We already caught you up on the new Hoyas over the summer in our Kenner League recaps, but with Midnight Madness around the corner, we figured it was time for an updated basketball cheat sheet.

Everybody Loves Austin

Publication after publication has picked senior guard Austin Freeman as the favorite for Big East Player of the Year and Coach John Thompson III isn’t tempering those expectations:

“Austin Freeman should be the Preseason Player of the Year in the Big East,” Thompson told MSG.com. “And I think, he’ll be the Player of the Year at the end of the season.”

Freeman, who is also on the preseason Wooden Award watch list, is joined by senior guard Chris Wright on Sports Illustrated‘s Naismith Award preseason watch list and Rival‘s preseason top 50 list.

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The working group hopes to include diversity discussion in NSO

In a campuswide e-mail yesterday evening, the Office of the Provost announced that the Admissions and Recruitment Working Group has put together a draft proposal for changes to Georgetown’s recruitment process.

The changes, which are meant to encourage a more diverse student body, are not official, and the “plan for implementation” of any changes will not arrive until January 2010, after community comment. However, the e-mail, signed by Provost James O’Donnell and Vice President for Institutional Diversity and Equity Rosemary Kilkenny, did indicate that the suggestions would be “immensely helpful” to the University’s ongoing recruitment of the Class of 2014.

Suggestions for altering the admissions and recruitment process, according to the nineteen-page working group report (PDF) provided by link in the e-mail, include, among other things:

• Prominently advertising the 1,789 new scholarships that Georgetown will be adding to encourage need-blind admissions over the next five years to potential students.
• Looking into strategies that will increase the likelihood that an accepted student from an underrepresented group will attend Georgetown
• Increasing the diversity of Blue and Gray tour guides and their knowledge of diversity issues and clubs on campus.
• Including imagery on Georgetown’s redesigned website that highlights campus diversity.
• Including a required essay prompt that invites students to discuss how their background or life experience would enrich Georgetown on applications.

These proposed changes are aimed at increasing campus diversity and cross-cultural engagement. The report notes that relative to peer universities, Georgetown has a very low attendance yield among its accepted minority applicants.

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