The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Exhibition more about charity than rivalry
The last time UConn and Providence met on the basketball court was March 9, 2013 — the last game the Huskies played as a member of the Big East.
Somewhat fittingly, it went into overtime — extending UConn’s long, glorious run in the conference for an extra five minutes. Equally fitting, the Huskies wound up winning 63-59 at Gampel Pavilion, improving their all-time mark against the Friars to 44-28 and sending a death blow to Providence’s faint NCAA tournament hopes.
When the teams meet again on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Mohegan Sun Arena, the results won’t really matter. It’ll be an exhibition game, the first of three for the Huskies.
What counts more to head coaches Kevin Ollie of UConn and PC’s Ed Cooley is the fact that all proceeds for the game will benefit the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.
“It’s for these victims that just had a horrible, horrible event happen to them,” Ollie said. “Puerto Rico and Houston are still recovering, especially Puerto Rico, all the other islands that we don’t even talk about are still recovering.”
The NCAA recently announced that it would grant a waiver to schools to play an extra exhibition game this year, as long as the proceeds were donated to hurricane relief. Cooley broached the idea of playing UConn with Ollie by phone, and it quickly got done. Since the idea was originally PC’s, the Friars will be the home team.
While Ollie didn’t want to talk about the rivalry and the old wars of the past, inevitably he was asked about the possibility of the teams meeting in the future for a regular-season game — or series.
“I think it would be great, the old Big East wars,” Ollie said. “The closeness of our two universities, I think it would be great. But there are a lot of things that have to align. We schedule a lot of our non-conference games way out before. Everything’s got to line up. But, if we can make it happen like we made this game happen, that’s something both of us will look to the future to see if it can be done.”
While UConn holds the alltime edge over PC and largely dominated the series as Big East rivals, the Friars were often a thorn in the Huskies’ side. At one point, from 2003-2008, PC won five of seven games against UConn, and, in fact, has won five of the last nine matchups. The Friars famously beat UConn on Jan. 24, 2004 in Hartford, sending Jim Calhoun into an infamous rant about why Waterbury’s Ryan Gomes wound up at
PC instead of UConn. The Huskies, of course would win a national title a couple of months later.
The Friars have grown up a bit since then, however, reaching the NCAA tournament a school-record four straight years, with a fifth rather likely this season. The Friars are on the cusp of the national Top 25 on several early ballots, though they’ll have to make do for at least part — if not all — of the season without talented forward Emmitt Holt. The senior recently had abdominal surgery, and Cooley recently told reporters that the team will have to brace itself for the possibility that Holt is gone for the season.
Still, the Friars boast plenty of returning talent, led by forward Rodney Bullock and guards Kyron Cartwright and Jalen Lindsey.
“They have a veteran-laden team,
they’re gonna be very good,” Ollie said. “All their guys, the senior guys that are on that team, it’s gonna help us to play against a great Providence team. I watched them on tape, and they’re a really good team.”
And, of course, there’s the intriguing story of Makai Ashton-Langford, PC’s freshman guard. Ashton-Langford committed to UConn in September 2016, but de-committed last spring amidst a huge turnover on the Huskies’ roster. His father, DeMarr Langford, told Hearst Media Connecticut earlier this week that his son’s de-commitment stemmed largely from the fact that UConn fired associate head coach Glen Miller, who had been Ashton-Langford’s prime recruiter.
Both sides, however, insisted there were no hard feelings either way.
“I love Makai like no other, whether he’s going to Providence or going here,” Ollie said.
Said DeMarr Langford: “Coach Ollie’s a great guy, man. We had a
great relationship. He wanted my son, and for good reason — he’s a good player.”
RIM RATTLINGS: After practice on Saturday, UConn had a teambonding outing with a game of paintball in Coventry.
“It was fun,” Ollie reported. “Like the kids say, ‘It was lit.’”
⏩ In addition to the live stream on Fox Sports Go, Wednesday’s game will be broadcast on WTIC-1080.
⏩ Ollie grew up a Dodgers fan in Los Angeles, so there’s no question about who he’s rooting for in the World Series — even though Houston boasts UConn product George Springer.
“That’s still not swaying me,” he insisted. “I’m still a Dodgers fan. He can have a couple of hits, but no RBI or anything like that. We wish him a couple of hits. But it’s gonna be a fun series. Just to see the Dodgers back, now baseball is really back.”