Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan
Thank you, and I just want to welcome Coach Christian. I know he is going to be warmly welcomed at Siena College, but I want to assure him that he is going to be warmly welcomed by a community here in the City of Albany, and in the Capital Region, that gets behind Siena, that really feels passionately about this team, that are some of the most dedicated fans that you'll ever meet, and who are so grateful to have someone of your caliber come here, coach these young men, and create that excitement. That opportunity, particularly for our young people, who are excited about basketball, who are looking for role models, and who really look to Siena and they fulfill a really important role in our community. So, you are joining the Siena family which is a great family, but you're also joining a family here in Albany and here in the Capital Region, and I just want to welcome you and your family and congratulate you and wish you the best of luck.

Siena College President Br. F. Edward Coughlin, O.F.M., Ph.D.
Welcome everyone, as you know, I'm rather new to the Capital Region so I am only learning that incredible passion that Siena has for its basketball team but indeed the whole city. The intense interest over the past few weeks about our search for a new coach has been overwhelming and amazing to me. Every time I talk to somebody they think `is that the coach?' I'm delighted though to welcome Jamion and his family. I think we have a wonderful opportunity to welcome him. We certainly appreciate the sacrifice that Mount St. Mary's is making, giving us a coach that has been very successful there, very well appreciated, and we are delighted to welcome to Albany. We welcome you here, it's a very exciting opportunity for us, and I think your record and the recommendations we received about you as a coach, as a man who really is about building relationships with your players and working with your players, and building a team, and a family within the larger family are things that are at the very heart what I believe Siena College is all about and our basketball program. I think it brings a lot of honor and praise to us as coach will be speaking next week to the Knight Commission about college athletics, so I think it speaks to the kind of regard the athletic community has for Jamion in terms of his contribution as a coach and a young coach, and potentially he has to lead Siena to hopefully in great victories and energize the Capital Region. We welcome you Jamion, fiancé Allie, and son Jacoy. It's great to have you with us here today.

Siena College Vice President and Director of Athletics John D'Argenio
Good afternoon everybody, thank you for taking some time out of your day to come out. I want to start off with some thank yous. Obviously, thank you to Brother Ed for allowing us to go on a very efficient search to find the best candidate for this job. The Chairman of our Board of Trustees is here today, Howard, I want to thank him for his leadership, not only through this search but also throughout the year. Obviously, I'd like to thank the mayor for being here with us today, to take time out of her schedule at the last minute means a lot to us, thank you. Quick thank you, when you pull an event like this together in probably what Mike, six hours, you also thank the communications team Mike Demos and Catherine Prince in athletic communications and Jason Rich, Kelly O'Donnell, Andy Murphy from College communications and marketing, we really appreciate your support and efforts to pull this off. It's been really 13 days since we started on this search at Siena for men's basketball, and just eight days since we first met in person with Jamion Christian, and during that short period of time there were a number of people who had a genuine interest to lead Siena College Basketball and really that was very humbling to not only me, but to the department and the College and area as well. It's a testament to our past coaches, players, current players, this area, and everybody in the community that people would have such a high interest and a high regard for the position and the Siena College Men's Basketball program. I think it's a testament to the strength and vibrancy, values, and traditions in Siena College's Franciscan Tradition. We had serious interest from a dozen head coaches, several assistant coaches and even people from the NBA ranks. So the quality of the pool demanded an efficient and tight process. And that's where my thanks to Brother Ed and Howard and Ken Raymond and our Board of Trustees comes in for allowing us to do that. Jamion was the first person we met with, and obviously he's here today so he made a lasting impression in the meeting. He was offered the position yesterday morning, and we negotiated during the day yesterday to an agreement on what I think is going to be a great partnership and a great collaboration. During that initial visit, he laid out a great strategic vision about recruiting, about developing relationships with players and about making Siena a MAAC Championship team again, and bringing more people to the Times Union Center. His ability to develop teams' sustained success is obvious from what he did at Mount Saint Mary's with two NCAA Tournament appearances, plays an up-tempo exciting style of play which I know everyone here will appreciate, especially the team. His ability to not just develop players but people is what impressed us the most about him, and his character and his desire to instill that character and values in young people. He respects their traditions of the game, of Siena College, and the people that helped establish that. So we are going to be treated to the pleasure of a young, motivated head coach who is a teacher and a collaborator, and Siena College has a great young man that is going to respect our traditions and values and help lead these guys and future Siena Saints to championships and to the good lives. I want to welcome Jamion, his fiancé Allie, and his son Jacoy to Siena College.

Siena College Men's Basketball Head Coach Jamion Christian
Well, this is an exciting day for our family. Our mayor is sitting up here. I want to give a special thanks to John. I'll be honest with you, I never knew this opportunity would be there for me. I was really excited the day you guys reached out to me for a chance to coach these guys here, and just to give me an opportunity to continue with my passion to help lead young people and help them become the best versions of themselves, and we're going to get to work on that right away. Mayor, thank you for welcoming me to Albany. I know my family is really excited to get up here and get immersed into the culture here and to learn all the little nuance of the city and the surrounding area so I wanted to say thank you. Brother Ed, thank you for spending time with us and giving us a commitment to basketball and what we are trying to do here. I look forward to having a great partnership with you as well and making sure we get you into that NCAA Tournament a couple of times so you can show your true form and show what a great celebrator you are. With that said, thank you to our team. I had a chance to meet with these guys today, and you can just see in their eyes the passion for turning this program around and getting right back to the top. You know, it won't change unless the people in the room want it to change, and one of the things with the guys on the roster, they have a great passion for making a change. We're so excited to be here. Part of the excitement when you look at it, honestly, and you look at the tradition and Mount Saint Mary's has a great basketball tradition, Siena has a great basketball tradition. Those are things that if you are a coach and you have a passion and enthusiasm to achieve greatness, you want to find a place that has tradition. The history gives you an idea of what you can achieve, but it also gives you a foundation and I think that foundation is important for everyone to see and know we're coming at you and we are in attack mode. We are going to do that from day one. I told these guys today, we are going to be the best-conditioned team in the country, but we're not going to do it before 10 a.m., right guys? We're going to make sure we are ready to go. Our style of play is going to be really simple. Everything is going to be player-centric. Each one of these guys has a heart inside of him and they grew up with a dream to be the best basketball player they can be and dream to play in the NCAA Tournament and to play meaningful games. We have an obligation as a coaching staff, as a family, as a College to do everything we can to help them fulfill that dream and we are going to get to work on that right away. It's going to be tough, there's going to be some moments when you guys are going to say `man, this is the hardest thing I have ever done', but in those moments when we have a chance to rejoice, you're going to have so much fun with one another. You are going to bond together as a unit and as a team, and with our College and that will be unprecedented on this earth and that's going to be very important for us. I want to make sure I also take time to thank my fiancé, Allie, we're getting married on Saturday, so we all know who the real MVP is of this stage here. She is tremendous and so supportive over the years, and she's ready for this challenge as well, and we are going to attack this thing as a family. My son, Jacoy, who you guys will get to know is so patient. He's 5 ¾ and the ¾ is apparently really important because the ¾ shows the growth he's had since his fifth birthday apparently, and how close he is to six, and we're really proud of him as well. In closing, I just want everyone here to know we're going to need a lot of people to jump on board. My pledge to you is that we're going to have the most enthusiasm. I'm going to lead our program with the most enthusiasm of any head coach you've ever seen, and my job is to get that enthusiasm to live out in our players every single day. The way they live their life has to be with enthusiasm. The way they go to classes with enthusiasm. We have to learn to do the tough stuff and to love doing it, because the better part of us is on that other side and we're going to be impactful in our community. Not just through basketball, but in other ways that we are going to continue to grow. So I am excited to be your head coach, be the person that is going to sit out in front of you guys, and I am excited that I'm going to be the guy that's going to push you to be the very best and to be excited because we are going to turn this page of Siena Basketball and we're going to achieve our own set of history, and we're going to set a new standard that has not been seen before. Thank you.

Media Questions
Mark Singelais, Albany Times Union
Q: Can you tell us what Mayhem is and why it is important to you? A: Mayhem is just all about making our opponents feel uncomfortable. Trying to push them to a point of no return, making sure that when we play the game in a tournament, they don't want to play us again. It's about us having a ton of enthusiasm for the day and enthusiasm for being great teammates. Again, the nuts and bolts are we're going to press and trap and shoot a ton of three's. So these guys are all going to love that right now, but they're not going to love that when we have conditioning. Because then we have to be the most conditioned team in the country, but it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm excited to bring Mayhem here. It's going to be something that is exciting when you look at a place that has so many season ticket holders and has a great passion for basketball, I just think it's a great mix to put together and it's going to make this place a tough place for opposing teams to come visit.