Jasper leader returning for fifth season

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RaShawn Stores was sitting home alone recently when the phone rang. It was Steve Masiello, his Manhattan College basketball coach, and he had some news both Stores and Masiello had been waiting on for quite some time.

The NCAA had approved Manhattan’s petition for a waiver for a fifth season for Stores to play at Manhattan and the call went like this.

“I got the news first and I called him up and said, ‘You better get your [butt] on a diet because we’re going to need to get you in shape for next year,’” Masiello said. “Then we both just started laughing. He was really exciting about it.”

And just like that, some three months before the 2015-16 college basketball season is set to tip off, the Manhattan Jaspers already had posted a huge victory.

Stores is the engine that helped lead Manhattan to back-to-back Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) championships as well as two straight NCAA Tournament appearances the past two seasons. Having him return for a fifth season could go a long way toward a possible Jaspers “Three-Peat.” But there were a lot of anxious moments for both Stores and Masiello while the pair waited on the NCAA’s ruling.

“Right after the season is when we applied [for the waiver],” Masiello said. “Our season ended in late March and we started to gather information [on Stores for the NCAA] in April. I thought it was one of those things where there really wasn’t a precedent for it, where there was a case and we could point to and say, ‘Hey, this could happen.’ So that was a little scary in that sense.”

Stores, who led the MAAC last season in assist-to-turnover ratio (2.9) and ranked fifth in the conference in three-point shooting percentage (.398), sat out his first season at Manhattan due to NCAA eligibility requirements. But a player can regain a year of eligibility if he takes care of business in the classroom over the rest of his time in school. 

Stores did just that, graduating last spring with a degree in business management. Now he will play this season as a graduate student and he is relishing the opportunity to return to Riverdale for one more season.

RaShawn Stores, Steve Masiello, Manhattan College, Jaspers, basketball, NCAA, MAAC, fifth season, Sean Brennan
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