Men's Basketball To Open Season In Western Canada at the CCA D2 Canadian Tip-Off Classic

Third Time In The Past Five Seasons Daemen Has Participated In A Prestigious D2 Tournament

8/2/2023 11:46:00 AM

AMHERST, N.Y. - The Daemen University men's basketball coach Mike MacDonald has announced that the Wildcats will open the 2023-24 season by participating in the Conference Commissioner's Association (CCA) Division II Canadian Tip-Off Classic. The round robin tournament will take place in Langley, British Columbia at the Langley Events Centre. Langley is located an hour outside of Vancouver. Simon Fraser University is serving as the tournament host school. SFU is the first and currently the only athletic program from outside of the United States that competes in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

It will mark the first time in program history the Wildcats have traveled to Western Canada and the first time since the 2012-13 season that Daemen has played a regular season game outside of the United States.

The CCA Division II Canadian Tip-Off Classic will be a 12-team (six women's and six men's) tournament November 3 to 5, 2023. Each team will play three games and there will be six games daily, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It is the start of a three-year agreement to host the event at Langley Events Centre, running through 2025.

It marks the second time in the past three seasons that Daemen has been invited to participate in a CCA sponsored tournament. The Wildcats took part in the 2021 CCA Division II Tip-off Classic hosted by West Texas A&M University. Daemen also tipped off the 2019-20 season by taking part in the Small College Basketball National Hall of Fame Classic held in St. Joseph, Missouri.

"It's an honor to be invited to these high profile events, and we have been lucky enough to take part in three of them over the past five years," said MacDonald. "It it a great opportunity for us to showcase our program and will hopefully provide our student athletes with memories that will last a lifetime."

All three of Daemen's opponents are members of the Great Northwest Athletic Conference. The Wildcats open the tournament on Friday, Nov. 3 by facing Western Washington University at 5:15 p.m. The Vikings posted a 15-13 overall record and an 8-10 mark in the GNAC last year. Daemen will face the tournament host, Simon Fraser, Saturday (Nov. 4) at 7 p.m. SFU went 6-22 overall and 1-17 in the GNAC last winter. The Wildcats close out play on Sunday afternoon (12:45 p.m.) against Seattle Pacific University. The Falcons finished 17-11 overall and 12-6 in the GNAC a year ago. All start times are Pacific Standard Time (PST). Daemen will be playing all three schools for the first time in program history.

The Wildcats will return all five starters and a total of 14 players from their 2022-23 team which went 20-8 overall and 12-4 in the East Coast Conference. The Wildcats advanced to the ECC Tournament championship game, where they suffered a 72-66 loss to top-seed St. Thomas Aquinas College. MacDonald will enter the season with a record of 179-74 with the Wildcats. He will be entering his 26th year as a collegiate head coach and owns an overall career record of 436-300.

Daemen has posted at least 20 wins in five of the last six seasons (Daemen only played 16 games during the COVID-19 shortened 2020-21 season) and advanced to the NCAA Division II Tournament in 2019, 2020 and 2021--claiming its first-ever NCAA East Region title and advancing to the Division II "Elite Eight" in 2021.

All-ECC selections Joey Atkins (Watervliet, N.Y.), Dylan Fasoyiro (Houston, Tex.), Nick MacDonald (Amherst, N.Y.) and Andrew Mason (Webster, N.Y.) all return in 2023-24. Atkins earned first-team All-ECC honors in his first season as a starter last year after averaging 11.9 points and 6.2 rebounds. He also ranked eighth among all Division II players in blocks (65). Fasoyiro averaged a team-high 13.4 points in his first season with the team, while MacDonald contributed 12.4 points. Mason averaged 10.9 points and led all three NCAA divisions in three-point field goal percentage (.516) this past year.

Veterans Ryan Salzberg (Manlius, N.Y.) and Justin Hemphill (Buffalo, N.Y.) also return. Salzberg, a 6-foot-4 point guard, started all 28 games last year and averaged 32 minutes a game. Hemphill, a 6-foot-6 forward, is coming off a breakout season in which he averaged 9.0 points and a team-high 6.5 rebounds off the bench.

The remainder of Daemen's 2023-24 schedule will be announced in the coming weeks.

Daemen features the premier NCAA Division II athletics program in the Buffalo-Niagara region, sponsoring 17 intercollegiate teams. For the latest information on Daemen Athletics, follow the Wildcats via social media on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, or sign up to receive customizable news alerts, e-mail newsletters and weekly schedule alerts.

Follow the Daemen men's basketball program on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at @DaemenMBB.

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