ORONO, Maine — The University of Maine men’s basketball roster continues its off-season transition, with two players opting to transfer out of the program while two junior college players reportedly have made verbal commitments to join the team next fall.
Troy Reid-Knight, a senior guard from Vaughan, Ontario, who did not play during the 2016-2017 season after suffering a broken ankle during preseason, is graduating on May 13 with a degree in biology. He will attempt to play at another school next season after being on scholarship at UMaine for the last four years.
Reid-Knight hopes to play either for another U.S. Division I program under the NCAA’s graduate transfer rule that allows players with remaining eligibility who graduate to go to another Division I school without having to sit out a year, or for a school in Canada’s top-level CIS, where he would have two years of eligibility left.
“I haven’t decided yet or even talked to many schools so that’s one thing I’m still looking at, but I’m definitely going to play next year,” said Reid-Knight. “I’m not done playing basketball yet.”
Reid-Knight was an AAU teammate of Andrew Wiggins — now of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves — before starting an injury-plagued career at UMaine. It has included multiple concussions, but he still hopes to play pro basketball either in Canada or Europe. That goal likely will be a factor in where he concludes his college basketball career.
“Canada probably would be the best place development-wise because I would have two years to basically build up my resume,” he said. “Some of the schools I’m looking at have developed a lot of pro guys and our game in Canada translates to the Euro pro league.”
Reid-Knight started 12 games during his three years on UMaine’s active roster, averaging 4.8 points and 2.2 rebounds as a junior and 4.8 points and 2.3 rebounds as a sophomore.
Also transferring from UMaine, according to multiple reports, is 6-foot-1 guard Austin Howard. The junior from Louisville, Kentucky, spent the 2016-2017 season with the Black Bears after two years at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois.
Howard played in 32 games for the Black Bears last winter and averaged 7.6 points and 2.3 rebounds while shooting 38 percent from the field.
Howard and Reid-Knight join non-scholarship sophomore guard Ryan Bernstein in opting to transfer out of the UMaine program since the end of the season. The Black Bears finished with a 7-25 record.
Coach Bob Walsh’s Black Bears have received their most recent verbal commitments to join the program from Celio Araujo, a 5-10 sophomore point guard from Boston, and Duncan Douglas, a 6-6 junior forward from Lubbock, Texas.
Those commitments were first reported by verbalcommits.com.
Walsh could not be immediately reached for comment on Tuesday afternoon.
Araujo played last year at Sheridan (Wyoming) College where he averaged 4.9 points and 4.6 assists. While in high school he played his AAU basketball for the nationally recognized Boston Amateur Basketball Club. He is one of eight players from the BABC’s Class of 2015 to earn a Division I scholarship, according to Adam Finkelstein of newenglandrecruitingreport.com.
Douglas is a two-year veteran of Santa Monica (California) College, and with Araujo will join 6-5 wing Isaiah White and 6-8 center Miks Antoms as newcomers to the UMaine program next season.
White, who redshirted as a freshman during the 2015-2016 season at North Carolina-Asheville, signed with UMaine last fall while attending Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland. White averaged 13.6 points and 4.6 rebounds while shooting 47 percent from the field in 26 games for Harford last winter.
Antoms, a native of Riga, Latvia, recently announced his verbal commitment to UMaine via Twitter. He averaged 18.1 points and 8.4 rebounds for Lee Academy’s postgraduate team last winter.
Also becoming eligible at UMaine next season will be 6-5 sophomore Dusan Majstorovic, the former Lee Academy prep player who redshirted with the Black Bears last winter after transferring from LaSalle.
