When Greg Kamansky played at UC San Diego in the 1980s, resources were slim. The school provided a jock strap in the preseason and a $3 per diem on the road, which the Tritons stretched by buying packs of hot dogs and eating them raw.
UC San Diego played for four decades in the NCAA’s Division III, where schools do not provide athletic scholarships, and after transitioning in 2000 to Division II, the athletic department tried for years to continue operating like a D-III outfit. Now the Tritons, in their first season eligible for the NCAA Tournament five years after moving to Division I, are the outright Big West Conference champions and will have a strong case for making the field of 68 even if they don’t claim the automatic bid given to the conference tournament winner, a rare position for a mid-major conference that hasn’t sent two teams to the tourney in 20 years.
The Tritons, currently 28-4 overall, are an outlier among teams that have made the transition from Division II. Their No. 35 NET ranking is the highest of any true mid-major in Division I and far ahead of the three other schools who moved from D-II to D-I in 2020: Bellarmine (No. 352), Utah Tech (No. 312) and Tarleton State (No. 306). Schools that make the jump are not eligible for NCAA postseason play for their first four seasons (the rules changed early in 2025 to shorten the reclassification period to three years) and are unable to receive money from the NCAA Tournament or any other NCAA revenue stream during the transition, a rule created to dissuade D-II schools from trying their luck at the top level without sufficient resources. Northern Kentucky was the last Division I newcomer to make the tournament on its first try, in 2017.
Kamansky, now the coach at D-II Cal Poly Pomona, hasn’t watched a game this season but marvels at how far his alma mater has come, and he’s “not surprised at all” that head coach Eric Olen has UCSD in the mix for a March Madness moment. And Kamansky has played a role in the success of the program: Olen hired away a Cal Poly Pomona assistant to install the matchup zone defense with which Kamansky won a D-II national championship in 2010.
Olen’s personnel moves, X’s and O’s and roster-building approach all line up with the underlying success story of a program that has always had to live on the margins: ingenuity by necessity.
GO DEEPER
Cinderella without a slipper: The best college basketball story you won’t hear about in March
Eric Olen is in his 21st season with the Tritons: nine as an assistant, 12 as head coach. (Derrick Tuskan / UC San Diego)
UC San Diego is one of the top public schools in America (rated No. 6 by US News and World Report), and its admission standards do not bend for athletics. Olen has had recruiting targets who could not qualify at UCSD and ended up playing in the Ivy League.
By the time Olen was elevated from assistant to head coach in 2013, the school had finally adopted athletic scholarships but made the unorthodox decision to distribute its scholarship pool money equally among every sport’s student-athletes, meaning Olen’s players received approximately $500 each per year. In his second season, the basketball program was given one full scholarship (the D-II norm is 10 full rides for basketball). The next year, Olen was given what amounted to a little more than two scholarships. That season (2015-16) the Tritons made the D-II Sweet 16 for the first time in school history and have been setting records ever since.
“We’ve always tried to do more with less in terms of resources,” Olen said. “If you don’t have certain things, then you’ve got to find a different way to do it.”
Olen found that his player pool — in-state, academically successful — skewed more toward skill than athleticism, so he went all-in on designing an offense that worked for them. In its final two years at Division II, UC San Diego put up back-to-back league titles and had a 30-1 record in 2019-20 when the season was cut short by the pandemic.
“That team had four Division I (caliber) guys on it and they were disciplined and tough,” Kamansky said. “I think they would have won the national title.”
The next season the Tritons were off to Division I to begin their four-year transition, with only one of those starters returning, and Olen had to come up with a new plan.
Olen studied the Big West ahead of UC San Diego’s D-I debut in 2020, starting with his new league’s best team: UC Irvine, which has won at least a share of the regular-season conference title in seven of the last 11 years. The Anteaters had size in their frontcourt, and it felt like the rest of the league was trying to scale up in response.
“I knew showing up with the worst version of the same thing was not going to be successful,” Olen said. “We wanted to be different. We felt like we were already different.”
On the interior, Olen recruited players who could shoot 3s and pull opposing big men away from the basket. On the wing, he tried to find taller players who could help with rebounding.
He couldn’t count on winning that rebounding battle, so he adjusted his defense to a more aggressive, turnover-hunting approach to steal more possessions. This year’s team ranks second nationally in defensive turnover rate — turning opponents over on 23.7 percent of possessions — and sixth in offensive turnover rate, allowing the Tritons to average six more field goal attempts per game than their opponents.
Another of Olen’s early realizations was that his best players at D-II were plenty good enough for D-I. Two springs ago, UCSD had several roster spots come open. Olen and his staff ended up turning to three D-II transfers.
The first was Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones, a 6-6, 200-pound power forward/center from New Zealand who was a three-time all-conference selection at Hawaii-Hilo. Olen sold him on more ballhandling responsibilities, splitting time between wing and backup point guard roles. Tait-Jones looks (and plays) nothing like the typical point guard, but despite his thin frame, he seeks out contact once he gets to the paint.
“It’s my background coming from New Zealand,” said Tait-Jones, who grew up playing rugby and had both parents play for the national netball teams. “We’re tough down there. We’re strong. With rugby, I’m used to taking heavy knocks. Just being a dog. My dad and my mum, they always used to tell me, you’re not the biggest, you’re not the strongest, you’re not the most athletic, but you can hit boots.”
The boot-hitting has come in handy; Tait-Jones leads the country in free throw attempts and makes (210 for 274 from the line). He’s also leading the Big West in scoring at 19.7 points per game.
“He forces the defense into being so physical that he’s then able to almost use it against them, timing up when they’re going to be physical and turning it into a foul,” Olen said. “Or, he feels that physicality and spins off of it.”
Tait-Jones picked UC San Diego because it was the only school recruiting him aggressively in the portal. Second-leading scorer Tyler McGhie had a similar experience. In the spring of 2023, the NCAA made it known that it was raising the threshold for waivers for players seeking immediate eligibility as multi-time transfers, warning athletes and schools that anyone transferring a second time was likely going to have to sit out. McGhie, the league player of the year at his previous school (D-II Southern Nazarene in Oklahoma), had plenty of suitors, but he was a backup plan for most because of his uncertain eligibility situation as a two-time transfer. Olen wasn’t worried about his status because the Tritons were still a year away from being eligible for postseason play. “There was a case that pushing his years back could be more valuable for us,” Olen said.
Ten games into the 2023-24 season, the NCAA’s restrictions on two-time transfers were struck down in court, and McGhie told Olen he wanted to play. Back on the floor ahead of schedule, McGhie made the Tritons significantly better down the stretch and this year has been one of the best shooters in the country. His 111 3s are the fifth-most in Division I, and he was leading the nation until opponents started face-guarding him in January.
The third D-II up-transfer was Hayden Gray, a San Diego native whose defensive film sold Olen. Gray has been even better on the offensive end than expected — scoring 10.9 points per game and shooting 40.7 percent from 3 — and he leads college basketball with 3.3 steals per game.
The Tritons’ other starters are two more transfers brought in the following offseason: Chris Howell (from D-I Saint Mary’s) and Nordin Kapic (from D-II Lynn University).
“They’re just so talented,” UC Santa Barbara coach Joe Pasternack said. “A lot of those guys could play in a lot of different conferences — high-major conferences. I think Tait-Jones is an NBA player. … That’s the golden nugget is getting McGee and Tait-Jones to stay and be in their system for several years. They’re just clicking on all cylinders and really hard to match up with.”
Tyler McGhie (13) is one of four D-II transfers in UC San Diego’s starting lineup. (Derrick Tuskan / UC San Diego)
Olen is quickly becoming one of the hottest names of this spring’s coaching carousel. It’s hard not to take notice: Only one current Big West school has ever finished in the top 50 in Ken Pomeroy’s vaunted adjusted efficiency margin rankings, and in late February, Tait-Jones even appeared at 10th in the KenPom Player of the Year rankings.
“I sent that to our staff,” said Olen, a self-proclaimed analytics nerd, of Tait-Jones’ appearance on the kPOY list. “I was like, I don’t know if you guys appreciate how crazy this is for a mid-major guy with our schedule. Do you know how dominant you have to be?”
Olen graduated from Spring Hill College, an NAIA school in Mobile, Ala., in 2004 with a degree in Finance, but he had no idea what he wanted to do. He hadn’t considered becoming a coach, but that spring his college coach, Bill Carr, was hired at UC San Diego. Carr always liked having a former player on his staff, and Olen was his first call. “He’d made himself into a good college player,” Carr said. “We had good teams at Spring Hill when he was playing, and he found a way to be a big part of it. He’s also one of the most dependable people I’ve ever been around.”
Carr left after three years to be the associate head coach at the University of San Diego. Olen stayed on as an assistant for the next coach, Chris Carlson, who left in the fall of 2013 to become an associate commissioner of the West Coast Conference. October is no time to look for a new coach, so the timing helped Olen get the head job.
And seven years later, after setting the Tritons on track to become a D-II juggernaut, Olen became a D-I coach.
“I’m kind of looking around like, there’s 360 of these jobs and I just kept showing up every day and now this is one of them,” Olen said. “There’s so many qualified applicants, and you have to have so much luck and timing to land in one of these.”
His stock will keep rising if UCSD’s unique style holds up in March.
The Tritons play two different defenses: a switch-heavy no-middle defense and the matchup zone they cribbed from Cal Poly Pomona. The best no-middle defenses — Texas Tech’s 2019 Final Four team, for instance — have elite rim protection. The Tritons do not have that, but they still allow the 10th-fewest points at the rim in the country, per Synergy, because they’re disciplined in sending the ball toward the baseline and always having a help defender waiting.
That approach leaves the 3 available — opponents shoot 43.5 percent of their shots from long range — but the Tritons scramble like crazy to try to take those away, too.
“We just talk about forcing one more thing,” Olen said. “Just keep making them do one more thing, and you give yourself and your teammates an extra chance to make a play, an extra chance to win in the rotation.”
On offense, the Tritons have a lot more freedom, with one hard rule: Whoever has the ball needs to have the space to drive either direction. They shoot 3s at the ninth-highest rate in the country, and anyone with a 55 percent true shooting percentage has a green light.
“My teammates make my job so easy,” Tait-Jones said. “Most of the times when I get the ball, it’s one dribble and lay it up because they’re so worried about the 3-point shooting.”
Olen’s team has the second-best scoring differential in Division I, with all but three of its conference wins coming by double digits.
The San Diego community is starting to take notice. When Olen and Carr showed up in 2004, Carr says they were “lucky to get 50 people in the gym.” This season the attendance has more than tripled since the school’s final year in D-II, and UCSD had its second sellout in school history against UC Irvine, with students lining up four hours before tipoff. Olen recently went to a local high school game to watch one of UCSD’s recruits, and every player on the floor was doing what has become McGhie’s signature 3-point celebration: finger guns.
The attention is nice, but Olen will always appreciate those D-II days when no one was watching.
“Everybody at Division II feels a little more freedom to try things because their jobs aren’t at stake to the same degree,” Olen said. “At Division I, you don’t want to look dumb. Nobody’s paying attention to Division II. We can try this. We can try that. I think it’s a really great place to develop as a coach.
“I could very easily just still be doing it at Division II and I’d be perfectly happy with that. Sometimes you just need the right break at the right time. I’ve been fortunate. This is probably my favorite team I’ve ever had, so I’m just really trying to enjoy each day.”
The rest of the country might fall in love soon. The Tritons have a formula that usually wins in March: a defensive system most opponents haven’t faced, an unorthodox star in Tait-Jones, an efficient offense capable of getting hot from 3 and an edge shaped by their backgrounds.
“We all have a point to prove,” Tait-Jones said. “A lot of the guys weren’t heavily recruited. Now that we get to play on the stage in front of all these people and make the noise that we’re making, I think we just want to keep winning and keep proving people wrong.”
(Top photo: Derrick Tuskan / UC San Diego)
