Exeter's Josh Morissette transferring to Saint Anselm
Apr. 20—Josh Morissette has attended a fair number of Saint Anselm College men's basketball games during his lifetime, and it looks like next season he'll be going to a lot more.
After spending his freshman season at Wofford College, Morissette, an Exeter resident, announced on his Twitter account last week that he was transferring to Saint Anselm, one of the top Division II programs in the country.
Morissette played in 15 games for Wofford last season — he averaged 5.9 minutes per game — and entered the NCAA transfer portal on March 13.
"I think the thought of transferring kind of flowed during the season, but I got away from it just because I knew there was a job that had to be done," Morissette said. "We had a lot of games left and we had to win some games, so I stopped thinking about it until after we lost to Chattanooga in the (Southern Conference) semis.
"I probably took three days after the season to really decide what I wanted for the future, and decided what would be best for me is to enter the portal and try to come closer to home.
"A lot of NE10 schools reached out to me. BU and Stonehill reached out to me, so I still had Division I looks when I was in the portal. My process was pretty easy. BU and Saint A's were the two I was really interested in.
"I've known Coach Dickson (Saint Anselm coach Keith Dickson) for a while. I went to a lot of Saint A's basketball games growing up with my family, so I kind of knew the program. If they didn't reach out to me I definitely would have had somebody reach out to them to see if they had any interest just because that was a place I wanted to look at and I could see myself being at."
Morissette spent two years at Exeter High School before he transferred to nearby Phillips Exeter Academy, where he played both basketball and baseball. He helped Exeter win the NHIAA Division I basketball championship as a sophomore.
HIs freshman season at Wofford, which is in Spartanburg, South Carolina, included a turbulent coaching situation. Jay McAuley resigned as Wofford's head coach in December after reportedly taking a forced leave of absence earlier that month. Paul Hemrick, the assistant coach who recruited Morissette, left Wofford to join the UNC-Wilmington staff following the 2023 season.
"The coaching situation was a difficult situation here this year, but I definitely did miss home," Morissette said. "I've enjoyed seeing a different part of the country that I've never been to and I've enjoyed being on my own, but I've missed that support from my family at games — and the support from Exeter, the community that I grew up in that played a huge role in the first 19 years of my life. I just missed having that support system behind me."
Morisette said Saint Anselm was the only Division II school he considered coming out of Phillips Exeter, but the lure of playing Division I basketball was too strong. The University of New Hampshire was another local school he strongly considered.
"I would definitely say that UNH was a close second coming out of high school," Morissette said. "That was a very hard phone call to make to Coach Herrion (former UNH coach Bill Herrion) to tell him that I committed somewhere else."
UNH didn't renew Herrion's contract after the 2022-23 season and, with no head coach in place until early April — the school hired Nathan Davis — the possibility of Morissette landing in Durham was remote.
"It's definitely a 'What If' question and you wonder about that, because I definitely would have looked at them," Morissette said. "I feel like I'm going to a place that might fit me even better style-wise, but I wonder if I would have heard from UNH if the coaching situation didn't go down the way it did there."
