Steve Morano
MSMU Class of 2024
(1/2025) After a first-round exit in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference tournament to Canisius on March 12, 2024, Mount St. Mary’s Men’s Basketball team found themselves in a crisis. Not only did Head Coach Dan Engelstad depart Emmitsburg to take an assistant coaching job at Syracuse, but star players Dakota Leffew and De’Shayne Montgomery entered the transfer portal, both eventually settling in Athens at the University of Georgia. With the departure of an experienced graduate student and the MAAC Rookie of the Year in Leffew and Montgomery respectively, many in Emmitsburg believed that there would be a downward trend to the future of Mountaineers men’s basketball. But in fact, quite the opposite has happened.
Change first began at the Mount with the hiring of first-year Head Coach Donny Lind on April 20. In a packed-out university press conference at the ARCC concourse, Lind promised to return to the team’s historical roots of full court defense that had become a stapple under the highly successful teams of former Head Coach Jim Phelan. This "Mayhem" brand of basketball was first introduced to Lind by former Head Coach of men’s basketball Jamion Christian when Lind was hired as an assistant coach at the Mount in 2013.
It was further refined after Lind left Emmitsburg in 2019 for Radford to work under Head Coach Mike Jones. Lind then followed Jones to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro in 2021 and together, the pair recorded an overall record of 153-103 and a conference record of 94-48 across both the Big South and the SOCON with a Big South title and first-round appearance against Villanova at the 2016 National Tournament in tow.
As a product of the Mike Jones coaching tree, Lind knew that he had to surround himself with a good corps of assistants in his coaching room. The first to join the team was Jeremy Freeman, who was retained from Engelstad’s old staff and was promoted to Assistant Coach from his old position as Director of Operations. Dave Matturo and Keith Chesley were the next additions, with the pair originating from Belmont-Abbey and the Virginia Military Institute, respectively assuming further assistant coaching jobs. The final piece of Lind’s coaching staff came in the form of Siddy Sall on May 31. Sall came to the Mount with a wealth of experience and knowledge as the Senegalese native served as Assistant Coach of the NBA Academy Africa as well as an Assistant Coach for the Senegalese Women’s National Basketball team at the 2026 FIBA Women’s World Cup Pre-Qualifiers in Rwanda this past summer. With the further retention of Graduate
Assistant Andrew Winton from last year’s staff, as well as the hiring of Demico Coleman as the second Graduate Assistant, Lind now had a staff that was uniquely his and yet, incorporated the best pieces of the previous year’s leadership corps.
With a new staff lined up, Lind had further work to do on the next issue, and arguably the most pressing, players. In modern collegiate athletics, player recruitment is often the most time consuming and difficult part of the job in a world governed by name, image, likeness deals and the transfer portal. This, combined with a lack of time to recruit, meant that Lind and the rest of his staff had little chance to get their guys in time for the season. But with less-than-ideal time, the staff recruited seven new players while retaining the majority of the players from the 2023-24 campaign.
Among the first to be added were freshman Elijah Espinoza and red-shirt freshman transfer Jaxon Hartman from West Virginia Wesleyan. Two more freshmen in Trey Wilson of Miramar, Florida and Abdou Khadre Kébé of Dakar, Senegal joined soon after. A further trio of transfers arrived in Emmitsburg over the summer, with junior transfer from Peninsula College Javon Ervin, junior transfer from Ellsworth Community College Arlandus Keyes, and sophomore UVA-Wise transfer Carmelo Pacheco joining the team in time for the start of the July training camp.
But with a flurry of new freshmen players and transfers, Lind and the rest of the staff had eight returns to the team in Jonathan Ogunfye, Dola Adebayo, Malcolm Dread, Dallas Hobbs, Patrick Haigh, Terrell Ard Jr., Jedy Cordilla, and Xavier Lipscomb to incorporate into the new gameplan along with the newcomers. They would play a key part in how the eventual product on the court would turn out and run smoothly.
To play into Lind’s new system of defensive pressing, the experienced forwards Adebayo, Ard, and Cordilla were charged with being the backbone of their defense. Along with their natural job in the paint and snagging rebounds, the trio has been utilized in the full court press and has been vital to overwhelming teams in transition. With a much more expansive and forward-based defense, the new Mount system has allowed its ‘bigs’ to play with more freedom across the court in comparison to last year’s defense.
Another way that Lind’s system differs to that of previous years is in the way that Hobbs and Lipscomb are utilized as guards. Instead of being a traditional, deep-shooting point guard, Hobbs has been converted into more of a driving-guard, using his speed and transitional momentum from defense to weed his way into the paint for a layup or a jump shot. With an absence of Hobbs’ threat from beyond the arc, the team has relied upon the likes of Pacheco and Keyes to shoot threes, especially from the wing and in the corner. Lipscomb, however, acts more of a play calling quarterback in football now than a traditional point getting guard, calling out what to do on the floor regarding plays and feeding the ball off to the rest of the team to get baskets.
The start the team has been on is nothing more than historical, winning seven out of their first 11 games as of December 19. Their win against Howard on November 30 notched the team its fifth win, leading them to a record of 5-2 thus far, notably their best start in Division One. Further wins against Bucknell, Saint Francis, LIU and a 101-94 win against conference rivals Fairfield round out their historic start. And with their conference schedule fully starting soon, the Mountaineers will look to continue their defensive prowess to overwhelm their opponents.
No matter how well this start to his career looks, people need to remember that Lind is of course in his first year as a head coach. On top of everything else, he had little time to both recruit and fit his playstyle to the existing players who had to be weaned off of Engelstad’s old system of playing. If the team starts to fall against their opponents in conference, then of course an inexperienced coaching staff would falter in this circumstance due to a lack of playing time. This goes for their players as well. But in all due time, Lind’s system can be successful and does in fact invoke older memories to that of Jim Phelan and the long and storied history of basketball at Mount St. Mary’s. Fans just have to be patient with the process.
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