The Richmond Spiders men’s basketball team announced on Apr. 25 that guards Derin Saran and Dominick Stewart will transfer to the program and play in the 2026-27 season.
The addition of Saran and Stewart is part of a broader effort by Richmond to strengthen its roster with experienced players ahead of the upcoming college basketball season.
Saran, a 6-foot-5 guard from Istanbul, Turkey, played last season at UC Irvine where he started all 35 games as a redshirt sophomore. He averaged 11.5 points, 5.3 rebounds, and 3.4 assists per game while helping lead UC Irvine to a Big West regular season title with a record of 23-12. He was named Honorable Mention All-Big West and was one of only twenty-two Division I players to average at least those statistics last year. In his freshman year at UC Irvine during the 2023-24 season, Saran scored an average of 10.1 points per game for an Anteaters team that finished first in their conference during the regular season.
Saran’s career also includes time at Stanford where he received a redshirt after appearing in five games during the 2024-25 campaign before returning to UC Irvine for another stint prior to transferring to Richmond. He attended The Asheville School in North Carolina for high school, earning three conference championships and being named Western North Carolina Player of the Year in 2023.
Stewart joins from Penn State after appearing in all thirty-two games last year with twenty-four starts as a sophomore, averaging 6.6 points and shooting nearly thirty-five percent from three-point range—third best on his team. As a freshman in the previous year he played twenty-four games averaging just under three points per contest. Coming out of Southern California Academy as a prep player, Stewart was rated as the number thirty-three combo guard nationally by recruiting service 247Sports.
With these additions, Saran and Stewart become the fifth and sixth members added through transfer this offseason by Richmond alongside Jamie Kaiser Jr., Amon Dörries, Jack McCaffery, and Andrew Ball.
