Basketball
The basketball teams, as well as all other sports teams, participate in the America East Conference. The current Clemson University head coach Jack Leggett also attended the university, as well as NBA head coach Rick Carlisle (although Carlisle transferred to Virginia and finished his college career there). Other notables include Rufus Harris, Kevin Reed, Andre Rossignol, Jim Boylen, Andy Bedard, and several former Maine high school stars including Bangor's Jon McAllian and Edward Little's Troy Barnies. A prominent current player is San Diego-native Gerald Mclemore. The women's and men's basketball teams play at Alfond Arena. On October 20, 2011, Maine announced that the men's and women's teams will have 11 home games played at Memorial Gym in Orono. UMaine played home basketball games at Memorial Gym from its opening in 1935, but held some games at the Bangor Auditorium from 1980 through the early part of the 1990–91 season. The remaining men’s and women’s home games will be played at Alfond Arena, UMaine’s basketball home since January 1992. The men’s team has held a total of eight games at Memorial Gym since 2003–04. The team has never played in the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament.
The women's basketball team is particularly noted for producing one-time WNBA player Cindy Blodgett, who also served as an assistant coach at Boston College and Brown.
The men's basketball team in recent years has made progress as in the 2009–10 season the team finished the season in second place in the America East conference with a 19–11 overall record with recording one of its biggest wins in recent years with a 52–51 win over Boston College of the Atlantic Coast Conference and in the 2010–11 season defeating the University of Massachusetts, 68-56, and Penn State, 74-64.
On May 23, 2007, Blodgett was named the head coach of the women's team. She was released in March 2011.
The Black Bears' rivalry with the New Hampshire Wildcats is the longest continuous basketball rivalry between any two non-Ivy League schools: the men's teams have played each other 107 seasons in a row, from 1904–1905 to the present season (2010–2011).
The program has developed 2 NBA players those being former Los Angeles Clippers Jeff Cross and former Boston Celtics and current head coach of the Dallas Mavericks Rick Carlisle.
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Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)