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| Bates alum brothers Malcolm and Marcus Delpeche are among the Division III alumni suiting up for Team D3 in The Basketball Tournament. |
Two players from Bates and two from Franklin & Marshall are among the nine players representing Division III basketball this season in The Basketball Tournament, a 64-team single-elimination tournament broadcast on various ESPN platforms. The winning team gets to split a $2 million prize.
It's the second year in a row that former SUNY New Paltz head coach Mike Rejniak has assembled a team of Division III alumni to take on the tournament field. Last year's team arguably had some of the best firepower a D-III team alumni could possibly assemble, with four former D3hoops.com Player of the Year selections, but got outscored 52-21 in the second half against the Sons of Westwood, a team composed of UCLA alumni.
This year's team is one of the eight No. 8 seeds in the tournament and will face Boeheim's Army, a team of Syracuse alumni.
The game will take place in Syracuse on Friday, July 26, at 7 p.m. ET, and will be televised on ESPN2.
Four NESCAC alumni are on the roster: Bates' Malcolm and Marcus Delpeche, Bowdoin's Lucas Hausman and Amherst's Johnny McCarthy. Brandon Federici and Georgio Milligan of Franklin & Marshall are on the squad, along with Muskingum alum Joshua Keys, MIT's Bradley Jomard, Cal Lutheran's Arik Smith and Whitman's David Michaels.
One of the most accomplished men's basketball players in Bowdoin history, Hausman was the 2015 NESCAC Player of the Year and was a two-time D3hoops.com fourth team All-America selection. As a senior, he established a single-season Bowdoin and NESCAC record for scoring average at 25.3 points per game. Hausman has continued his basketball career professionally overseas, playing two years with CB Marbella in Spain before signing with Maccabi Haifa in Israel last fall. In his first game with the team in October, he scored 10 points with three assists and three rebounds in an NBA preseason exhibition game against the Los Angeles Clippers.
Federici has a shoulder injury and won't participate, but Georgio Milligan has played pro ball since his final year at F&M, where he was a second team D3hoops.com All-America selection in 2012. Michaels was the Northwest Conference's Player of the Year in 2011-12. Keyes, a second-team All-OAC selection in 2017 for Muskingum, signed a professional contract to play for CS Cruza Sport Braila in Braila, Romania. McCarthy is 12th all-time on the Amherst scoring list with 1,396 career points and was a two-time NESCAC All-Conference selection. Smith was D3hoops.com Second Team All-West Region as a senior in 2015. Jomard was a D3hoops.com fourth team All-America selection this past season.
Perhaps Division III's most prominent overseas player, 2013 D3hoops.com men's basketball player of the year John DiBartolomeo, is a member of the Overseas Elite team, the four-time defending tournament champion, but is on the inactive roster for the opening game.