Recruiting for football and men's basketball will certainly change with the University of Massachusetts moving from the Atlantic 10 to Mid-American C in the 2025-26 academic year.
of daily hampshire gazette We spoke with soccer player Dazur Hollingsworth, who is scheduled to sign a contract in December 2024, and basketball player Luka Damjanak, who signed with NLI in November.
Both players have previous ties to UMass and support the conference's move.
“I did some research,” Damjanak said. “The A-10 is a great conference, but so is the MAC. So looking at our strength, I think they can do well in both conferences.”
Massachusetts men's basketball reached 20 wins this season for the first time since 2014 and earned the No. 4 seed in the Atlantic 10 Tournament.
“I thought, wow, this is pretty good,” Hollingsworth added. “…We're going to be on TV, ESPN and everything else.”
Damjanac is rated as a 3-star center by 247Sports and is a native of Vienna, Austria. Although he is from Bosnia. After immigrating from Europe, he played a graduate season of basketball this year at Wilbraham & Monson Academy, where he became teammates with men's basketball coach Frank Martin's son Christian.
In WMA, Damjanak was coached by Mike Mannix. He worked under James “Bruiser” Flint as a student at the University of Massachusetts in his early 2000s and is also the head coach of the Commonwealth, a team comprised primarily of University of Massachusetts alumni and playing in TBT. .
Hollingsworth is also rated as a three-star recruit by 247Sports and is the younger brother of Jairee Roberts, a redshirt freshman linebacker at Massachusetts, and Jerry Roberts, who graduated from Massachusetts last year as the state's No. 6 tackler. . All three played football at Cathedral Prep in Erie, Pennsylvania. Hollingsworth, a 5-foot-9, 175-pound running back, rushed for 1,576 yards and 18 touchdowns this season, earning Class 5A All-State honors.
Head football coach Don Brown recruited Jerry to Arizona while serving as the Wildcats' defensive coordinator in 2021, and Jerry followed him to the University of Massachusetts last year for his final college football season.
Hollingsworth always wanted to continue playing on the same team as Jailey and liked Brown's family ties. Hollingsworth will join the Minutemen's roster after Roberts completes a graduate semester at Salisbury School in the fall of 2024. He's an independent who “loves” the University of Massachusetts competing in conference championships now that it's no longer in the FBS.
Damjanak will join the Minutemen next season, and coaches say they see similarities between his play and Josh Cohen, who was named first-team All-Atlantic 10 last week and has one season of eligibility remaining. He said that he was informed by.
“I thought it was going to be for the better,” Damjanak said. “If they switch, there has to be a good reason.”
