be wearing green and gold. I say you pull those people outside and strip search them.

We were discussing that there was no price on that last night. Free is a pretty good deal. I wish I was able to go that day.

Second the good luck to Jamar and his surgery. Seemed to me last night that this was the first time Levi got the "star treatment" from the other team. He was doubled and tripled teamed all night and had trouble handling it often forcing the issue and turning the ball over. To his credit he continued to battle and help out it other ways. I suspect as the season goes on we'll see him handle those situations better and pass out of those spots instead of dribbing into traffic. A couple things I enjoyed last night: -Courtney Johnson slapping the floor to pick the defensive intensity. -Iati's interview on the late news. He looks like a guy who is having fun playing D1 basketball.

Thanks Statefan. I almost spit coffee all over my monitor after reading that.

Danes salve their psyche, winning close one at end -From today's TU. Team effort lifts Danes in OT -from today's Troy Record

There's a story in today's TU about UA's possible bid for the AE tournament in 2005. Dr. Mc doesn't seem adverse to having the tourney in 2006 in spite of the MAAC tourney either. 2005 Bid story.

Great win tonight. It speaks volumes that they were able to pull it out while Levi had one of the toughest nights ( 8 pts, 9 boards, 7 turnovers) I've seen him have. St. Hillaire was the only one with a good shooting night and was huge in OT. Pretty gritty effort by everyone on an ugly looking night. I was kind of concerned they might feel sorry for themselves in OT after letting Lehigh come back to tie it. They didn't. Courtney Johnson really came to play tonight-Tough D, no turnovers, 3 steals, 3 assists, 4 rebounds and 10 points in 43 minutes. Pipikis wasn't bad with 7 points and 5 boards. Apparently they have been preaching to Knotts to be more aggressive because he was hyper-agressive in the first half and took some wild shots. I liked the aggressiveness but hopefully he'll be able to find some middle ground between passive and wildman. We've been looking for a night when everyone steps up and contributes something and this was more like it. Eight players scored and all eight had at least one rebound.

Hopefully there's no cover jinx today. There's a nice story on the front page of the Gazette Sports section about Pipikis.