1987-88 UMass Lowell men's basketball team photo

50th Anniversary Celebration: The Legacy That Built Lowell Basketball

2/27/2026 11:15:00 AM

Prior to the merger of Lowell State and Lowell Tech, both campuses featured proud and storied men’s basketball programs. Fifty years ago, when those two schools became one, they brought their individual legacies with them, looking to build on what had been done in the past and soar higher together.

The first teams laid the building blocks with belief, connection and a willingness to compete, but when head coach Don Doucette arrived on campus ahead of Lowell’s eighth post-merger season in 1983, the program was still in search of its first winning season.

Doucette began putting in the work to build the program from the ground up and inspired his athletes to do the same.

“That transition that we went through of putting conditioning and lifting programs in place, they by and large hated most of it, but they were all things I thought were necessary to build a program and have success," stated Doucette.

The effect of Doucette’s changes could be felt in his very first campaign, as the team achieved its first ever winning season in program history with a 15-12 record in 1983-84. The following year, he signed a special class that would change the trajectory of Lowell basketball forever.

“They all came from hard-nosed programs with tough and disciplined coaches,” explained Doucette. “It was part of our recruiting philosophy to get guys like that because they understood the commitment and hard work that was going to be needed.”

Doucette ended up starting four freshmen from that class, including future Hall of Famer Bobby Licare ’88, who averaged 36 minutes per game as a rookie.

“They were getting a tremendous amount of experience and taking the necessary steps,” commented Doucette. “It didn’t look like it in the overall record, but we were on our way.”

Bill Herenda ’88, who was also a member of that first recruiting class and a vital piece off the bench for the squad, explained that by his senior year, the team truly believed they could go far.

“Even though Lowell had never made it to the tournament, we definitely believed that we could get there and that we belonged there,” commented Herenda.

A decisive win at Southern Connecticut in late February sparked a 10-game winning streak, as the team would roll to the New England Collegiate Conference (NECC) Championship by defeating the fifth-ranked team in the country, New Haven, to earn a bid to the NCAA Division II Tournament for the first time.

“We talked about all the hardship we went through to get to that point and how it was in our hands and no one was going to take that away from us,” remembered Doucette. “The team believed that.”

In the national championship game against Alaska-Anchorage, Lowell played with the same defensive intensity that it played with every day.

“Doucette and his staff, they just drilled the defensive principles into us in a major way,” recalled Herenda. “This was an improbable run that had never occurred on our campus. The coaching staff did a great job keeping us humble and focused.”

After hoisting Coach Doucette onto their shoulders in a rowdy on-court celebration, the reality of the national championship sunk in during the quiet moments the team shared together later.

“It sunk in that we were national champions and it was amazing,” said Herenda. “It’s difficult to describe that feeling. It was nice to share it together as a team that night. There were also a number of events on and off campus afterwards, so the community really embraced us.”

Head Coach Don Doucette celebrating 1988 national championship on the shoulders of players

Don Doucette holding 1988 NCAA Tournament Trophy

The national championship team and its principles of sacrifice, grit and family inspired the generations that followed to aspire for greatness, paving the way for Elad Inbar ’04 and his teammates to sweep the Northeast 10 Conference regular-season and tournament titles in back-to-back seasons.

“I was so excited to be there. It felt like a second home to me,” the Israel native said about coming to Lowell.

Inbar and a core Israeli contingent, under the direction of new head coach Ken Barer, led UMass Lowell to four straight 20-win seasons and NCAA Tournament appearances.

“Ken Barer demanded so much from us,” commented Inbar. “He was very on point all the time, no lapses with him. That was the missing ingredient we needed to do the hard work. Everybody connected our second year together when he came in. We were very focused on every play, every workout, every drill. That’s what made us a great team.”

With the city of Lowell rallying around them, UMass Lowell advanced all the way to the NCAA Elite 8 in both 2003 and 2004, putting the university back in the national spotlight just as Doucette’s squad had done previously.

“When I first came to Lowell, the gym was kind of empty, but when we played junior and senior year, the gym was full,” Inbar recalled. “I know that we made a great contribution to the Lowell basketball program.”

Those contributions and the ones that came before positioned Kerry Weldon ’15 and his teammates to continue to take the program to new heights, making the jump to NCAA Division I status ahead of the 2013-14 season.

“As a team, we all looked at each other and said, ‘Alright, what’s next?’” Weldon reminisced about the Division I announcement. “From the beginning it was proving a point to the rest of the teams in the Northeast 10 that we deserved to be here and to the rest of the America East that they weren’t just going to run all over us.”

The veteran team, despite being in an unfamiliar landscape, knew the only way to be successful in basketball was to do it together.

“The team actually came together more than any other year because it was just an uphill battle all the way through,” Weldon stated. “We’re playing Division I, we’re traveling a lot more, there is a lot more wear and tear on the group. It’s uncharted territory for most people on the team and we just had to figure out how we were going to get through it.”

The River Hawks made their presence known in their very first Division I outing, setting the stage for years to come.

“Going into that game, Coach Duquette said, ‘What do we have to lose? Let’s give it all we got and see what we can do,” recalled Weldon. “We got in the game and being tied with Michigan at halftime, we all were looking at each other like, ‘what did we just do,’” joked Weldon. “So we knew if this is what we were capable of doing now, just imagine what we could do when we really got the ball rolling.”

Now 13 years into the Division I journey and despite the landscape of the sport and college athletics as a whole continuing to change, the current River Hawks stand on the shoulders of these giants that came before them. Those that built the program from the ground up and found success at every level.

“Now being able to come back and see the energy from the crowd at games and how many more people are invested in the program, it makes me feel like we were part of the foundation,” Weldon concluded. “It makes me proud to see where the program is going.”

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