Finally eligible for March Madness, Division I’s most unlikely success story out to prove it’s not done yet

When you think of Hawai’i, you think of idyllic beaches, beautiful oceans, lush forests and vibrant flowers. Mountains and volcanoes create stunning views and dramatic landscapes. Back in 1888, when it was officially the “Kingdom of Hawai’i” a magazine called Paradise of the Pacific helped introduce the eight islands to the world.

But when Aniwaniwa (pronounced: uh-NEE-wuh-nee-wuh) Tait-Jones arrived at University of Hawai’i at Hilo in 2020, he wasn’t prepared for one less-than-paradisiacal aspect. Situated on the windward side of the Big Island, Hilo is the rainiest city in the United States. Tait-Jones, having just arrived from New Zealand, didn’t have a car.

“I was getting stuck in the rain biking to the gym,” Tait-Jones recalls, laughing. “I’m at the gym and it’s pouring with rain, so it’s like ‘I gotta stay in the gym.'”

A youth rugby and soccer star, Tait-Jones didn’t pick up basketball until he was about 12, when his dad, Aaron, introduced him to the game, and even when he reached high school, he still only played recreationally. But those poor rec-leaguers never stood a chance, and a hobby became an obsession. Thanks to an unshakeable belief, a lot of hard work, a dedicated support system and lots and lots of airplane miles, Tait-Jones turned himself into a college basketball player. And if the story ended there, it’d be a hell of a story.

Instead, it’s become even more remarkable. Magical. Essentially a fairytale, though don’t misconstrue Tait-Jones’ current team as a Cinderella.

Tait-Jones is the unlikely star of one of the most unlikely stories in college basketball this season: The 26-4 UC San Diego Tritons, a team not only eligible for NCAA postseason play for the first time, but one ready to make plenty of noise, too.

Only four Division I teams have more wins this season. The Tritons are on an 11-game winning streak, tied for the second-longest in D-I. Ten of the 11 are by double digits. Advanced analytics sites rank the Tritons as a top-50 team. KenPom has UCSD 36th, on pace to be the best Big West team since 2004-2005. The NET has UCSD 35th, right next to two-time reigning champ UConn.

The Tritons boast six players with 1,000 career points, and their paths mirror UCSDs: from Division II to Division I with startling success. The journey takes place in faraway places like New Zealand, Austria and Argentina, but also in the little towns where the lights aren’t as bright but, as UCSD has found, the talent can still shine: Bethany, Oklahoma; Azusa, California; Boca Raton, Florida; and, yes, Hilo, Hawai’i. 

To fully understand how UCSD and its roster got here, we must go back nearly a decade.

In March 2016, UCSD made the third round of the Division II tournament. Two months later, students voted to incrementally raise student fees to support a move to Division I, and faculty approved it in January 2017. But in April 2017, the Big West shot the school down, and with the student vote set to became null and void in September 2018, per the San Diego Union-Tribune, it looked like the momentum would die out.

But Big West leaders kept talking, and in November 2017, UCSD and Cal State Bakersfield accepted bids to join the conference in 2020.

Cue the celebration — strike up the band, bring out the cheerleaders, hear the city’s dignitaries speak … it all happened.

Cue the mixed emotions for men’s basketball coach Eric Olen, too

“I love the Division II version of us too, you know,” Olen says. “We felt like we were kind of an emerging Division II powerhouse, and so I looked at that as like, ‘Man, we could really build this and make it sustainable and have all kinds of success.'”

The trepidation gave way to excitement.

“As a competitor, you always want to compete at the highest level and challenge yourself in those ways, so it was cool to kind of get that opportunity to move up and start over and see if we could build it again and sort of redo that process,” Olen said. “Honestly, the Division II years were super helpful in the experience of elevating our program.”

The Tritons finished their D-II tenure by winning the California Collegiate Athletic Association four straight times and making the tournament five straight times. It would have been six straight without the COVID-19 pandemic ending the 2019-20 season, when the Tritons went 30-1.

Then it was off to Division I, where the debut season was stop-and-start, fitting given how tough it was to even get into the Big West. The Tritons went 7-10 in 2020-21, when they had nearly as many games canceled as played. Two more losing seasons followed. But Olen liked the program’s direction, the process mirroring its D-II rise, even if the results weren’t.

The Tritons’ NCAA-mandated four-season transition period that prohibited them from postseason play was a big challenge, especially in a college sports landscape that has made patience largely outdated. But ahead of the 2023-24 season, Olen had to balance urgency and patience. He couldn’t wait to get final year of the transition period over with, but he wanted to assemble a team willing to embrace a postseason-less year to, hopefully, reap the rewards in 2024-25.

“That was one of the first things in the recruiting process that they told me, and that’s why I appreciate them so much, because they were straight up with me from the jump,” Tait-Jones said. “Last year, that was kind of like an adjustment period, you get used to the system. This year, now is when we really wanted to make a push and be really good.”

The “adjustment period” was much more than that. Led by Bryce Pope and buoyed by the arrivals of Tait-Jones, Hayden Gray and Tyler McGhie, the Tritons were near or at the top of the Big West standings almost all season, and a late-February win over UC Irvine gave the Tritons a tie for the league lead. They couldn’t win — or even play in — the conference tournament, but there was nothing prohibiting them from winning the regular-season title.

Then came a letdown loss at Bakersfield, and suddenly the prospect of no postseason and no regular-season title hit hard. The Tritons ended up dropping three of their final five games. 

“You could feel it,” Olen said. “It’s just the human nature. … We all know they all wanted to kind of rebound from that and keep fighting. … We just didn’t quite have the same edge down the stretch.”

Again, though, this is when the process and the patience proved rewarding. In early February of this season, the Tritons went to Irvine and beat the Anteaters to tie for the Big West lead.

Again, they went to Bakersfield next. This time, they pounded the Roadrunners by 19, a performance Olen called “wildly different” from the year before. Perhaps it’s that game that showed this team was special.

“Just being able to learn from that and not letting our urgency drop,” Gray says of the experience. “Coming into games that everyone thinks you should win, those are the ones that can get you, approaching every game in the same way.”

Or maybe it was the 75-73 win at Utah State in mid-December that grabbed some attention. The Tritons are one of just two teams to win in Logan this season, and it required a late comeback in one of the most raucous environments any of them had visited. McGhie never blinked, pouring in 26 points — each seemingly more cold-blooded than the last — with six 3-pointers.

“For me, I feel like that was pretty cool, you know, I feel like I’ve come a long way, just my basketball journey,” McGhie said. “But for the team, we knew we were going to be pretty good, but going to their place and winning is not something a lot of teams can do in the country. Just how together we were that game, we realized how great we can be.”

McGhie is a two-time transfer. After one year at Western Carolina, he spent two years at D-II Southern Nazarene, where he led the Thunder Cats in points both years and won conference player of the year in 2022-23.

“Mentally, Division II taught me how you got to play as hard as you can, no matter what,” McGhie said. “There were games where I had 20 people in the stands, so there’s no juice. You got to bring your own juice.”

McGhie knew “nothing” about USCD when the Tritons reached out but, like Tait-Jones, he quickly appreciated the staff’s transparency and desire to build a winner, even while in the transition period. And like Tait-Jones staying in the gym to avoid the rain and Olen putting his team in the CBI to subvert the NCAA-mandated ban (the CBI is not NCAA-sponsored) last year, McGhie used an inconvenience to make himself better. As a two-time transfer, he couldn’t play the first 10 games of last season. So he experimented with the “no-dip” 3-pointer, in which a shooter catches and released the ball without having to bring the it down into his shooting pocket. He knew in D-I, where the action is often quicker and the defenders are bigger and more athletic, those milliseconds matter.

It’s worked wonders. McGhie has 101 3s this season, tied for seventh in D-I, and the Tritons’ 11.0 per game is fourth in the country. Nearly half of the team’s shot attempts are 3s, another top-10 rate nationally, Five key rotation players shoot above 35% from 3, the Tritons’ five-out offense giving opponents fits. And when teams focus on McGhie, he’s willing to sacrifice for the greater good.

“We went six weeks or five weeks where he’s getting face guarded every night; they’re not letting him touch the basketball,” Olen said. “And we’re just asking him to be a screener and help other guys, you know, and he’s like, ‘All right, fine. I’ll score five. If we win, I don’t care.'”

UCSD’s players are willing to adapt physically, yes, but they’re also able to adapt mentally — a team that rarely beats itself. The Tritons commit turnovers at the seventh-lowest rate in the nation and force turnovers at the third-highest rate in the nation.

“Everybody talks about assist-to-turnover ratio, but I like steal-to-turnover better,” Olen said. “That’s not one that I think people talk about, and I don’t think it’s a common one either.”

Leading that charge is Gray, whose career is coming full circle. A San Diego native, Gray grew up mostly attending San Diego State games, but he won a high school state championship on UCSD’s home court. He went to D-II Azusa Pacific, where he faced off against Tait-Jones, for two years and became a defensive menace, improving both his effort and focus to ensure he got playing time.

Now, he leads Division I in steal rate.

“You have to have like that floor of physical attributes and athleticism,” Olen says. “He’s a wild competitor, and he has a ton of anticipation, and he sees things happen, and he’s just able to make plays that people don’t think he can make.”

That’s the unifying bond for these Tritons: that they may not pass the eye test, that they may not have gotten the offers they wanted, but, most importantly, that they can really play, and all they care about is winning.

“They resonate with me because a lot of those guys at Division II kind of have that a little bit of chip on their shoulder wanting to prove what they’re capable of,” Olen said. “They’re just winners, they buy into the team concept, and I think that’s as important as anything in today’s day and age.”

That’s where Olen and the staff’s extensive D-II history — what most would consider an impediment — very much comes into play. Dipping into the D-II waters as a D-I program can be risky, but Olen and Co. know the lay of the land as well as anyone, and better than almost everyone.

All six of the Tritons’ 1,000-point career scorers are D-II transfers, as are their top four scorers.

The Tritons’ rotation also features two D-I transfers — Chris Howell from St. Mary’s and Justin Rochelin from Oregon State — and another D-II transfer, Maximo Milovich from Biola, by way of Argentina. Talking to the Tritons, I hear Tait-Jones’ Kiwi quips, Gray’s California cool, McGhie’s Texas twang. (Talking to Aaron Tait-Jones, I’m greeted with “Kia ora,” the Māori “hello.”) How does this group, with a huge variety of life and basketball backgrounds, come together to this level of success?

“I think it’s on the coaches, man,” Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones said. “When you bring in like a group of just really good guys, I mean, it’s easy to gel. I love my teammates. Everyone’s just a good dude. No egos. We’re just like-minded guys.”

The Tritons can beat teams in many ways, led by a barrage of 3s and hounding defense. But if the shots aren’t falling, there’s Tait-Jones, who in many ways encapsulates the team best.

At 6-foot-6, Tait-Jones is a handful, a downhill-driving whirling dervish hellbent on getting to the rim. “Never settle” is his mindset, and he absolutely lives by it. With a soccer player’s nimble footwork, a rugby player’s toughness and a basketball addict’s work ethic, Tait-Jones leads the nation in free throw attempts and is second in free throws made. When it comes to Win Shares, which “attempts to divvy up credit for team success to the individuals on the team,” Tait-Jones is second in the nation.

“To be fair he’s gotten to a level that I’d I never projected him to be,” Olen says frankly, adding the same goes for McGhie and Gray.

But these are no accidents. Tait-Jones is a testament to that. As he went all-in on basketball, his family followed, moving from Auckland, in the north of New Zealand’s North Island, to Wellington, in the south. There, he started working six days a week with Kenny McFadden, a childhood friend of Magic Johnson and a former Washington State player who was voted the second-best player in New Zealand National Basketball League history. He dedicated his post-playing days to helping kids like Tait-Jones.

Tait-Jones thanks McFadden, who died in 2022 (Tait-Jones was a pallbearer), over and over again. After all, McFadden instilled the “never settle” mindset and guided Tait-Jones toward college ball, rather than a career in New Zealand. After a year at SPIRE Academy in Ohio didn’t yield any scholarships for Tait-Jones, McFadden vouched for his pupil to Kaniela Aiona, who had taken over at Hilo in May 2020. Very late in the recruiting cycle — we’re talking weeks before school started — Tait-Jones committed.

Now, he’s on the precipice of leading UCSD to its first March Madness. Aaron and the rest of the family have been there every step. At 4 p.m. on Fridays in New Zealand (7 p.m. Thursday Pacific Time), when most people are wrapping up work, Aaron and his friends are long gone, at a friend’s house, beers in hand, for watch parties scheduled via Facebook Messenger. They hope their VPN can connect to ESPN+ or other broadcasts. If not, they’ll try UCSD’s student-run radio broadcast. Sometimes they resort to simply tracking box scores. Aaron runs an incredibly detailed YouTube highlight page so those who can’t catch it live can stay abreast.

But they won’t be subject to the whims of finicky Internet this March. Aaron is stateside, as are Aniwaniwa’s uncle, fiancée, sister and best friend from home. His mom, another sister and a brother-in-law arrive today for tomorrow’s Senior Night, and more friends and family will be at the Big West Tournament next week.

They’ll be in for quite a scene, especially if the Tritons can cap it off with a title to guarantee their first D-I NCAA Tournament berth in their first year eligible, a wild success story whose characters have taken the roads less traveled.

When given one word to describe each of his stars, Olen says “warrior” for Tait-Jones.

McGhie? “Bucket.” Gray? “Winner.”

This season?

“Unfinished.”

And for the first time in six years, there’s no end date in sight, either.