In the Coastal Athletic Association, patience is a kind of currency, and few programs have spent it as deliberately as Elon. The Phoenix — maroon and gold, set on a postcard campus in Elon, North Carolina — have been building toward March for a decade, and the 2026-27 season under head coach Billy Taylor is the latest, most intriguing chapter in that climb. This is a program that built a palace first and then went hunting for the roster to fill it.
The building is the Schar Center, which opened in 2018 and instantly became one of the CAA’s best homes. It’s a statement arena for a school of Elon’s size — bright, modern, loud when it fills — and it changed the program’s recruiting pitch overnight. Where once Elon sold recruits on a vision, now it could show them one: walk into the Schar Center and you see a program that behaves like it expects to win.
That ambition has deep roots. Elon’s basketball history stretches back more than a century, and the program climbed to Division I in 1999, joining the Southern Conference in 2003. The maroon and gold made their name in the SoCon the hard way — including a stirring 2013 run to the conference tournament title game that announced Elon as a program that could win in March. When the Phoenix moved to the CAA in 2014, they brought that belief with them into a league with deeper pockets and bigger stages.
The CAA chapter has been a grind, which is the honest truth about one-bid leagues. New rivals — Charleston, UNC Wilmington, Hofstra, William & Mary — have taken turns winning the league’s automatic bid, and Elon is still chasing its first CAA tournament crown. That’s the mission that defines every season in this conference: survive the winter, peak in March, win the games that matter in four days. Nothing else counts until that.
Taylor arrived in May 2022 from the Iowa bench, where he’d been an assistant under Fran McCaffery, and the 2026-27 campaign is his fifth in charge. His tenure has been a build-through-retention project in an era when the portal makes retention the hardest thing in the sport. He’s added modern infrastructure around it, too — assistant coach and general manager Al Seibert, and veteran bench coach John Krikorian, who spent 15 years as a head coach at Christopher Newport before joining Elon’s staff.
The 2026-27 roster is Taylor’s boldest swing yet: eleven newcomers — seven transfers, four freshmen — joining a six-man returning core headlined by Bryson Cokley, Randall Pettus II and Iker Garmendia. The headliners of the portal haul are real producers. Marko Sarenac, a 6-10 Serbian forward, signed in May after a monster season at Barry University, where he averaged 14.2 points and 11.3 rebounds, set a school single-season record with 328 boards, piled up 18 double-doubles and earned All-Sunshine State Conference third-team honors. Before Barry he logged two seasons at Weber State, and he’s played for Serbia’s U18 national team, helping it to bronze at the European Championships.
Then there’s Josh Dalton, a 6-10 sophomore who spent his freshman year at Loyola Marymount, playing 29 games and averaging 3.6 points and 2.6 rebounds with a 15-point outburst at Pepperdine and a double-double on his collegiate debut. The staff also loves what it saw from Chandler Cuthrell early in his debut Elon campaign. It’s the biggest, most skilled frontcourt Taylor has had at Elon — and in a league won on the glass in March, that matters.
The non-conference slate sets the table the way it should: Morehead State on Nov. 21, Radford on Dec. 22, and the CAA grind opens with William & Mary on Jan. 2. In this league the conference tournament is the whole season, and Elon’s history of near-misses — the program has flirted with contention without ever breaking through — is exactly why this year matters. The fan base can feel it.
What makes Elon different in the CAA is the profile: a nationally ranked academic institution that decided basketball mattered and invested like it. The Schar Center is the symbol, but the commitment runs through everything — facilities, staff, a recruiting footprint that now stretches from North Carolina prep schools to Barcelona and Serbia. The Phoenix’s identity is ambition made concrete, and the maroon-and-gold brand keeps getting bigger.
The chase for the first CAA title is the current mission, and it remains unfinished business. In a one-bid league, a handful of wins in March is the whole season — and Elon keeps building toward the weekend that would define the program. The Schar Center was the declaration. The roster is the bet. The next chapter of Phoenix basketball is about cashing it in.