By Gio Annatelli – STAFF WRITER

Freshmen play a pivotal role in the future of any program. They can bring life and a fresh face to a losing team or they can keep the winning tradition going until graduation. This year, Hofstra has a freshman that can bring the Pride to the next step: a championship.

The most influential freshman who will have the biggest impact on the future of a program is Rokas Gustys of the men’s basketball team. I believe Gustys will be the future of the men’s basketball team.

Hailing all the way from Kaunas, Lithuania, we have the 6’9” big man Rokas Gustys. Before coming to Hofstra, Gustys played at Virginia’s Oak Hill Academy for two years, which fields an amazing team every year. Oak Hill has produced countless NBA players and top college basketball recruits, so Gustys has to be pretty good to have gone there.

As a senior, he led the team in rebounds per game (9) and field goal percentage (62 percent), while also averaging 12 points per game. He was a member of the Lithuania U-18 and -19 National Teams which placed second in the 2012 European Championship and third at the World Championship. Rokas Gustys seems to have been born a winner.

At Hofstra, he has played in 27 games and started in five of those contests. He averaged around 17 minutes a game with having a stat line of 5.2 PPG, 5.7 RPG, 0.8 APG, 0.8 SPG and 0.4 BPG. He shot 57 percent from the field and 42 percent from the free-throw line. Gustys was third on the team in field goal percentage, first in rebounds per game, and first in offensive rebounds per game.

He could’ve had much better numbers had a hamstring injury not held him out of seven of the Pride’s contests. Rokas has shown flashes of greatness this season, with his first career double-double against Delaware in November, and the hot streak he was on throughout the conference tournament, and against Vermont in the CBI. It was a good time to be on a hot streak, as those were high-pressure games, under which he remained cool.   

If Rokas Gustys decides to stick with Hofstra through his senior year, the Pride could easily field a team that can win a conference championship and go to the NCAA tournament, all behind the help of Gustys.

He will be called upon greatly in the next couple of years, as starting center Moussa Kone will be graduating and transfer center Ibrahim Djambo will be graduating going into Gustys’ junior season. It also doesn’t seem as if he will ever lose his pivotal role on the team, as Coach Mihalich seemed to favor Rokas over fellow freshman center Andre Walker, who only played in 17 contests opposed to Gustys’ 27.

If he continues to progress like he has, the Hofstra Pride men’s basketball team will be Rokas Gustys’s team by the time he hits his junior year.