With the Northeast Convention dropping Merrimack and Sacred Coronary heart from an already shrunk-down nine-team league, commissioner Noreen Morris has been put in a bind. The primary transfer to offset this was including Chicago State College, who is predicted to be an on the spot contender in males’s basketball.
The second transfer was introduced Thursday, as Mercyhurst College of the Division II Pennsylvania State Athletic Convention will transition to Division I and the NEC for the 2024-25 tutorial yr.
The athletic groups at MU are generally known as the Lakers, because the campus sits slightly below three miles from the shores of Lake Erie within the metropolis of Erie, Penn. Mercyhurst is now the one Division I faculty in Erie or the Erie metro space, a area with a inhabitants of over 280,000 folks.
Already a Division I program in males’s and girls’s ice hockey, Mercyhurst’s athletic program is a bustling enterprise that sponsors 26 sports activities, together with soccer.
The Lakers’ males’s basketball group went 15-16 this previous season and 11-11 within the PSAC, tying for fifth place within the West Division. Nevertheless, this was simply the primary time since 2018 that Mercyhurst didn’t make the NCAA Division II Match. Over the earlier 5 seasons, the Lakers went 108-31, successful 25 video games three totally different instances and never dropping greater than eight.
Head coach Gary Manchel will enter his twenty second season on the helm in 2024-25 because the unquestioned most profitable coach within the Division II period of Laker basketball. Recognized for his stingy defenses which have ranked within the prime 10 of Division II in factors per recreation 10 instances, he has received essentially the most video games of any coach in Mercyhurst historical past. In February of this season, he received his five hundredth profession recreation, which incorporates his 9 seasons on the helm of UMass Lowell again when the River Hawks had been a Division II program.
Main scorer Jeff Planutis, who averaged 17.4 factors per recreation this previous season, has exhausted his eligibility. Aidan Reichert will see a rise in his accountability, as he averaged 12 factors and a team-leading 6.4 rebounds per recreation in 2023-24.
Mercyhurst ladies’s basketball hasn’t been fairly as profitable, however is a program on the rise with back-to-back successful seasons for the primary time for the reason that mid-90’s. Head coach Brooklyn Kohlheim will enter her sixth season on the helm when November rolls round.
Like different transitioning Division I applications, Mercyhurst won’t be eligible to compete within the NCAA Match inside its first 4 years on the degree. Within the NEC, Stonehill nonetheless has two years remaining in its transition interval, and Le Moyne has three. Nevertheless, because of the NEC’s rule change earlier than final season, these applications are instantly eligible to compete within the NEC’s convention match, ought to they qualify.
Whereas Mercyhurst loses a number of longstanding rivalries with the transition, together with crosstown foe Gannon, the transfer to DI continues the NEC’s enlargement in direction of a western footprint. Chicago State and Le Moyne, the league’s earlier two additions, are additionally west of conventional cluster centered round New York Metropolis and Connecticut.
Buster Douglas, who handed Mike Tyson his first loss in 1990 after coming into the struggle as a 42-to-1 underdog, performed basketball at Mercyhurst. Different notable alumni within the sports activities world embrace ladies’s hockey legend Meghan Agosta and former Los Angeles Chargers head coach Brandon Staley.
Mercyhurst’s ascension now brings the entire of Division I basketball applications again to 363, the identical quantity as 2022-23 earlier than St. Francis Brooklyn disbanded its athletic applications and Hartford moved to Division III.
