UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.; April 23, 2009 - Penn State men's basketball coach Ed DeChellis received a National Letter of Intent from 6-9, 230-pound forward Sasa Borovnjak Thursday, one week after the NCAA late signing period began on April 15. The native of Belgrade, Serbia had officially committed to the Nittany Lions last week, but his official letter had to travel to Serbia and back for his parent's signatures.
Borovnjak has spent the last two years playing at Veritas Christian Academy in Fletcher, N.C. where he became the nationally competitive program's go-to player according to head coach John Jordan.
'Sasa is a thinking four-man who has the ability to score in a variety of ways and has a very high skill level,' Jordan said. 'He can play with his back to the basket, take people outside and face the basket, handles the ball and shoots very well. He understands the game very well and is a great passer.'
Borovnjak earned first-team All-Western North Carolina honors in his senior season at Veritas where he led western North Carolina in scoring and was fourth among all public and private school players in the state posting 26.1 ppg. He also added 12.0 rebounds per game for a Veritas team that went 20-18 and finished sixth in the National Association of Christian Athlete's Division I National Championship. Veritas spent four weeks in ESPN's Top 50 prep program rankings during the year and played a national schedule that took them as far as the Bahamas and to 16 states according to Jordan.
'I think he is a very good fit for the Big Ten with his skill level and strength,' Jordan said. 'He is a strong kid and a very hard worker. When he came to us as a junior he weighed 205 pounds and now weighs around 230. His strength allows him to play good post defense and he has all the tools to be a scorer at the next level. He has a `refuse to lose' attitude and doesn't back down against the top players and teams in the country.'
Borovnjak played two seasons at Veritas where he played with current Memphis guard Doneal Mack and Clemson center Catalin Baciu. Jordan said he Borovnjak really began to emerge when in his junior season he dunked over the 7-2 Baciu in a practice.
'He had to battle against a bunch of very good big men just in our program,' Jordan said. 'We have five guys over 6-7 on our team this year. With our schedule he also played against some of the top prep players in the country and became our go-to guy on offense.'
Borovnjak posted 33 points and 14 rebounds against perennial national power Oak Hill Academy and had a 41-point outing vs. Queens Grant and 27 points vs. Mt. Zion. He averaged 18 ppg and 12 rpg as a junior and was named the Offensive MVP of the NACA Division I National Championship. He is listed as a three star recruit by Scout.com and was also heavily recruited by N.C. State, Marquette, Wake Forest and the College of Charleston among others.
Borovnjak's brother, Dejan, is a 6-10 forward who has played five years of professional basketball in Europe. He averaged 12.2 ppg and 6.8 rpg playing for Vojvodina Srbijagas in the Adriatic League in 2008-09.
Borovnjak joins 6-2, Texas point-guard Tim Frazier (Houston, Texas/Strake Jesuit) and 6-5, Pennsylvania shooting guard Jermaine Marshall (Etters, Pa./Red Land). Frazier averaged 15.5 points, 7.7 rebounds, 5.5 assists and 3.6 steals per game in leading Strake Jesuit to a 37-1 record last season. He was named the No. 1 Class of 2009 recruit out of Texas by the TexasHoops.com.
Before its win Sunday against Ohio State, the Penn State women's lacrosse team had an unexpected visitor in its locker room.
Nittany Lion basketball star Jamelle Cornley was there to provide the team with some inspirational words before its Senior Day matchup with the No. 13 Buckeyes.
Cornley said he was approached by lacrosse head coach Suzanne Isidor and asked to speak to the team before the game.
'She felt I was the most inspirational player on campus,' Cornley said. 'She asked if I could just come in and say a few words and share a couple of experiences to fire her team up.'
Cornley explained to the team how important it was to defend its home field. He also told the underclassmen on the team to play as hard as they can for the seniors and make sure their last home game was a memorable one.
Although the basketball season ended earlier this month, the senior used the leadership quality that has endeared him to so many Penn State fans and motivated the lacrosse team to a victory over a conference foe.
'We already had a lot of motivation,' senior attacker Marisa Lozano said, 'but having the confidence of another fellow athlete was definitely inspirational to us going into that game.' ...
Penn State’s coaches and returning players held a team meeting last week. It was what wasn’t said by a couple of unnamed players that bothered head coach Ed DeChellis.
“I thought they had an opportunity to exert their leadership and they didn’t do it,” he said.
DeChellis called the players into his office early the next morning and reminded them that more than distribution of points will change next season.
The Nittany Lions return all but three players from their regular rotation in 2009-10, but those three players — forward Jamelle Cornley and guards Stanley Pringle and Danny Morrissey — will leave tremendous tangible and intangible voids as Penn State looks to sustain the momentum from its 10-3 finish and NIT championship.
“I think the leadership thing is what I’m most concerned about,” DeChellis said Thursday. “Other guys have to step up now; they’ll be the guys that people will be looking towards. The on the floor stuff, that kind of works itself out — what you can do, how you’re going to score and defend, who you’re going to go to to get a basket at crunch time.
“Basketball, I think will sort itself out. I’m more concerned with the intangibles, the toughness, bringing it at practice very day, the locker room, the leadership, and that’s what we started working on as soon as the season’s over." ...
For the record, Taran Buie very much enjoyed watching his older brother, Talor Battle, and Penn State defeat Baylor in the NIT championship game in Madison Square Garden earlier this month.
But although Buie committed to the Nittany Lions just hours after the game, he wasn’t swayed by the outcome. The decision had already been made, just not verbalized.
“That wasn’t the night,” Buie said this week. “I had been thinking Penn State for a couple weeks before that. I just kept it to myself.”
The timing of the decision is irrelevant. The impact it could have on Ed DeChellis’ program is potentially enormous.
The 6-foot-2, 180-pound Buie is a junior at Bishop Maginn High School in Albany, N.Y., where he played with Battle, his half brother, for one season.
He is also Rivals.com’s 53rd-ranked player and 13th-ranked point guard in the Class of 2010 and the nation’s 16th-best shooting guard prospect according to Scout.com. ESPN’s Scouts Inc. ranks him a top 40 overall prospect.
Those numbers make him Penn State’s highest-rated recruit of the school’s Big Ten era and improve the Nittany Lions’ chances of adding more top players.
“Momentum is so important in recruiting,” said Jerry Meyer, a basketball recruiting analyst for Rivals.com. “You see with a lot of programs, a sort of a snowball effect can take place. One recruit leads to another, and that leads to a few more wins, which leads to even more recruits.” ...
Penn State coach Ed DeChellis disappeared not long after the Nittany Lions wrapped an impressive 27-11 season by beating Baylor in the NIT championship game April 2.
The architect of the winningest single season in school history stayed secluded with his family and politely rejected most requests to publicly talk about this past season's magical run.
It was a time for DeChellis to silently savor some scintillating success. When he finally re-emerged this week, there was a river of memories racing through his mind.
'I've always tried to remember where I came from. I'm a small-town, Western Pennsylvania guy,' DeChellis, a Monaca native, said with a humble sense of pride. ...
... You can't get to here from there without a lot of slogging through the wilderness. And Penn State men's basketball was nowhere; it had a lot of slogging to do.
The best thing you can say after the Nittany Lions' 27-11 season is that the program is no longer dead in the swamp but clearly heading toward civilization.
This was the second consecutive season in which State made significant improvement. You haven't really been able to say that since the program's Big Ten incubation period in the mid 1990s.
This PSU team learned how to finish games. It played 20 contests decided by single-digit margins and won 15 of them, many times coming from behind in the final minutes.
That sort of repeated success creates a positive mind-set that cannot be quantified. When the young players on this team find themselves in close games later in their careers, they will expect to find a way to win.
Just being able to see every conference road game this team plays gives me the unmistakable feeling the Big Ten Network is quickly leveling the recruiting playing field. ...
Dick Jerardi is returning to the radio booth in 2009-10.
From Great Santini's post, New Commitment, on the forum:
"I was reading some articles on Philly basketball a few days ago and I came across an article written by Dick Jerardi. As usual, nicely written. At the end of the article, his e-mail address was listed. So I sent him an e-mail and told him how much I enjoyed listening to Steve Jones and him over the past years. I concluded by saying I hoped he would be back next season.
"Amazingly, I got a reply from him. He thanked me for the compliment and said he would return next season."
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Shortly after winning in the National Invitation Tournament, Penn State scored what might have been an even bigger long-term victory.
Taran Buie, one of the nation’s top high school juniors, verbally committed to the Nittany Lions for the 2010-11 season. Buie is perhaps the most coveted recruit to commit to Penn State’s men’s basketball program.
Buie, a guard from Albany and the half-brother of Penn State’s star point guard, Talor Battle, made his decision last Thursday in the moments after the Lions’ 69-63 win over Baylor at Madison Square Garden. And to punctuate his selection, Buie climbed aboard the Nittany Lions’ team bus to inform Coach Ed DeChellis and the players.
“I haven’t had any second thoughts about my decision,” Buie said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “I’m pretty confident about my decision. That’s the place I want to be and the people I want to be around.”
Denise Murphy, Buie’s mother, said: “I asked if he got caught up in the moment. But he said he caught the right moment — he didn’t get caught in the moment. He thinks the legacy is going to go on, and this is going to continue.”
Buie, who was also considering Maryland, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame and Marquette, said he would try to persuade some of his Amateur Athletic Union teammates to join the Nittany Lions.
Buie’s commitment will reverberate for years at Penn State, which has long been noted for its football prowess and its basketball futility. ...
Taran said he didn't make his final decision until Thursday night although his Mom thought he was going to pick PSU for awhile now because every weekend he wanted to go to State College. But Taran did not contact any coaches beforehand. For instance, his Mom said they found about Stoglin going to Maryland on the streets of NYC, but it didn't faze Taran a bit because he was already a heavy PSU lean.
How do you define being basketball tough? Start with two words. Big Ten.
Check several rosters and you'll come up with fitting candidates.
Penn State's Jamelle Cornley qualifies as a bruiser first-class for openers. The NIT MVP powered the Nittany Lions to a school-record 27 victories and their first postseason title.
Considered undersized by most majors, he piggybacked Penn State to its last three victories with a tightly wrapped partially separated left shoulder.
'We have tough kids,' said Ed DeChellis, my choice as Big Ten coach of the year for turning an after-thought into a force to be reckoned with.
Even tough kids cry and Cornley shed a few after winning his first title since he was a high school freshman....
DETROIT — Ragging on the Big Ten has become such a popular pastime that 'much-maligned' might as well be a formal part of its name.
Yet here the rough-and-tumble conference is, playing for the national title again.
Michigan State is the fifth Big Ten team since 2000 to advance to the NCAA championship game. Since 1999, 10 Big Ten teams have made it to the Final Four, including two teams in 1999, 2000 and 2005.
The Spartans play top-seeded North Carolina on Monday night.
'There's a saying in Latin — res ipsa loquitur — 'the thing speaks for itself,'' commissioner Jim Delany said Sunday. 'We haven't won championships as much as we'd like, but we've played for it. And I don't think you have to defend playing for the national championship, whether it's in the BCS or whether it's in the NCAA tournament.
'You're at a stage where your kids and coaches and fans have an opportunity to win, and that's all you can ask for.'
The Big Ten's tough, physical play isn't for everyone. It often looks like smashmouth football, but on hardwood (no lie, Michigan State coach Tom Izzo has had his players practice in helmets and shoulder pads). It's a rare shot that goes uncontested, and most baskets come when the shot clock is down to single digits. It isn't always pretty, and scores can look more like a low blood-pressure reading — think '80 over 60,' though even that might be a tad generous.
But the ugliness can mask some darn good teams. This was Michigan State's fifth trip to the Final Four since 1999, and the Spartans won it all in 2000. They've already knocked off two No. 1 seeds in this tournament, including overall No. 1 Louisville in the Midwest Region final, and sent 2008 champion Kansas packing.
Penn State, who many thought was a tournament team, just won the NIT. Wisconsin, another bubble team, beat Florida State in the first round of the tournament. That would be the same Florida State that beat North Carolina in the ACC tournament. During the regular season, Michigan beat both UCLA and Duke. ...
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Never before has Penn State ended a season on a such a high note on the hardwood.
There is optimism over men's basketball in Happy Valley after the Nittany Lions won the National Invitation Tournament in New York City on Thursday night. A perennial also-ran in the Big Ten, Penn State heads into the offseason with its first-ever title in a national postseason tourney....
NEW YORK -- You hear the refrain from college basketball snobs all over the nation this time of year, 'It's only the freakin' NIT.' A consolation prize for teams not good enough. I've said it myself and meant it. But if you opened your eyes on Thursday night, you could learn something new. When a team wins the National Invitation Tournament, it can mean and feel to the victors exactly like what it says on the trophy -- Champions.
Jamelle Cornley held that trophy with tears welling in red-rimmed eyes, finally at the end of a twisting trail of frustration and pain and finally vindication that was his chosen avocation at Penn State. Ignored by his hometown school Ohio State and placed down the priority lists of other brand-name basketball programs, Cornley departed the plains of Columbus, Ohio, four years ago to attend school in the mountains. They all said, very reasonably, that a 6-4 kid could not hope to play power forward at a major school.
Jamelle took the advice of his mother Dorci: 'I told him, 'Go someplace where they want you first.' And Penn State was at every AAU event. Every game, they had somebody there.' Choosing Penn State meant setting a torch to tangled thicket and taking a scythe to make a way where there was none. He committed to join a program being sold by an unknown coach named Ed DeChellis that had gone 7-23 the year before, 1-15 in the Big Ten, the orphan of a conference he'd watched all his life.
The last four years has taken him through emotional and physical torture. Bouts of hopelessness and agony. A 2-14 Big Ten season his sophomore year, by which time he thought he could wrench toward a compass point the static barge of a program. A bone bruise in his left knee at the outset of his junior season that left him a pale imitation of himself.
This year, his left shoulder popped partially out of its socket three times, leaving him in excruciating pain and finally with a giant ace bandage wrapped around it the last two weeks just to allow him to play. But play he did.
In the season when it all finally came together this year for Cornley -- a second-team All-Big Ten selection and just the second winning league record in PSU's 17 Big Ten seasons, the dream of an NCAA tournament appearance fell just beyond his grasp.
This is the juncture when everyone says with easy sarcasm, 'Whoop-de-doo, you're in the NIT.' Cornley wouldn't. His team -- and this is his team -- followed his lead. Everyone else just got out of the way. You don't mess with this 235-pound guy when he suggests a course of action any more than you'd be able to steal his snapped rebound. ...
Taran Buie, a 6-2 off-guard from Albany, N.Y. and younger brother of Penn State guard Talor Battle, verbally committed Thursday night to play his collegiate basketball with the Nittany Lions, a dependable school source said. Just hours after the Nittany Lions dumped Baylor 69-63 in the NIT championship game at New York's Madison Square Garden, Buie told Penn State players and coaches of his choice. Other finalists were Maryland, Georgia Tech and Notre Dame.
Buie, from Bishop Maginn High School, is the son of former Harrisburg High standout Dan Buie, who is Battle's step-father. Currently a junior, Buie would join the Nittany Lions for the 2010-11 campaign, which would be Battle's senior season. Several scouting Web sites list Buie as a Top 100 recruit nationwide, including Top 20 at his position.
Baylor and Penn State set meaningful, perhaps watershed, records during this National Invitation Tournament.
The Bears’ seniors, who began their college careers prohibited from playing nonconference games because they joined a program reeling from scandal, still managed to win more games than any other class in Baylor history thanks to this postseason run.
Likewise, the Nittany Lions set a program record by winning for the 26th time this season in the N.I.T. semifinals.
Yet only one of these teams could finish a historic season with a victory. Penn State took that honor by beating Baylor, 69-63, in the N.I.T. final Thursday night at Madison Square Garden...
Like dozens of other basketball teams around the country, Penn State gathered in its gym last month to watch as the N.C.A.A. tournament bracket was slowly unveiled on television.
The Nittany Lions, who finished tied for fourth in the Big Ten and beat Michigan State, an eventual Final Four team, on the road, watched as seven of their conference foes made the tournament while they did not.
Replacing scowls and disappointment with motivation and focus can be difficult for players and coaches in that situation. But Coach Ed DeChellis made his players’ new mission clear as soon as the television was turned off.
He wrote on a board, “Championship of a National Tournament,” then underlined it and stated that it was the group’s new goal. On Thursday, the Nittany Lions (26-11) will play for the National Invitation Tournament championship against Baylor (24-14) at Madison Square Garden....
Penn State football coach Joe Paterno stood in the underbelly of Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night after the Nittany Lions' 67-59 victory over Notre Dame in the NIT semifinals and lit up when he saw his favorite player -- sophomore point guard Talor Battle. 'I remember when you came up for a visit and I told [Ed] DeChellis, 'You want that kid? He's too short!'' he crowed. ...
"NEW YORK - They're known as football schools who've had some games that needed the final seconds to decide.
"But on the Madison Square Garden hardwood, it really was not much of a contest.
"Penn State played its best defensive game of the season in getting up and all into the grill of Notre Dame (21-15).
"And the Nittany Lions ran around and through the Fighting Irish at the other end to take a wire-to-wire 67-59 win in the late semifinal of the National Invitation Tournament.
"The Lions (26-11) will be favored to win their first NIT title at 7 p.m. Thursday (ESPN) against Baylor (21-14), easy victors over San Diego State in the other semi.
"And it's fair to say the Lions will have the crowd on their side. About 80 percent of an audience of a student-heavy crowd of 11,352 cheered on State on Tuesday night.
" "It was great; it seemed like a home game," said PSU's Talor Battle of New York state capital Albany who led the Nits with 17 points and five assists. He attracted about 60 friends and family from there and Harrisburg, his childhood hometown. "And we've been great at home all year.
" "It felt like one of my high school games. I fed off the energy."
"So did the rest of the Lions. They won matchups all over the floor in building leads as high as 19 points. ..."
