Paris to give keynote address at COW commencement

The College of Wooster will celebrate the graduating Class of 2024 with its commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 11 at 1 p.m. in the Gault Recreation Center inside the Scot Center.

Lamont Paris, a 1996 COW grad and currently head men’s basketball coach at the University of South Carolina, will deliver the keynote address. The ceremony also will feature two speakers from the graduating class, Sukriti Chiripal and Tyler Hilbert.

In his third year as USC’s head coach, Paris was a 2024 finalist for the Werner Ladder Naismith Men’s College Coach of the Year and has been named Southeastern Conference Coach of the Year. Paris led his South Carolina team to a second-place SEC finish and a 13-5 conference record after seeing the team picked to finish last in the league in the preseason.

Inspired by his Wooster roots on the court, in the classroom and within the campus community, Paris has coached at the collegiate level since 1997. Paris’ coaching career started at Wooster, and he had stops at DePauw University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the University of Akron before joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant coach. At Wisconsin, Paris helped the Badgers to the national championship game in 2015 and two Final Four appearances.

Paris earned his first head coaching job at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where the team went 87-72 in five seasons including 65-29 during his final three. In his final season with the Mocs, Paris’ team finished 27-8, won the Southern Conference regular-season title and secured a spot in the NCAA Tournament on a deep buzzer-beating 3-pointer in overtime of the SoCon Tournament championship.

The Fighting Scots 1996 business economics alumnus, whose Independent Study was titled “Taxation of Sin: The Effects of Excise Taxes on the Demand Function of Cigarettes,” played on Wooster teams that went 84-25, advanced to three NCAA Division III Championships and won two North Coast Athletic Conference titles.

The 2024 commencement ceremony at the college also includes speakers Chiripal and Hilbert from the Class of 2024, selected based on academic performance and peer nominations.

President Anne McCall will preside over the ceremony. An invocation will be shared by Rev. Walter Clark, minister at Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Wayne County, and the benediction will be provided by Rev. David Rice, pastor at the First Presbyterian Church of Wooster and college trustee.

Families who cannot attend the event in person will be able to access a livestream of the ceremony. For more information and the full schedule of events, visit the commencement website at www.wooster.edu/commencement.