UAB Fans To Get First Look At New Roster When Blazers Take On Vanderbilt

By Steve Irvine

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - October 23, 2025

The Bartow Arena scoreboard will be working on Thursday night when the UAB plays a men’s basketball exhibition game against Vanderbilt. For UAB head coach Andy Kennedy, though, the game is about much more than what the final score tells us.

“Any time you play, you want to win, but that's not the bottom line here,” Kennedy said. “The bottom line is to try to get some guys some experience and for us to see what's in this team's best interest moving forward. While winning would be superb, that's the goal.”

For the first time in his career, and possibly not the last, Kennedy is fielding a roster with no returning scholarship minutes. All 12 scholarship players are in their first season at UAB. Only five of those players – true freshmen Salim London and Lance Carr and junior college transfers Evan Chatman, Joao Das Chagas and Ari Gooch – have never played in a Division I game. But all 12 are new to this program.

So rosters will be needed for the fans coming to Bartow Arena Thursday night for a game that will tip off at 6:30.

Obviously, Kennedy knows the names of his players and has learned a ton about them since they reported to campus in June. But he still has a lot to learn about this group.

“Number one, I need to see how we play under the lights,” Kennedy said. “(Number two), it's the first time that we've played someone other than ourselves as a group, which is huge. Number three, we've done some intrasquad games. You can learn from intrasquads, but you can only learn so much because everybody plays. You know, the power of the bench I think sometimes is a great motivator. We can tell guys, hey, you got to do this, you got to do this, you got to do this. But then they're still practicing for two hours every day. So I think, you know, for the first time we're working in 200-man minutes. That’s how many man minutes we have available and they’re all competing for them.”

Kennedy said his hope is to play all 12 scholarship players. But he’s also working toward perfecting a rotation.

“You can play eight pretty steadily and you can get to nine,” Kennedy said. “Getting to 10 is not easy because it's hard to get to more than 6 guards. You can get to four bigs, but it's really, really difficult to get to that sixth, seventh guard. We need some separation because I've got a lot of guards that are right there. I've got to do my best to give them all an opportunity to show, but I can't. Sometimes you can play too many and nobody finds a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm to the game and again, I'm just going into it open-minded. Hopefully it'll teach me some things that I can help them with moving forward.”

The backcourt begins with Ahmad Robinson, who appears to have a solid hold on the starting point guard spot. Chance Westry and Jacob Meyer look to be solidly in the rotation, Dayjaun Anderson needs to shoot the ball well for UAB to reach its offensive potential and London should have an immediate role. Quaran McPherson and Gooch are also pushing to get in the rotation.

In the frontcourt, KyeRon Lindsay-Martin, Daniel Rivera and Chatman lead the way with Das Chagas and Lance Carr also competing for minutes.

What needs to be figured out is where the Blazers go when they need a bucket in a big situation.

“I don't know where we would go with the ball right now,” Kennedy said. “As I said before, I think this team's got a chance to have good balance. I think we've got a number of guys that can be right there in that 9 to 14 range, so I think that gives us some versatility. But as it relates to end of clock, where are we going with the ball? Thursday we have an opportunity to figure that out. I've got some ideas, but I'm not sure yet where we'll go.”

Vanderbilt already played its first exhibition game. The Commodores hosted Virginia in a 48-minute scrimmage last Wednesday. The Commodores won the game, 95-87, but no official stats were released. Vanderbilt played in the NCAA Tournament last season and Kennedy said he believes the Commodores are a tournament caliber team once again.

A portion of the ticket proceeds for Thursday’s game, as well as next Wednesday’s Bartow Arena visit from Western Kentucky, will go toward UAB’s revenue sharing initiative for men’s basketball.