Season preview: Monmouth’s climb up CAA ladder becomes family affair
Season preview: Monmouth’s climb up CAA ladder becomes family affair
Xander Rice passed on other offers in the transfer portal to join father King Rice on the Jersey Shore.
WEST LONG BRANCH – Xander Rice had offers. One of them was rumored to come with a six-figure payday.
But only one place gave him the unique opportunity to play college basketball for his dad.
Ask either Xander or King Rice, and they’ll confirm some big programs came after the former Bucknell guard when he entered the portal as a graduate transfer. With the opportunity to earn thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) in NIL compensation, Xander Rice may have wound up spending 2023-24 in one of the Power Six conferences.
King Rice, the longtime coach at Monmouth, was touched when his son explained his rationale not to go for the short-term reward.
Dad, that could be cool for eight, nine months. What we could do here together could be cool for a lifetime.
“Well, when your son tells you something like that it makes you just want to be better,” King Rice said during Coastal Athletic Association media day.
Xander Rice will play a major role for the Hawks as they attempt to reverse their fortunes in their second season in the CAA. After a dismal 1-20 start last season, they found the right gear late in conference play for a 6-6 finish.
“The MAAC was a really good league. I think top to bottom, this league is better,” King Rice told me after a practice last week. “… In this league, we were one of the bottom teams, we won (four games) in a row. I think anybody can getcha. There’s a lot of consequences when you’re a top team and you lose to one of the bottom teams.”
The younger Rice led Bucknell in points (14.1), assists (3.8) and steals (0.9) per game last year, his fourth season at the Pennsylvania program, and earned third-team All-Patriot League honors. He scored more than 1,000 points in his Bucknell career and made three of every eight 3-pointers he tried (finishing two seasons with a 42.4% rate).
This sort of production is no surprise coming from not only a coach’s son, but the son of a former top-notch North Carolina point guard like King Rice.
As Xander’s little brother Julian worked on his crossover on the sidelines of a Monmouth scrimmage, King thought back to how his eldest son grew up alongside the program. Xander was 10 years old when his father got the job in New Jersey after being turned down for other head coaching gigs.
“He remembers,” King Rice said. “And then right after that, when Justin (Robinson) and those guys came, that’s when he really grew up with these guys. Collin Stewart used to take him to the lunchroom all the time when he was 10, 11, 12.
“It’s been easy because he’s been around the program for so long, and now he’s a college graduate so he learned another way of doing things. … That makes me relax in my fatherly duties where I don’t have to push him so hard to get his degree or do these things. So now it’s a basketball deal, and we haven’t done this before. So it’s been fun.”
Xander Rice was in lockstep with his dad – first about needing to experience life on his own somewhere other than Monmouth, then about needing to make his own decision on whether to spend a grad transfer year in West Long Branch.
“During last season I wanted to try not to think about it too much,” Xander Rice said, “because if I kind of started making expectations for what was to come in the future, I feel like I wouldn’t have been able to handle the present and put too much pressure on myself and not play how I needed to play during last year. Immediately after the season ended I knew that I was going to enter the portal and stuff. And I honestly had an idea that this is what I wanted to do.
“But like my dad said, he really wanted it to be my decision and give me space and allow me to kind of figure things out for myself.”
Rice has enjoyed playing for his father for the first time and spending more time with his mother and family while staying in his own apartment near campus.
King “has been able to still keep that balance that between, yeah, during the day, during those three hours of practice every day, he’s my coach, but everywhere outside of that he’s still my dad,” Rice said.
The three-year starter at Bucknell brings much-needed experience to Monmouth’s backcourt and ought to be the Hawks’ lead guard, but he’s far from the only new piece to this puzzle.
With the transfer addition of 6-foot-10 Nikita Konstantynovskyi from Tulsa, the Hawks have three options at the five at any given time. Klemen Vuga, while just 6-foot-9, grew (figuratively) into the position and averaged 16.8 points and 6.0 rebounds over the final eight games. Amaan Sandhu (7-foot-1) has become more mature, King Rice said, and benefited from playing for India in an Olympic pre-qualifying tournament in August.
And Rice already considers Konstantynovskyi the best rebounder he’s had at Monmouth in quite a while.
Adding height wasn’t the only key to this offseason for Rice.
“First thing’s first, we had to get bigger. Not by recruiting, by the weight room,” he told me. “You could tell (opponents’) weight deal was better than ours. You could just see it when you walked in the gyms and saw the shoulders and how big guys were. I think that’s one of the first things, improving what we did in the weight room. Mike (Thiers), our strength coach, is incredible. Just had to change a few things to get these guys bigger and stronger to deal.”
Leading scorer and rebounder Myles Foster and stellar defender Tahron Allen have moved on, but Monmouth can feel good about the freshman-to-sophomore development of Jack Collins and Andrew Ball, who showed flashes last season.
Monmouth was picked 11th out of 14 in the CAA preseason poll, and the league features at least four teams that could not only win the CAA title but also be an upset threat in March. But after the Hawks paid their dues in their league debut, the trajectory points upward – thanks in large part to a father-son team years in the making.
“It’s been a dream come true,” Xander Rice said. “It’s been a perfect transition.”
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Hey gang, thanks for reading. My visit to Monmouth completed a preseason tour that also included Rutgers, Seton Hall, Princeton and MAAC media day. You can check those corresponding season previews here if you missed any. (There’s actually one more stop to make before the season begins, but I’ll keep that under wraps for now.)
A few quick notes for Cleaning the Glass, and then we’re one step closer to the weekend:
The Monmouth player expected to take the biggest step forward may be Jaret Valencia, a native of Colombia who redshirted last season but is long and toolsy. It may take time for him to fully integrate after sitting for a while, but King Rice said he’s just beginning to scratch the surface of his capabilities. “Jaret’s 6-foot-9, so when he’s jumping through the air it’s crazy,” he said. “And overall, how hard he tries. He’s a kid that hasn’t played in a lot of games, organized games, so everything’s new for him. But the ability to shoot the 3, post up, dunk and guard one through five, a lot of people can’t do that.”
The Hawks weren’t deep last season but have 19 players on the official roster now, including a large collection of freshmen and walk-ons. One of those 19, center Tadhg Crowley, will not play after suffering multiple concussions in recent years. He is staying with the program, is helping at practice and will travel with the Hawks.
Finally, an important programming note: The next three editions of Guarden State will come out Wednesday, Friday and Monday (Nov. 1, 3 and 6) before I move to a Tuesday-Thursday-Sunday schedule during the season. Starting Nov. 21, all Tuesday editions will be for paid subscribers only. This will almost never be standard game coverage; I want to make a paid subscription worth the (reasonable) price so I’ll be trying out columns and different statistical analyses in that space, while Thursday and Sunday will be all about news, game takeaways and feature stories from around the state. I encourage you to subscribe, whether free or paid – and if you’d like to pay, $30 per year is a far better deal than $5 recurring every month. This helps put a coffee in my hand and gas in my car as I set out to bring you the most comprehensive New Jersey college basketball coverage one independent writer can provide. Thanks!