BATON ROUGE — LSU Head Coach John Brady announced on Thursday that junior college All-American Lamont Roland has signed a national letter-of-intent to join the LSU men’s basketball team for the 1999-2000 season.
The 6-4, 205-pound guard is from New Albany, Ind., where he attended New Albany High School. He played his freshman season at Ball State University before transferring to Barton County Community College in Great Bend, Kan. He will have two years of eligibility remaining with the Tigers.
This past season, Roland led Barton County to a 35-3 record as the Cougars advanced to the championship game of the National Junior College Athletic Association championship tournament. Roland averaged 24.2 points per game and 7.3 rebounds a game with 76 assists and 118 steals. He shot 42.9 percent from the field, 35.3 percent from three-point range and 67.1 percent from the free throw line in earning first-team All-American honors.
As a freshman at Ball State, he played in 19 games with seven starts with his best game a 28-point effort against Ohio University. He averaged 12.1 points per game while hitting 45 percent of his field goal attempts and 72 percent from the free throw line. The Cardinals had a 21-8 record, losing in the Mid-American Conference tournament finals and advancing to the first round of the National Invitation Tournament.
In high school at New Albany, Roland was fourth in the voting for the prestigious Indiana “Mr. Basketball” award, earning all-state honors while averaging 21.6 points, 7.6 rebounds and 3.2 assists per game.
Coach Brady had the following comments on Roland: “We are very excited about Lamont Roland choosing to further his basketball career at LSU. He provides our basketball program an experienced guard who not only can shoot the basketball and score, but he can also be creative off the dribble. He comes from a winning program at Barton County and that is also very important. His team reached the final game of the national junior college tournament and he was coached by an excellent staff of head coach Ryan Cross and assistant coach Ryan Wolfe. Our coaching staff is excited about adding a player of Lamont Roland’s ability to our basketball team.”
Roland is the second signee of the spring signing period, joining Torris Bright of Slidell. Ronald Dupree of Biloxi signed with the Tigers during the fall signing period.