Former Canton High basketball star Chris Robitaille finished his collegiate basketball career with a flourish at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Robitaille, a 6-foot-5 senior forward, led Eastern Connecticut (22-8) to its first ECAC Division III tournament championship with a 74-60 win over Westfield State in the title game. He averaged 20.0 points and 10.3 rebounds in the three-game ECAC Division III tournament.
Robitaille earned All-Little East honors and was named to the second team of the ECAC New England Division III All-New England team.
“Chris being honored by the ECAC is a tremendous recognition for all his hard work,” Eastern Connecticut head coach Bill Geitner said. “This year, Chris consistently demonstrated that he was one of the best forwards in the country. He has been a special ambassador for our basketball program.”
A four-year varsity letterman, Robitaille led the conference in field goal percentage (.573) for the second straight year and was first in the Little East in minutes (33.0), tied for second in rebounding (8.4), tied for fourth in scoring (14.6), tied for fifth in blocks (1.1) and tied for ninth in assists (2.3), all of those marks except field goal percentage representing season-highs in his career.
This season, Robitaille had 12 double-doubles, with five of them coming in the final seven games. He reached the 1,000-point mark in the final collegiate contest in the ECAC title game with a turnaround jump shot in the paint on his fifth attempt of the contest with 11:13 left in the first half.
Robitaille, the 27th ECSU player to reach that 1,000-point plateau in program history, finished the championship game with just seven points and three rebounds, but was instrumental in the team’s surge to the final. Robitaille had a career-high 31 points with 11 rebounds in the first-round win over Johnson & Wales and followed with 22 points and a career-high 17 rebounds (fifth double-double in six games) in Saturday’s semifinal victory over Anna Maria College.
He concluded his 109-game collegiate career with 1,003 points (9.2 ppg.) and 638 rebounds (5.9), 93 blocks and 136 assists and a .573 field goal percentage, ranking among the program’s all-time top 10 in rebounds and blocks and third in field goal percentage.
Robitaille and fellow seniors Joe Ives (Avon) and Tyler Hundley (Cheshire) paced the Warriors to four consecutive 20-win seasons in their careers – the winningest four-year period in the program’s 72-year history. That includes one Little East Conference regular-season and tournament crown, a berth in the NCAA Division III tournament Sweet 16 in 2012 and the No. 1 seed in the ECAC tournament in consecutive seasons.
Eastern played the final three weeks of the season with Ives, a senior point guard, who was lost for the season with a knee injury sustained against Wesleyan. Ives finished the season averaging 9.1 points and 3.3 rebounds a game. He had 56 assists and 54 turnovers in 19 games.
Gerry deSimas, Jr., is the editor and founder of The Collinsville Press. He is an award-winning writer and has been covering sports in Connecticut and New England for more than 40 years. He was inducted into the New England High School Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2018.
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