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The Rhody Way withdraws from The Basketball Tournament; what happened.

Bill Koch, Providence Journal
·4 min read

There won’t be a University of Rhode Island alumni team in The Basketball Tournament after all.

The Rhody Way announced it had been forced to pull out just days before the scheduled tip due to “unforeseen circumstances.”

The Rams alums were set to face the Massachusetts alumni team, The Commonwealth, on Monday at War Memorial Arena in Syracuse. The Rhody Way counted several commitments from URI’s pair of NCAA Tournament qualifiers in 2017 and 2018. Former team managers Jerrell Coleman and Owen Sammarone were serving as general managers while former guard TJ Buchanan had been announced as the team’s coach.

“My one fear came true,” Coleman said on his personal Twitter account early Friday. “Unfortunately, due to some budget and financial constraints, we will not be able to participate in TBT 2023. But this gives us a full year to prepare for 2024.

“We will put this together to give the alumni and Rhode Island fans the experience they deserve.”

More: URI men's basketball faces rough road schedule in 2023-24

URI's Jared Terrell was one of the alumni players who had agreed to play for The Rhody Way.
URI's Jared Terrell was one of the alumni players who had agreed to play for The Rhody Way.

Per the TBT home page, E.C. Matthews, Jared Terrell, Cyril Langevine, Jarvis Garrett, Fatts Russell, Xavier Munford, Four McGlynn, Earl Watson and Jarrelle Reischel were among the former Rams committed to play in the event. They were to be joined by New Jersey shooting guard Kelvin Amayo and Cameroon forward Kenneth Kadji. Former URI forward Kuran Iverson was among the initial commitments but was forced to withdraw earlier last week after suffering a knee injury.

The event was founded in 2014 and is broadcast across multiple platforms on ESPN. Teams battle for a $1 million prize, with the winners taking the entire purse and dividing it among themselves. The Rams had drawn the No. 4 seed in their region. They'll be replaced by Virginia Dream.

TBT rules call for rosters with a minimum of nine players and a maximum of 12. Player registration fees run upwards of $1,000. The application process for this year’s event started on April 1 and remained open until early June.

More: https://www.gofundme.com/f/uri-alumni-team-make-it-to-syracuse?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&ut

Coleman and Sammarone created a fundraiser on July 10 on GoFundMe and set a goal of $10,000. The page had generated just over $1,800 by Friday afternoon, including donations from URI athletic director Thorr Bjorn and several Rams fans and boosters. The school had no formal affiliation with the team. The former Minutemen benefited from a partnership with The Massachusetts Collective, the group set up to help foster name, image and likeness opportunities for current UMass men’s and women’s basketball players.

“They had six-plus months to prepare like everyone else,” the UMass collective tweeted from its account, @TheMassCo. “Letting TBT know days before is irresponsible and unprofessional. One hundred-plus teams applied. It sucks for the teams that didn’t get in that were prepared, organized and funded.”

The Commonwealth features a pair of standouts from the last NCAA Tournament team at UMass — Chaz Williams and Maxie Esho helped power the Minutemen into the 2014 field. More recent names include forward Brison Gresham, shooting guard Carl Pierre, point guard Cedric Anderson, shooting guard Donte Clark and point guard Luwane Pipkins, who spent a graduate year with Providence in 2019-20. His last professional team was BK Olomouc in the Czech Republic.

bkoch@providencejournal.com  

On Twitter: @BillKoch25 

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: The Rhody Way's decision cited as 'irresponsible and unprofessional'