It will be Take 2 for the start of the University of Maine men’s basketball season Saturday and Sunday when the Black Bears visit Hartford.
Both contests tip off at 2 p.m. from Chase Arena in West Hartford, Connecticut. America East has adopted an 18-game, regular-season conference schedule featuring back-to-back dates against the same opponent at the same location, typically on weekends.
The Black Bears had traveled to the Mohegan Sun complex in Uncasville, Connecticut, to open their season on Nov. 25 against 2019 national champion Virginia. However, that game and three other nonconference games were canceled when the university announced a pause in its winter sports activities until Dec. 8 due to COVID-19 concerns.
One UMaine player reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 not long before the Virginia game, but results of a subsequent testing of all players and team staff members before they returned to Maine came back negative.
However, confirmed cases in the athletic department caused UMaine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy on Nov. 24 to pause activities for affected teams and put all games on hold.
The Black Bears went 2 1/2 weeks between practices while in quarantine before returning to the court on Dec. 10. A Dec. 12 nonconference game at Fordham was canceled.
“I think they handled it as well as you can expect them to,” UMaine coach Richard Barron said of his 16-player team, which includes just four juniors and seniors. “I think they were all disappointed, me included.
“It’s tough. You feel like you’d gotten through it all, we had gotten our results back from the testing we had done in between showing that we were negative. We were just thinking about practicing and excited to get going and all of a sudden everything changed,” he said.
UMaine finished 9-22 last winter, and the Black Bears were picked to finish tied with Binghamton for ninth place in this season’s America East preseason coaches poll.
UMaine is one of three America East teams set to make their season debut along with Albany and conference newcomer New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Hartford enters the weekend at 3-2 and has won three straight since losses to Connecticut and Villanova.
“Not having any scrimmages, not having any games before you start conference is definitely difficult, but what’s the alternative, not playing?” Barron said. “We’re just going to take each day that’s in front of us and try to do the best we can.”
UMaine will be without two players for the weekend series due to injury. Senior center Miks Antoms faces reconstructive shoulder surgery in January and will miss the entire season, and freshman forward Matt Fleming of Bangor also is sidelined, though Barron declined to disclose the reason.
“I’m definitely excited that we’ll play, but there’s also some anxiety about it, too, because everybody’s worried about what we’ll look like,” Barron said. “We don’t know. We haven’t scrimmaged, so relative to our competition it’s very difficult to gauge where we are at this point but I think we’ll have a much better idea after the next four or five days.”
UMaine will play three games in four days after adding a nonconference game Dec. 22 at Boston College.
Boston College’s schedule opened up when a nonleague game slated for the same date against Cal-Berkeley was canceled. That left the Eagles (1-5) without a game between their 101-63 loss to Syracuse last Saturday and their Atlantic Coast Conference opener on Dec. 30 at North Carolina State.
UMaine was to be idle after its Hartford twinbill until its first scheduled home games against the University of New Hampshire on Jan. 2-3, 2021.
The UMaine-Boston College game will tip off at noon and will be televised nationally on the ACC Network.
“Our players want to play, and most of them can’t go home for Christmas so for them to come back to an empty campus and sit in a dorm room for 10 or 11 days before we would play on Jan. 2 isn’t as attractive as playing Boston College,” Barron said.
