PHILADELPHIA - The Ivy League has announced the 16-member inaugural class of Legends of Ivy League Basketball, who have each contributed significantly to—and left a lasting impact on—their respective basketball programs and universities. 

Each member of the Ancient Eight is represented by one male and one female honoree, as selected by their university athletic department.

Four legends will be formally honored at halftime of each semifinal game at the 2017 Ivy League Men's and Women's Basketball Tournaments this Saturday, March 11 at The Palestra in Philadelphia.

A two-time Ivy League Player of the Year and four-time All-Ivy honoree, Ugonna Onyekwe helped the Quakers to Ivy League titles in three of his four campaigns from 1999-2003. As a freshman, he collected Ivy League Rookie of the Year accolades and was second-team All-Big 5. He returned to the All-Big 5 lists as a junior and senior, when he was named to the first team—coinciding with his back-to-back Ivy League Player of the Year selections and Associated Press All-America Honorable Mentions in 2001-02 and 2002-03.

Onyekwe graduated second on Penn’s all-time scoring list, with 1,762 points, and eighth on the all-time rebounding list with 759. He was part of two Penn teams that went unbeaten in Ivy League play—in 1999-2000 and 2002-03—and three Quaker squads that participated in NCAA Tournaments as the Ivy League’s automatic bid. In recognition of his Quaker career, Onyekwe was inducted into the Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Fame in 2015.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in economics and marketing, Onyekwe had an eight-year professional basketball career in Israel and Spain. He then embarked on a career in the music industry, co-founding Podini Media before earning a professional certificate in general music studies, production, composition and songwriting from Berklee College of Music. Onyekwe currently works in business development for Hits Songs Deconstructed, which is the number-one source for hit songwriting analysis and trends.

Diana Caramanico, Penn women’s basketball

The most dominant women’s basketball player in Penn history, Diana Caramanico’s 2,415 career points still stand as Ivy League and Big 5 records, and she remains the only men’s or women’s basketball player in Penn’s illustrious history to score more than 2,000 career points. The four-time first-team All-Ivy selection was the first player in Penn history to earn Ivy League Rookie of the Year, Philadelphia Big 5 Rookie of the Year and ECAC Rookie of the Year.

The accolades continued to pour in during Caramanico’s four-year Quaker career from 1997-2001, as she was a three-time Ivy League Player of the Year, three-time Big 5 Player of the Year and two-time Academic All-Ivy. During her senior campaign, Caramanico helped Penn become just the second team in League history to finish with a perfect 14-0 mark in Ivy play. The Quakers’ 22 overall wins that season was the program’s high-water mark until 2015-16. For her on-court efforts, Caramanico was inducted into the Philadelphia Big 5 Hall of Fame in 2007 and the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame in 2012.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, Caramanico played professional basketball for the Racing Club in France from 2001-03, leading France’s second division in scoring both years. She returned to Penn and earned her master’s degree in applied positive psychology in 2011. Now a sports psychologist, Caramanico launched her business Corpus Mensque with the mission of ensuring that (a) physical training is never done without developing productive habits of the mind and (b) resilience training for the mind is never done without addressing how it connects to enhance the physical skills.