By Connor Wilson (@Conman_815)
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Anthony Latina painted the picture of how he envisioned this week down at Boardwalk Hall going for his Sacred Heart Pioneers during his postgame press conference after Thursday night’s first round win over Iona.
“We caught some bad breaks (during the year), but now we’re at full strength and can be the story of the Northeast and the MAAC,” he said.
He had a point. Picked to finish third in the league in the preseason poll and garnering a pair of first-place votes, the Pioneers ended up finishing ninth due in part to a brutal 1-6 start to their MAAC schedule. During that stretch, Sacred Heart was dealing with numerous injuries, particularly big man Anquan Hill.
“You lose Anquan Hill for six games and go 1-5,” Latina said. “You know, take CJ Anthony off Iona, or take Kevair Kennedy off of Merrimack, or take Amarri Monroe off Quinnipiac or Gavin Doty off of Siena (and see what happens).”
Latina also clarified that nobody’s feeling sorry for the Pioneers that that happened, insisting you are who you are. Still, he felt as if Sacred Heart was a Top 4 team in the league when healthy.
The spirits were quite high after the victory over the Gaels, but as it’s well known in March, that can change before you know it. Just 24 hours after the win, Sacred Heart saw its season come to a close with a 70-48 loss to top-seeded Merrimack.
“Merrimack deserves a lot of credit, they’ve been the best team in the league all year,” Latina said. “We battled, but we just fell up short.”
The game itself exposed two major areas that had been hurting the Pioneers all year. Coming in, the team was 1-9 when shooting less than 33 percent from beyond the arc and 4-17 when turning the ball over more than 10 times.
On Friday night, they hit 7-of-26, or 27 percent, and turned the ball over 15 times.
“We picked a bad day to shoot poorly, but (Merrimack deserves) credit for that,” Latina said.
Because of the critical stretch without Hill, Sacred Heart’s 2025-26 season will be tough to truly assess. Not to mention the burden of losing another key player in sharpshooter Griffin Barrouk for the season before the campaign even began. The concept of a full strength unit including Barrouk is one that will be one of the biggest what-ifs in the MAAC this year.
“The curse of this time of year is you feel as good as you possibly can feel one day, and it’s as bad as you can feel the next,” Latina said. “And I feel for our guys and our university, because we would like to have gone farther, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
It’s still fresh, but it’s never too early to do a look at some potential changes that are to come in Fairfield. For starters (literally and figuratively), three starters — Hill, Dashon Gittens, and Yann Farell — all have exercised their eligibility and won’t be back next year. All three joined the Pioneers at different points in their careers and had a lasting impact on the program despite mixed results.
“I came back because I thought we had a really good team to win it all this year,” Hill said. “Obviously it didn’t go the way that we wanted it to.”
Among those eligible to return include the other two starters in Mekhi Conner and Nyle Ralph-Beyer, as well as key reserves such as Jaden Slaughter, Abdou Yadd and Fallou Gueye. Nothing is a guarantee with the transfer portal these days, but Latina realizes the connection he’s made with this group is important.
“Every year is a brand new year. You have no idea who's coming back, who’s not,” Latina said. “There’s a lot of different ways to be successful, we just have to make sure we’re doing a proper evaluation. We have to allocate our resources correctly. You can’t make a lot of mistakes.”
Now through two full seasons as members of the MAAC, Sacred Heart still may be a bit ahead of schedule in terms of the expectations it had making the jump from the NEC. Latina guided the Pioneers to MAAC tournament victories each year, albeit first-round games. The ceiling and goal for this year’s team wasn’t to match last year’s finish, but it’s not terrible given the draw.
“We played great in our last game (of the regular season) and beat Mount St Mary’s. If we lose that game, we avoid Merrimack until the finals,” Latina said. “But sometimes the draw is what it is, we’d have to beat them at some point.”
Latina already has some sort of idea as to who he’ll be targeting to retool the roster next year. Not specific names, of course, but the archetype that he always looks for.
“I feel blessed to coach these guys,” he reflected. “They’re great people. They’re people that you would want your son to hang out with and your daughter to date, and they’re a credit to themselves, to their families and to the university,” Latina said. “As long as I’m the coach, we’re going to try to get good people. We will never sacrifice that, and we will pass on guys that don’t believe in what we believe in, even at the expense of winning.”
One thing is for certain, the foundation of the program at Sacred Heart has been poured. The next step is to start building upon it and advance further in Atlantic City. With Latina and his staff at the helm, it feels like that next step will be arriving quite soon.
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