Just one thing here: Xavier Basketball

Mike Pegues of Delaware and Ashley Howard of Drexel are joining Chris Mack's staff.

They both have east coast connections, namely in Philly and DC so that will help on the recruiting trail.  The 2013 class has a solid list of guys from these two areas and Xavier has been actively recruiting a lot of them so this will only help in our campaign for those players.

Pegues is a big-man coach which is something we've needed since Pat Kelsey's departure.

http://cincinnati.com/blogs/xavier/2012/05/18/mack-hires-two-assistants/

Go Muskies!

The CAA Commissioner just announced that VCU is bolting and will join the A10 this summer.  So, in less than a week, VCU went from being in the Colonial to joining the A10 in a year to joining the A10 immediately.  Welcome aboard!

This makes 15 teams in the conference for this fall as Butler-in, Temple-out, and Charlotte-out don't happen until next year.  That will make the A10 scheduling a bit tougher.  Xavier would likely now only play two teams twice (instead of 3) as the conference schedule is 16 games.  I'm sure Xavier/Dayton will still play twice and more than likely St. Louis will be the other school we'd play twice.

Go Muskies!

VCU will be joining the A10 for the 2013-2014 season along with Butler.

With Temple leaving for the Big East and Charlotte now departing for the CUSA, the A10 will keep 14 teams in the conference.  It's shaping up to be a very solid group of teams in the A10.

Some various Muskies notes for you...

Mark Lyons has told Sean Miller and Arizona he'll be heading there this fall.  Best of luck to him.

Chris Mack has been out recruiting and likely trying to decide who's going to fill the 2 assistant coach vacancies.  We'll update as soon as we hear more.

Summer is coming and Musketeer Madness seems so far away.  It's nowhere near as exciting, but at least the summer leagues will be in June and July.  Saturday, June 16th will be the first sets of games.  It's at Woodward High School again and you will more than likely see most of the Muskies on the rosters.  Check this link periodically as it will be updating which players will be on which teams.
http://greatercincinnatisportsworld.com/Deveroes-_Teams_Players.html
Incoming Freshmen may not be eligible to play so keep that in mind.

Go Muskies!

Sorry I didn't post this earlier.  There was a lot of speculation that these 2 were leaving, but I waited until it was official. 

Rasheen Davis took a position with Manhattan.  He is from the NY area so you would think that he wanted to be closer to home.  Davis is a great recruiter and the main guy involved in landing the #5 overall 2013 player, Chris Thomas, in next year's class.  We've heard from Thomas' camp that he still intends to attend Xavier in the fall of 2013 but there's a lot of time between now and then so anything's possible.

Kareem Richardson took a job with Rick Pitino and Louisville. You can't really fault him for that as I'm sure a huge raise came with it and he'll be recruiting for a big-time program and Hall of Fame coach. If you look at Kareem's resume, you'll see that he never stays anywhere for too long so I'm not really shocked by this move for many reasons.

I don't really put a lot of stock into the thinking that something bad must be happening at XU with all the coaching and roster changes.  If Mack seemed more like a coach who was looking to move to another school in the near future, I could see his assistants wanting to stay and move up to Associate Coach or Head Coach.  But that's not the case.  The reality is, when the program is successful, other schools are going to notice and take interest in those that helped make that happen.  I'm looking forward to seeing who Coach Mack decides to hire in these two spots.

Go Muskies!