UALBANY VS. BINGHAMTON

ALBANY — There will be some familiarity Saturday afternoon when the University at Albany and Binghamton University men’s basketball teams take to the Broadview Center floor.

UAlbany graduate transfer Tyler Bertram played two seasons at the Vestal school — he scored 21 points for the Bearcats in a 2022 game against the Great Danes — and was there for the first season of current coach Levell Sanders.

“It’s been a couple years,” Bertram said, “but I played with Taveion White and Dan Petcash. It’ll be nice to see a couple familiar faces on the team, get to go and compete against them.”

Danes forward Marcus Jackson, an Amsterdam native, has history with Binghamton’s Symir Torrence, a Syracuse transfer. Jackson’s older brother Andre, a former Connecticut star now with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, played on the AAU Albany City Rocks with Torrence, who is fourth in the country with 7.2 assists per game.

“I’ll treat him like any other talented player,” Marcus Jackson said. “You’ve got to play him straight up, and you got to have the pride to get stops. My team has to help me with that.”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” Bertram said, “and I’m just excited. We had a good relationship. I had a good relationship with the coaches. I’m excited to go and compete against them and get the win, and we’ll show them who’s the best team in the area.”

Binghamton (8-6, 0-1) is coming off a 77-69 loss Thursday night at Bryant. The Bearcats and Danes have two common non-conference opponents. Binghamton lost to Sacred Heart and beat Army. UAlbany defeated both of those teams.

UAlbany (9-7, 1-0) has been idle since last Saturday, getting the first of its two byes. The odd number of America East teams (nine) affords each school two idle dates during the conference season. The Danes also will have a week between games in early February.

“It was good for us to catch our breath a little bit, get some guys off their feet,” UAlbany coach Dwayne Killings said. “We had a chance to do a team-bonding experience. We went down to a restaurant and had a cooking class. All the guys cooked. The guys did a pretty good job. The food tasted pretty good.

“It was fun. It was a life lesson in there. It was great to hear the kids just talk and converse. In college basketball, we’re coming and going a lot. You’re around each other a lot, guys are in the gym, in the training room, in the weight room. You have film (study). Just sitting and being present, talking, is important. We got better, although we didn’t play basketball.”

Other than forward Justin Neely, who plans to take this as a redshirt season, the Danes should be at full strength. Guard Will Amica, who missed Saturday’s victory over NJIT because of a hand injury, is expected to be available off the bench.

UAlbany’s bench players have been outscored 76-14 over the past two games. The starting five and Bertram, a guard whom Killings is touting for the conference’s sixth man of the year, played 81 percent of the minutes Jan. 2 in a loss at Harvard and 94 percent against NJIT.

“We’ve been through this odyssey of trying to find the 4-man (power forward) position to be a starter,” Killings said. “We’ve started Muneer (Newton), Aaron (Reddish) and Ny’Mire (Little), and getting consistency out of that has been the biggest concern.

“Aaron stepped up huge our first league game (against NJIT) — 16 points, nine rebounds. The message to the team before the game is all of our 4-men have started games. Our bench should help us get better.”

ALBANY — “I’ve handed out a lot of jerseys in my day,” said the basketball coach, “but never aprons.”

Dwayne Killings, head coach of the University at Albany men’s basketball team, was standing at the bar of dp: An American Brasserie on Wednesday morning as more than 20 Great Danes players and staff approached for an apron to don prior to a cooking class at the restaurant. Under the supervision of Yono and Donna Purnomo, who opened the downtown restaurant and its fine-dining sibling, Yono’s, in 2006, the team would make five dishes, including Yono’s signature bakmi goreng — stir-fried noodles that are a national dish of Yono Purnomo’s native Indonesia. Cooking was followed by settling down around a long table for the lunch they’d made for themselves

Killings, who has been the Great Danes head coach since March 2021, said the outing, scheduled for a time the restaurant is otherwise closed, was meant as a bonding exercise that would foster communication among the team.

“It’s loud back there in the kitchen. They’re really talking to each other,” Killings said midway through the 90-minute cooking session. He said, “I think it’s great the way they have to be so present in what they’re doing, put their phones down and really be together in the moment.”

In the organized chaos of the kitchen, packed with about four times as many people as a normal midweek dinner service, teams of roughly six members worked on preparing vegetables (carrots, celery, shallots, peppers, garlic, bok choy, to be variously peeled, chopped, sliced and minced), proteins (shrimp, pork loin and chicken breast, to be cut into bite-sized pieces), noodles, rice and, for dessert, bananas Foster with cake and ice cream.

Walking through the first formal cooking lesson the team has ever participated in with him, Killings looked around and said, “I have a whole new respect for professional kitchens. This is a lot of work.”

Players and staff echoed the sentiment repeatedly.

Marcus Jackson (6-foot-2 guard, sophomore, from Amsterdam), who had been slicing celery for what he said seemed like an eternity, asked Yono Purnomo, “Chef, you said how much more?”

Purnomo replied, “Double.”

“Double?!”

“You have 22 people! Double!”

Ryan Daly (assistant coach, played ball in college but height no longer important) was having even more trouble with a pile of chicken breasts the size of, well, a whole chicken, and a big one at that.

“I didn’t know it would be so tedious,” he said. “I guess it’s another kind of practice — but you don’t have to run sprints if you cut your finger.”

More than 15 minutes later, Purnomo walked by and said, “The chicken’s still not done! Why?”

Killings joked sternly, “Why would you stop before you were done?”

Daly: “Jon (Jonathan Beagle, 6-foot-10 forward, sophomore, from Hudson Falls) asked me a question. I got distracted!”

As the clock wound on, levity grew. A player waiting to cook pork tenderloins said to the kitchen in general, “I’m ready for the meat, brother.”

The double entendre drew laughter and multiple amused comments, including, “Oh, whoa, yo — who was that?!”

Moving smoothly among players well more than a foot taller than she, team manager Mekela Hinds helped out at multiple stations and was the only person besides the Purnomos who cleaned as much as she cooked.

Advising Zane Adnan (6-foot-2 guard, freshman, from Gaithersburg, Md.) as he sauteed pork loin, Hinds said, “That’s how it should look when it starts to really get cooking — you can see you’re building flavor.”

Later, Hinds and Justin Neely (6-foot-6 forward, redshirt sophomore, from Miami) worked on a sauce for the pork in a giant wok over a 110,000-BTU burner. (Most home stoves average 7,000 BTUs per burner.) In went coconut milk, sambal, lemongrass and ginger, then the pork. The finished dish, called babi kecap, is another Yono’s classic and is what Purnomo made during a 1994 appearance on the “Today” show.

By then, only one other player and an assistant coach remained in the kitchen. The rest were hanging out in the dining room, engrossed on their individual phones and awaiting lunch.

Referencing the length of a collegiate basketball game, Dominick Purnomo, who took over the restaurants after his parents semi-retired in summer 2022 and arranged Wednesday’s cooking lesson and lunch at Killings’ request, joked to the coach, “I guess most of them only have 40 minutes in them.”

Said Killings, “A lot of them lasted a lot longer than I expected. I’d call that a win.”

ALBANY — The comeback of University at Albany basketball player Justin Neely has been put on hold until next season.

UAlbany coach Dwayne Killings announced Thursday that Neely, a 6-foot-6 forward who was 2021-22 America East Rookie of the Year, will be redshirted for the remainder of this season.

Neely, who tore the ACL in his left knee early last season, returned Dec. 6 — after nearly 13 months — and played in six games, averaging 6.5 minutes, 1.8 points and 1.3 rebounds.

“We were trying to get him back, and I don’t think he feels comfortable,” Killings said. “He needs some more time to recover, so he won’t play this season.”

Neely, a Miami native who did not play Saturday in the Great Danes’ America East opener at New Jersey Institute of Technology, was at practice Thursday but remained on the sidelines.

“You just watch him practice,” Killings said, “the productivity, the movement, he just wasn’t ready to go out there and impact a college basketball game. That’s why his opportunity was so short. You can be as optimistic as you want, but if the body’s not ready for the wear and tear of college basketball, it’s just hard to put him out there.”

In other roster news, former Albany Academy star Marcus Filien, a graduate transfer from Cornell, has been awarded a scholarship.

Filien, who started the first five games this season but has not played since Dec. 22 at South Florida, is averaging 5.0 minutes, 0.2 points and 1.3 rebounds.

“He earned the scholarship because of who is he,” Killings said. “Marcus Fi-lien goes to class, never a problem, comes in and works, battles with Jonathan (Beagle) in the post in practice, doesn’t always get rewarded from it. … He’s going to play meaningful minutes for us. It means too much to play for the program, and he’s going to be rewarded for it.”

UAlbany gained a scholarship when 7-foot freshman Bautista Giralt, who has not played because of a heart abnormality discovered in preseason, returned to his native Argentina.

“He’ll do some things to focus on his health and his heart in February,” Killings said. “He’s got to get through that and re-evaluate where basketball fits into everything.”

UALBANY AT BINGHAMTON

ALBANY — Her statistics may not overwhelm anyone, but Sarah Karpell, point guard for the University at Albany women’s basketball team, isn’t about compiling numbers.

It may sound cliché, but the only number Karpell, a graduate transfer from Fordham, seems to care about these days is 13 — the number of victories that the Great Danes have accumulated this season, including a current nine-game winning streak.

“I’m having a lot of fun,” Karpell said Thursday as UAlbany prepared for Saturday’s road game against Binghamton. “When I decided to take my fifth year, I just wanted to have an enjoyable experience and hopefully win a championship. It seems like we’re on track to hopefully do that.”

Karpell, 5-foot-7 from Holmdel, N.J., started 67 of her 109 games at Fordham, averaging 2.5 points and 2.1 assists. She has started all 15 UAlbany games, averaging 7.5 points a game — seventh on the team — and 3.3 assists, but most significantly is playing a team-high 30.8 minutes per game.

“Sarah has allowed us to score 10 to 15 more points a game,” Danes coach Colleen Mullen said, “based on how she goes by her player, gets into the paint and then makes the right decision, whether that’s shoot a layup or make a draw pass or a kick-out for a shot.

“Kayla (Cooper, 15.2 ppg), Helene (Haegerstrand, 10.1) and Deja (Evans, 9.0) have gotten more easy baskets or easy shots around the basket because Sarah’s facilitated those shots. When you’re getting 5-10 points on just drop-pass layups or kick-out shots, that’s the difference of, you know, averaging 58 points a game, or averaging 65 points a game. She’s that difference-maker.”

UAlbany (13-2 overall, 2-0 America East) is averaging 68.7 points and allowing 50.1, a scoring margin (18.6) that ranks 30th nationally among 348 Division I schools. All of the victories in its current winning streak have been by 10 or more points.

Surrounded by several capable scorers, Karpell has a lot of options when running the offense.

“It just depends on one game to another,” she said. “How is the other team playing us? We’ve played so many games where one team is focused on doubling us in the post, and we hit a bunch of threes. Or we play another game where they’re basically face-guarding our 3-point shooters, and we go into the post. Reading what the other team is giving us is what’s important and something that we’ve been doing a great job of so far.”

“I knew she had the (basketball) IQ, I knew she had the athleticism,” Mullen said, “but coming here, it’s the piece on both ends of the floor that we’ve been missing. She’s my type of a point guard, she’s pass-first, she creates, she’s opportunistic, but she makes great decisions. She’s a defensive stopper, she’s a floor leader. She’s really exceeded my expectations.”

Binghamton (5-10, 0-2) is coming off a 62-51 home loss Thursday against Bryant, which lost to UAlbany 69-50 a week earlier. Among common opponents, the Bearcats have lost to Siena, Navy and Cornell, and beaten St. Bonaventure. The Danes are 4-0 against those teams.

Notes: Evans, a freshman forward who has started every game and leads the Great Danes in rebounding, suffered a concussion late in last Saturday’s victory over NJIT and will not be available against Binghamton. Mullen said she hopes to have Evans back in time for next Thursday’s game against UMass Lowell. … Sophomore guard Marie Sepp, who hasn’t played since Dec. 30 because of an ankle injury, is expected to return Saturday. Otherwise, UAlbany will have only eight players available for the game. … Junior Meghan Huerter, who continues to come off the bench for the Danes, ranks second nationally, shooting 52.1 percent from 3-point range.

2024 Football Schedule

Jillian Huerter has been solid off the bench for the 6-11 Rutgers women’s basketball team, but the 6-foot freshman guard got the first start of her college career and scored 16 points in a 77-76 Big Ten Conference loss to Purdue on Jan. 2 in West Lafayette, Ind.

Huerter, from Clifton Park and a Shenendehowa High graduate, made her second start on Friday, but the Scarlet Knights ran into a buzz saw, dropping a 103-69 conference decision to No. 3-ranked Iowa before a sold-out crowd of 8,000 in Piscataway, N.J. She had seven points, two rebounds, two assists and two steals in 37 minutes of action.

The 16 points matches her season high. She had that total in a 98-67 non-league victory over La Salle on Dec. 5. She has four double-figure outings and is averaging 7.1 points a game, aided by 32-for-82 from 3-point range (39 percent).

Jillian is the third sibling to make a name for herself on the college level. Her brother Kevin was a standout at Maryland and is currently playing with the Sacramento Kings in the NBA while her junior sister Meghan is a key performer at UAlbany.

University at Albany head coach Greg Gattuso was named Tuesday as the American Football Coaches Association FCS Coach of the Year.

Gattuso, in his 10th season, guided UAlbany to the best season in program history. The Great Danes went 11-4 and reached the Football Championship Subdivision playoff semifinals before losing to eventual national champion South Dakota State.

“It’s truly an honor to receive this award knowing that it was voted upon by my peers in college football,” Gattuso said in a news release. “This showcases the hard work and dedication from both the staff and the student-athletes - it’s a team award. They are the ones who made this season what it was, I cannot thank them enough.”

Gattuso was honored in December as the AFCA FCS Region 1 (Northeast) Coach of the Year, nominating him for the national award.

On the same day its former quarterback committed to a Power Five conference school, the University at Albany football program reached into the transfer portal for a P5 passer who could be the Great Danes’ next starter.

University of Wisconsin transfer Myles Burkett tweeted Monday his commitment to UAlbany. He posted a photo of himself in a Great Dane uniform with the caption #UAUKNOW. On Instagram, Burkett posted the same photo and added, “New York State of Mind.”

He has three years of eligibility remaining.

Burkett, a native of Franklin, Wis., made the announcement about two hours before Reese Poffenbarger, who led the Great Danes to the Football Championship Subdivision semifinals, confirmed he’s headed to the University of Miami. Poffenbarger entered the portal on Dec. 20, five days after UAlbany’s season ended with a loss to eventual national champion South Dakota State.

Burkett, a 6-foot, 202-pound redshirt freshman, spent two seasons as a Wisconsin backup. He appeared in two games in 2022, completing 4-of-5 passes for 84 yards in mop-up duty against Illinois State and New Mexico State.

Burkett didn’t appear in any games in 2023 after new Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell brought in a pair of transfer quarterbacks, Tanner Mordecai and Braedyn Locke. The Badgers went 7-6 and lost to LSU in the ReliaQuest Bowl on New Year’s Day. Burkett was already gone by then, having entered the portal in November.

Then Burkett tweeted he “achieved my dream of being a Badger” and thanked the Wisconsin coaching staff.

“With that being said, it is time for me to take on a new challenge,” Burkett posted.

That challenge will present itself at UAlbany, where Poffenbarger transformed from a transfer who sat his freshman year at Old Dominion to a player who led FCS in touchdown passes and passing yards this past season.

Poffenbarger thrived under offensive coordinator Jared Ambrose, who will now tutor Burkett, a former three-star recruit coming out of high school.

Burkett was the Wisconsin Associated Press and Gatorade Player of the Year as a senior. He was a two-time first-team all-state selection and won the Dave Krieg Award as the top quarterback in Wisconsin as a senior. He led Franklin to a 14-0 record and a state title as a senior, completing 71.3 percent of his passes for 36 touchdowns and four interceptions.

In his high school career, Burkett passed for 6,483 yards and 71 touchdowns and rushed for 1,054 yards and 14 scores.

UAlbany filled other needs in the transfer portal on Monday with the commitment of East Stroudsburg defensive tackle Dasean Dixon and Kent State defensive end Marcus Winfield. Dixon had six sacks and 59 tackles for Division II East Stroudsburg last season. Winfield was third-team all-conference at Delaware State before transferring to Kent State.

UAlbany lost its entire defensive line to graduation or transfer. Defensive end Anton Juncaj chose Arkansas and defensive tackle Elijah Hills committed Tuesday to Wisconsin.

A UAlbany spokesman said head coach Greg Gattuso is not commenting on recruits at this time and will issue statements in the future.

Efforts were unsuccessful to reach Poffenbarger about his Miami commitment.

“Albany will forever have a place in my heart and we did a lot of special things,” Poffenbarger told ESPN. “At the end of the day, I thought it was time to move on and put myself in the best position to compete for a national championship and one day play in the NFL.”

ALBANY — After his team was trounced by Fairfield on Friday night, Siena men’s basketball coach Carmen Maciariello found his thoughts drifting to Tucson, Ariz., to explain the Saints’ latest blowout loss.

Arizona crushed Colorado by 47 points in a Pac-12 game the night before, Maciariello pointed out, trying to add context to his own team’s 93-69 loss to the Stags in a Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference matchup in front of 4,931 fans at MVP Arena.

“No, I mean, you’ll see scores all over the country that are one team’s high one day and low the next,” Maciariello said. “I think that’s college basketball. I think you can look at (Thursday) night with Arizona and Colorado. I mean, some scores get crazy.”

That’s happened a lot to Siena this season. The Saints have lost seven games by 20 or more points, including their past two MAAC games.

Maciariello didn’t back off his opinion offered last week that Siena has “all the makings of a team that can win a championship.”

The Saints lost their seventh straight to fall to 2-12 overall, 1-2 in the MAAC with 17 league games left.

“At the end of the day, it’s about being consistent and the MAAC’s a wide-open league,” Maciariello said Friday. “I haven’t looked at the (other) scores tonight, but any given night, anybody can beat anybody. That’s what it is. We just have to make sure what our part is and what we have to do.”

The Saints still have a lot of work to do. Fairfield shot 70.6 percent in the second half and senior guard Brycen Goodine came off the bench to score a career-high 40 points, the most in a regulation game by a Division I player this season.

“We just had to be better defensively today,” redshirt sophomore center Giovanni Emejuru said. “We had no pride, essentially. That’s what it came down to.”

Siena started well enough. The Saints led 20-13 and were still ahead 24-21 with 5:49 left in the first half. That’s when Fairfield went on a17-0 run that began with the first of Goodine’s eight 3-pointers.

“I’m trying to put a finger on it,” Maciariello said. “We’re up seven, 10 minutes to go in (the first half), and I don’t know if we relax. … We have to make sure we understand how hard we have to play all the time. We can’t be inconsistent. We have too many inconsistent guys and right now, that’s hurting us.”

Offensively, Siena received only five bench points. The Saints continue to rely heavily on the trio of Emejuru, who had 22 points, red-shirt junior guard Sean Durugordon (20 points) and sophomore guard Michael Eley, held to eight points after scoring 30 against UMass.

“We have to understand teams are going to continually try to speed us up to take us out of offense,” Maciariello said. “It’s not like they (Fairfield) are a great pressing team… The ball has to move. Guys have to understand where the ball has to go.”

The Saints seemed encouraged after last week’s 79-66 loss at UMass, a game Siena trailed by six with less than five minutes left. But Friday, Maciariello told his team that game was “fool’s gold” because UMass didn’t respect Siena and was exhausted after returning from a tournament in Hawaii.

Emejuru was asked if Siena had too high an opinion of itself after the UMass game.

“If we did, we had no reason to because we lost that game,” he said. “At the end of the day, it comes down to us being more mentally mature and being able to understand that, OK, there were good spurts in that game, but we still lost and its about having that mentality of, OK, we lost but we have to fight and be better from that game.”

The situation doesn’t get easier for Siena, which travels to western New York to face Canisius and Niagara next weekend. The Saints have swept that trip only once (2016) since the 2007-08 season.

“After being in this many games, that’s what it’s come down to now, is having pride and stopping the guy in front of us,” Emejuru said.

Sophomore jinx? Not yet, at least, for University at Albany second-year player Jonathan Beagle.

Beagle, the reigning America East basketball Rookie of the Year, turned on the afterburners in the second half Saturday afternoon in the conference opener against New Jersey Institute of Technology. He scored 17 of his 19 points after halftime to go with a career-best 16 rebounds to lift UAlbany to a 79-73 victory in Newark, N.J.

“It’s a gutsy effort by him,” UAlbany coach Dwayne Killings said of Beagle, who played 36 minutes despite turning his ankle with five minutes remaining. “He’s OK. He turned it, but he’s fine. It’s good that we get some rest and don’t play till Saturday.”

The Great Danes (9-7, 1-0) topped their overall victory total of last season (8-23), when NJIT pushed UAlbany out of the America East Tournament for the first time ever.

The Highlanders (4-9, 0-1) escaped the first half with a 35-34 advantage, holding Beagle, a 6-foot-10 forward, to a pair of free throws and blocking three of his five field-goal attempts.

Beagle, whose scoring is up 12 percent and rebounding ahead 30 percent over his stellar freshman year, didn’t get his first field goal until 14:55 remained, but at that point dominated inside. He had six second-half buckets, all dunks or layups, and went 7-for-7 on free throws.

“The one thing that holds Jonathan back is he gets in his head a little bit,” said UAlbany guard Sebastian Thomas, who led the team with 22 points. “In the first half, he wasn’t getting calls and things like that, so going into halftime, we told him just focus on what you can control. In the second half, he showed us what he can do.”

“Going into the second half, everyone’s giving me confidence,” Beagle said. “I know the type of player I can be. I just went out there with a lot of confidence. I knew that they could get me shots and that we have some talented players that can help me out.”

It was far from a one-man show. Thomas fired in four 3-pointers, all at critical junctures. His first tied the game, the second gave the Danes a lead, the third doubled their lead, and the final with 59.4 seconds to go rattled in to put UAlbany ahead 74-67.

Aaron Reddish got his fifth start of the season — the first since Dec. 16 at Drexel — and answered with 16 points and nine rebounds. Marcus Jackson added 10 points and eight rebounds.

“I was really impressed with Aaron Reddish, the way he came out,” Killings said. “We challenged him about rebounding. The two areas that we have to improve at, just to have an impactful level of improvement in league play, is ball security — we had 15 turnovers; obviously we want to cut that down — but rebounding the ball, and Aaron was great there.”

UAlbany held a 41-36 advantage on the boards, 23-15 in the second half.

The Danes are now set up with three straight home games, although all are against teams that are over .500: Binghamton (8-5), UMass Lowell (10-4) and Bryant (9-7).

“We’ve got to take them one game at a time, one possession at a time,” Killings said. “It’s going to be hard, but I’m excited to get going and start league play. I told our guys, when I woke up, it felt like Christmas morning because we’re going to go after this thing.”