Colonials Corner

Jeremy Chappell will begin his professional career in France.

With the Pittsburgh Summer Basketball League ending tonight, a few pieces of news to pass along, plus a few site updates to inform you of. One we’ll mention right now: I’m now on Twitter, so you can click the link on the right side of the page to follow OR you can follow along at the bottom of the page. I might move the twitter feed up once things get going.

• Former Robert Morris guard Jeremy Chappell just signed a deal to play professionally in France. He’ll be joining JL Bourg-en-Bresse, part of the Ligue Nationale de Basketball (LNB).  It’s a three-tier league set-up like most European soccer leagues. The top teams in a lower league earn promotions to the top league, while the worst teams in the top league get bumped down to the lower league and have to earn their way back up to the top. The bottom three teams in the “ProA” tier of the LNB get bumped down, while the regular season and playoff champions in the “ProB” tier get bumped up. Bourg-en-Bresse sits in ProB and was very close to earning a promotion to the top tier last year, finishing 3rd with a 23-11 record.
• No Robert Morris players made it into the final in the summer league. UPMC and CRONS, two RMU-laden summer league teams, both won their opening round games on Monday night at the GreenTree SportsPlex. But the Colonials players weren’t able to make it to Tuesday night’s games, meaning their teams were at a distinct disadvantage against the Pitt-laden squads of PBC and LAIR. Those two teams won and met in the finals tonight.

• As far as stats from the summer league, Rob Robinson was the top performer out of all of the Colonials in the league. According to PantherLair, Pitt’s Jermaine Dixon led all scorers with nearly 20 points per game. Robinson was fourth overall with just under 17 per game. Jeremy Chappell was 9th with 14.4 ppg, and Khalif Foster 11th with 13.7 ppg. A few others are also in the top 25, but of note is Velton Jones. He averaged 11ppg, but had 18 points in one of his better nights in the playoff game on Monday.
• Robinson was also in the Top 6 in rebounding, while three Colonials were in the Top 10 for assists, including Chappell and Jones in the Top 5. Robinson led the league in field goal percentage, while Jones was in the Top 3 in three point percentage. Tony Lee finished as the leading free throw shooter.
• Cleveland State is officially on the men’s basketball schedule. The Colonials will head to Cleveland on December 15. The Colonials are also reportedly hosting Appalachian State.

Finally, we had a few changes that we planned for the weekend but ended up not really following through. The process was just too ridiculous and required too much monkeying with the code. We’ll make a few smaller cosmetic changes, but for now, this is how we’re going to run. One of the features we did add is the category menu bar across the top of the page. This will now enable you to select a specific category and see all the entries in that category. The next step will be adding a few additional features – message board, photo page once our camera arrives, etc.