Expect Ryerson University to announce shortly that the men's basketball program will be led by new Head Coach Roy Rana, effective immediately. Rana has had tremendous success as a high school mentor in Toronto with Eastern Commerce Saints and also has several seasons working with Canada Basketball, most recently this past summer as he led Canada's Cadet team to a spot in the first ever FIBA U17 World Championship next summer in Germany. Canada qualified by winning the Bronze medal at this summer's FIBA Americas U-16 championships in Argentina.
Eastern Commerce under Rana has had numerous graduates who have gone on to play NCAA and CIS basketball and he is well known in GTA basketball circles. This represents a very important step forward for the Ryerson program, bringing in a young coach with plenty of ties to the community and a growing coaching resume. Rana's signing shows the commitment Ryerson University has made to athletics and the basketball program. Plans apparently are in the making for a modern, new gymnasium with seating of 2,000+ for basketball situated near the Rye campus in downtown Toronto and Rana's signing is the first of many planned milestones for a program now brimming with optimism.
Rana coached the Saints from 2000 to 2007, winning 4 OFSAA championships including 3 consecutive between 2003 to 2005. He also coached the Basketball Ontario's Elite Development Program and coached Team Ontario to gold medals at the Canadian National Championships in 2004 and Canada Games in 2005. Finishing off a busy coaching summer of 2009, Rana also coached Canada's U19 team at the recent NIKE Global Challenge, advancing to the championship game against USA East where the Canadians dropped a tough one point game. But the recruiting and planning portion of his summer is just beginning as he embarks on maybe his most challenging position yet, competing in the OUA East.
Rana inherits a Rams team, led by 6'7" All-Canadian Moser Trophy candidate Boris Bakovic, that hosted a first round playoff game last season but were defeated by York. There is other returning talent as well in 6'3" fourth-year guard Ryan McNeilly plus 6'1" Josh Budd (Timmins) and others expected back include 6'10" Joey Imbrogno (5th year), 6'6" Chris Blouin (Carleton Place) and 6'2" Afeworki Gebrekerestos (Ottawa). Expect the hard-working Rana to comb the recruiting trail even this late in the process to continually bring fresh talent to Ryerson in an effort to compete in what may be the toughest conference in the country.
3 comments:
Is there any possibility that Dave DeAveiro was Ryerson's first choice, but Ottawa refused to allow him to make the move to Ryerson ?
I do know this...back in 2004 Dave signed a long term contract to coach the Gee-Gees..it was reported and can be found in the OUA website's archives.
That was five years ago and possibly that deal was set to expire soon, if not already.
This is only my theory but it could be Dave was in the process of negotiating a new deal with Ottawa when Ryerson made him this offer.
I really don't think Dave wanted to leave Ottawa, even though he is a Toronto native.
But having an offer in hand from Ryerson would be some ammunition to take to the table if he felt he was getting low balled by Ottawa.
There is nothing like having a real possibility of losing a valued coach's services to a rival school to ramp up an offer.
So I think Dave could have taken the Ryerson job as a last resort, if negotiations with Ottawa had broken off.
Mind you, that's only my guess.
deaveiro declined the job but he was the first choice
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