UConn, Yale, Quinnipiac playing ‘secretly’ on Saturday

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A trio of local college basketball teams are playing games on Saturday — only no one is supposed to know about them, and fans and media can’t watch them. They are closed-door, “secret” scrimmages, and they’ve been going on in college hoops for a while now.

UConn will host Harvard at Gampel Pavilion and Quinnipiac will host Princton at TD Bank Sportscenter, while Yale will travel to Rutgers.

These aren’t exhibition games. They aren’t open to the public or the media, and the school can’t advertise that they’re happening. However, they will be officiated and the score and stats will be kept.

Still, coaches can stop the game in-progress to go over technique, fundamentals, etc. And, since video of these secret scrimmages tends to leak out to future opponents, the coaches are more apt to run “vanilla” offenses and concentrate more on defense.

“What you try to do is play somebody good and play somebody who runs some pretty good motion offense, too,” said UConn coach Dan Hurley. “Because motion offense puts stress on your defense. It’s easy to prepare for stress-heavy, set-heavy teams, because you can kind of script out how you want to guard all these things. When you play a motion offensive team, and everything’s random, it really gives you a good sense of what you want to fix — what kind of offenses give you trouble.”

Harvard is the favorite to win the Ivy League this season, per the preseason coaches’ poll, and features reigning Ivy player of the year Seth Townes along with talented guard Bryce Aiken, who was limited last season by injury. Hurley goes back with Harvard coach Tommy Amaker through his older brother, Bobby (who, like Amaker, played at Duke), as well as when Amaker coached at Seton Hall, Hurley’s alma mater. The two have sat together and talked at Celtics practices, as well, and Hurley even called him last year about some of the job searches going on in the sport.

“I have a lot of respect for Tommy,” Hurley said. “He’s a really smart guy, and he’s seen it all in this business.”

UConn never participated in secret scrimmages under Jim Calhoun or Kevin Ollie, but they’re certainly not new

to Hurley. He played Harvard in a secret scrimmage in each of his six seasons at Rhode Island, and the results haven’t been pretty: Hurley reckons he’s about 1-7 overall in closed-door scrimmages.

Division I teams are allowed to play two preseason games. If it’s an exhibition game that is open to the public, it must be against a nonD-I team. UConn’s lone exhibition will be on Nov. 2 against D-II Southern Connecticut State, at which SCSU coach and former Husky star Scott Burrell will have his number raised into the Huskies of Honor.

Quinnipiac coach Baker Dunleavy prefers to play D-I opponents in the preseason, so the Bobcats won’t have an open exhibition. They’ve already played a closed-door scrimmage at Delaware.

Yale hasn’t had the best of luck in secret scrimmages. Two years ago, in a scrimmage against Boston University at Yale, star junior guard Makai Mason suffered a

serious foot injury. He wound up playing just one more game for the Bulldogs over the next two seasons.

Last year, at BU, talented sophomore Jordan Bruner suffered a season-ending knee injury. BU, of course, is coached by Yale coach James Jones’ brother, Joe.

Yale’s second exhibition will take place in China, prior to the Bulldogs’ season-opener in China on Nov. 9 against California.

UConn begins its regular season on Nov. 8 against Morehead State at Gampel, while Quinnipiac kicks things off on Nov. 10 at defending national-champion Villanova, where Dunleavy was a player and an associate head coach for the 2016 national title team.

One thing is certain: all the coaches are anxious for the season to begin.

“You get tired of kind of beating each other up,” Hurley said. “Secret scrimmages, the exhibition, real games — if you’re a competitor, you’re dying for this to stuff to start.”