Brandeis University might double its men’s basketball win total from last winter while suiting up one senior starter. Coach Brian Meehan should be giddy with delight about the Judges’ future.
Then, Meehan realizes who that senior is. He’ll enjoy watching Bryan Lambert graduate in May about as much as he’d welcome a root canal.
“Even with our great freshman class this year, and even with Bryan being the only senior seeing significant playing time, we fully expect that we will take a step backward next year,” Meehan said. “He’s a focal point of everything we do.”
Lambert has been named Player of the Week in the University Athletic Association twice in the last three weeks and six times in his career. The 6-foot-8 center is averaging 15.5 points and 8.4 rebounds per game for the rising program in Waltham, Mass., nine miles west of Boston.
Those numbers are down a trifle from last winter, when Lambert averaged more than 20 ppg in conference play. In one game against New York University, the 2000 Edward Little High School graduate scored 38 points and drained a school-record eight 3-pointers.
Brandeis stumbled to a 7-18 mark. Then Meehan successfully recruited four 1,000-point high school scorers, including Rocco Toppi of Portland. Now Lambert is free to patrol the low post as a more traditional center, and the Judges are an eye-opening 10-5.
“That has helped define Bryan as a complete player,” Meehan said. “It makes him extremely difficult to defend. No big guy can stop him on the perimeter, but if they go small on him he’ll just take it down low and dominate under the basket.”
Meehan is thrilled that Lambert, who shone in high school confrontations with Nik Caner-Medley of Maryland and Chris Markwood of Maine, has been rewarded with his first taste of team success since those long-ago battles with Deering and South Portland.
Lambert won’t rest when the season ends in March. He’ll return to the Brandeis baseball team after logging two wins and a team-high four saves in 2004.
“He came to Brandeis because it was the only school that offered him the opportunity to play both,” Meehan said. “I think people felt baseball was his (best) sport, but he loves basketball more than anything.”
Bear tracks
There’s no shame in any point-winning performance at an invitational indoor track meet, considering that those meets often are attended by more different schools than a basketball or hockey team will encounter in an entire season.
Still, a fifth-place effort in the triple jump at last weekend’s GoRhody Invitational at the University at Rhode Island was relatively mundane for Stephanie McCusker. The junior from Lisbon frequently wins that event for the Black Bears, after all.
McCusker topped the triple jump at a Boston University meet in December, covering a distance of 37 feet, 3 inches. One week later, she virtually duplicated that performance in an individual triumph at the University of New Hampshire. At URI, she hit a mark of 36-, ushering the Maine women to a fourth-place finish.
Her best triple jump this winter is 38-2.
At the Brown University Challenge Cup on Jan. 17, McCusker soared to second place in both the long and triple jumps.
Maine’s men, bolstered by the exploits of two area distance runners, placed fifth at their Rhode Island Invitational. Mike Lansing of Lovell and Fryeburg Academy ran the mile in 4:17.72, good for fifth. Sixth was Auburn’s Jeff Caron. The Edward Little product crossed the stripe in 4:19.30.
Ally Thomas of Auburn stood sixth in the pole vault at the Dartmouth Relays earlier this month. Other local faces around the fieldhouse this winter for Maine include Cerese Richardson of Rumford (jumps) and Charlotte Howley (distances) and Heather Groder (middle distances, hurdles), both of Wilton, for the women, and Liam Gallagher of Auburn (distances) for the men.
Comments are no longer available on this story