BOX SCORE MANCHESTER, N.H. – The University of New Haven men’s basketball team saw its season come to a close on Sunday evening with an 80-63 loss to Franklin Pierce in the NCAA Division II East Region Championship Semifinals. Jeffery Adkins (Piscataway, N.J./Piscataway) led the Chargers with a career-best 19 points.
 
New Haven (20-9) completes its first 20-win season since the 2003-04 campaign. Last night, the Chargers also notched their first NCAA postseason victory since 2003. New Haven, the fourth seed at the East Region Championship, finished in third place in the Northeast-10 Conference regular season.
 
Adkins’ 19 points came on 7-for-10 shooting from the floor and a 5-for-7 outing at the free throw line. Justin Exum (Brooklyn, N.Y./Xaverian) added 13 points, ending his junior campaign ranked 21st all-time at New Haven with 1,226 points. The Second Team All-NE-10 performer also knocked down two three-pointers to cap his year with 82 conversions from distance – the second-most in a single-season at UNH.
 
Jeremy Williams (Silver Spring, Md./Springbrook) scored eight points to conclude his Charger career with 958 tallies. Eric Anderson (Newark, N.J./Newark Tech) had seven points and Cyrus James (Manchester, Conn./Howell Cheney Tech) netted two.
 
Ashanti DePass (Baldwin, N.Y./Baldwin) led the reserves with 12 points off the bench, and Kevin McLaughlin (Pittsfield, Mass./Taconic) notched two in his collegiate finale. Mark Palmieri (West Haven, Conn./West Haven) had a career-high three rebounds in his last game at New Haven.
 
Exum and Anderson each hauled in eight rebounds, with Anderson upping his Division II-leading total to 349 rebounds this season. The Northeast-10 Defensive Player of the Year grabbed the eighth-most boards in a season in program history and finished with 71 blocked shots – two shy of Herb Watkins’ single-season record.
 
Franklin Pierce (23-8) was led by 19 points and 12 rebounds from Adrianos Vourliotakis.
 
After a 4-4 tie start to the game, the Ravens went on a 16-0 run over the ensuing 6:06 from which the Chargers never recovered. New Haven netted the next seven, capped by a DePass trey, to cut the deficit to 20-11, but Franklin Pierce scored the next six and the Chargers would not get back to within single-digits for the remainder of the game. When the final horn sounded, the Ravens advanced to the NCAA East Region Championship Game with an 80-63 victory.
 
This season was the Chargers’ third under Head Coach Ted Hotaling, who is now one of three UNH coaches with an NCAA postseason victory to his credit.