Mid-Major Minutes: America East celebrates LGBT Pride Month, San Diego State hosts a big-time recruit, and more

Good morning! If you’re reading this, you’re clearly starting your day off right with an effort to better yourself by becoming more educated about the goings-on in the mid-major world.

In a landscape so dominated by the biggest schools and conferences, it’s quite hard to winnow down the information you want and need to hear about your favorite mid-major programs.

Thankfully, Mid-Major Madness is here to aggregate the news and links for you, providing you with a brand-new, daily post about the world of mid-major hoops.

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#Content to Read

UMass’s roster for next season is set (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

Carl Pierre’s commitment to come play for the Minutemen means that the UMass roster for the upcoming season is essentially set in stone. The Daily Hampshire Gazette’s Matt Vautour broke down what the roster will look like and what its strengths will be around the court.

Looking at San Diego State target Andre Kelly (Aztec Sports Report)

San Diego State’s hot on the 2018 recruiting trail, with news coming that 4-star forward Andre Kelly will be visiting soon. As Ruben Meza notes, despite being a 4-star recruit with solid athleticism, Kelly has not had a great deal of interest shown so far (but that’s likely to change):

...Kelly has only visited UC Santa Barbara this spring (there was a tournament nearby). He plans to check out SDSU soon while the local programs, Cal and Santa Clara, should get visits this summer as well. Nevada is another program showing strong interest.

America East has new gear for Pride Month (Twitter)

June is LGBT Pride Month, and many sports teams are honoring it by hosting pride nights like the Diamondbacks or wearing rainbow-themed uniforms, like the US Soccer teams. The America East Conference is celebrating with rainbow apparel, and their social media images have been rainbow-colored as well.

It’s another affirmation of support from a conference that already shows immense advocacy for the You Can Play Project. It’s just nice to see a conference taking such positive steps in regards to LGBT equality, especially in the field of sports.

Leon Rice has a new associate head coach (Bronco Sports)

Phil Beckner, who has spent a season in Boise helping the team as an assistant coach, has been promoted to associate head coach of the Broncos. This is certainly a huge step up for Beckner, and — as the Boise State Athletic Department made sure to note — it’s a promising career move given the track record of former associate head coaches under Rice:

Beckner is the third associate head coach during Rice’s eight-year tenure, with the previous two earning head coaching jobs after three years in the position. Dave Wojcik was Boise State’s associate head coach for Rice’s first three seasons before becoming the head coach at San Jose State. Jeff Linder served as associate head coach the next three years and is now entering his second season at the helm of Northern Colorado’s program

Robert Morris adds two new faces to their coaching staff (RMU Athletics)

Robert Morris announced the hiring of both Danté Jackson and Tray Woodall as assistant coach and director of basketball operations, respectively. The name Tray Woodall should be especially familiar to basketball fans, as he graduated from Pitt quite recently after a solid career that was noted in the press release:

He concluded his career with totals of 1,108 points, 580 assists and 116 steals and is one of just seven players in program history to eclipse career totals of 1,000 points and 500 assists.

Overall, both men are good, young hires with a great deal of college basketball knowledge and experience between them. Robert Morris should be excited to count both of them as part of their team.

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Tweets of Interest

New Mexico hosted Special Olympics of New Mexico participants at The Pit tonight, signing autographs and shooting hoops with them. Very heartwarming stuff.

Remembering a MAC legend

ALL CAPS! PICTURES! BASKETBALL!

Did someone pick up a buy game scoop before Jon?

Otz is buff

We’ve got MVC-MWC Challenge pairings:

Me every time I have to write a caption for these things:

Someone please help John out

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Recruiting News

Carbone didn’t put up huge numbers, but he still has a few years ahead of him.

A solid transfer for Johnny Dawkins

Hornets are doing some team building