“Next Monday, it’s real,” Dayton coach Anthony Grant said last week after the team’s second exhibition game. “We’ve got a week now to see where we can kind of tighten the screws a little bit so that as we move forward we can be the best versions of ourselves. It’s a process. We haven’t arrived at anything. It’ll be a process throughout the year. The mindset is just to keep getting better.”
Dayton beat Penn State 78-62 and Bowling Green 90-59 in the preseason, boosting optimism around a team with many unknowns.
“I think we got better today,” Grant said after the Bowling Green game Monday. “I feel like we learned from the game. What I loved was the competitive character of our group.”
Grant, a 1987 UD alum, enters his ninth season with a record of 172-83. His teams have won one Atlantic 10 Conference championship (2020) and have earned two NCAA tournament berths (2020 and 2024) if you give UD credit for the berth it would have earned five years ago during the pandemic.
Last season, Dayton won 10 of its first 12 games, entering the top 25 for one week in December, but three straight losses early in Atlantic 10 Conference play spoiled its NCAA tournament hopes. It finished 23-11 overall and 12-6 in the A-10. After losing its first game in the A-10 tournament, it settled for a NIT bid for the fourth time in Grant’s tenure.
Prospects
The 2025-26 roster includes four returning players, six new transfers and two freshmen. Already, injuries and an off-court situation have hurt Dayton’s depth.
Freshman guard Jaron McKie will miss the season with a shoulder injury. Rutgers transfer Jordan Derkack, a senior guard, missed most of the offseason practices after undergoing foot surgery in June and did not play in either preseason game after suffering a fall in practice.
Sophomore guard Adam Njie Jr., a transfer from Iona, is practicing with the team but is not available for games at the moment.
Dayton announced Oct. 26 there are “potential eligibility concerns” with Njie. According to a report by Pat Forde, of Sports Illustrated, “Njie’s situation is connected to the ongoing investigation of gambling-related activity in college basketball.”
Even without those three players, there is excitement around the team because of the presence of returning starters Javon Bennett and Amaël L’Etang and two transfers who stood out in the preseason, Keonte Jones and De’Shayne Montgomery.
“I feel like the chemistry is there 100%,” Montgomery said. “I feel like everybody on the team buys into what coach is laying out for us. That’s really the big part. Everybody just wants to see everybody else win. The main goal is to win the A-10 championship. Everybody has got that stuck in their head.”
Bennett, a 5-foot-11 guard, averaged 10.0 points the last two seasons. L’Etang, a native of France who’s the tallest player in UD history at 7-1, averaged 7.1 points last season as a freshman.
Jones, a 6-6 forward, is playing his sixth season of college basketball. He spent his first three seasons at junior colleges and played the last two seasons at Cal State Northridge. He averaged 12.5 points in the two exhibition games.
Montgomery, a 6-4 guard, played one season at Mount St. Mary’s and one at Georgia, before transferring to Dayton in the spring. He averaged 11.5 points in the preseason.
Those players and the other members of the rotation, including Alter High School graduate Jacob Conner, will have to perform well early for Dayton to reach its goals in March. The Flyers play at Cincinnati in the second week of the season and at Marquette in the third week. A victory in either of those games would put Dayton on a path to building a resume worthy of a NCAA tournament at-large bid.
“It’s definitely important,” said Bennett, the lone remaining player on the team who played in the 2024 NCAA tournament. “We want to get a bid. Every game matters.”
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