Click here to subscribe today or Login.
Up next for Misericordia will be the Cougars’ toughest test yet.
The Freedom Conference champions will open the NCAA tournament with a true road game against a top-10 team as the Cougars take on Ramapo in the first round at 7:30 p.m. Friday.
The NCAA unveiled the 64-team Division III bracket on Monday afternoon, placing Misericordia in a four-team pod at Ramapo’s campus in Mahwah, N.J.
Play will begin at the site at 5:30 p.m. Friday with Amherst taking on Keene State. The two winners will play a second-round game at Ramapo on Saturday.
“It’s exciting,” Misericordia athletic director Chuck Edkins said after the Cougars outlasted DeSales in Saturday’s conference finals. “They’ve got a great group of young men all the way through. There’s a lot of guys on that roster, and they all believe.”
To advance, the Cougars will have to do something no one else has this season — beat Ramapo on its home floor. The Roadrunners went 13-0 at the Bradley Center, including winning the NJAC championship there on a half-court buzzer-beater on Friday night.
Ramapo is 25-2 overall and was ranked No. 7 nationally in the most recent D3hoops top 25 poll, released a week ago.
It will be a matchup of two of the country’s better offenses as the Cougars are 24th at 86 points per game and the Roadrunners are right behind them in 25th at 85.6 per game.
This will be Misericordia’s third trip to the tournament in program history, all coming in the last six seasons.
The Cougars lost in their first two tries, falling to NYU in a true road game in 2012 and then to Wooster in a neutral-site matchup in Ohio in 2015.
Three seniors — Griffin Sponaugle, James Hawk and Jamie Egan — have meaningful NCAA tournament experience, having played 25-plus minutes vs. Wooster.
Elsewhere in the region, both the Scranton men’s and women’s teams made the tournament after each won their respective Landmark Conference titles.
The Lady Royals — led by former Misericordia men’s coach Trevor Woodruff — will host a four-team pod at the Long Center, opening with New England on Friday. The men will play Oswego State at Williams College.
MU women play on
Misericordia’s women’s squad also got good news on Monday. Though the Cougars lost a tough double-overtime game to DeSales in the Freedom Conference semifinals, they were selected to play in the ECAC tournament and will get to host a first-round game.
The ECAC will have one 15-team bracket this season on the women’s side. Misericordia will take on Rutgers-Camden at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Anderson Center.
A win there would send the Cougars to Pittsburgh for the weekend as top-seeded Carnegie Mellon hosts the final three rounds from Friday to Sunday. If the Cougars advance, they would play either Stevenson or Cabrini at 2 p.m. Friday.
“I really would like to see our women have a chance to get after it one more time,” Edkins said. “They deserve the opportunity (to play) for another championship.”
