The University of New Orleans Privateers are the college basketball team of the Crescent City — the program that plays on the Lakefront, in a building with real history, for a city that understands resilience better than anywhere in America. UNO men’s basketball turns the page into the 2026–27 season with head coach Stacy Hollowell entering his third year, and a roster that finally looks like his.
Hollowell took over in April 2024 after Mark Slessinger departed for the Indiana State staff, inheriting a rebuild. His first team went 10–23. His second went 15–18 overall and 12–10 in the Southland Conference — a five-game jump that put the Privateers back into the league’s middle tier and signaled the floor is rising. In a one-bid league where three wins in March is the entire season, trajectory matters, and UNO’s points the right way.
The 2025–26 campaign showed what Hollowell ball looks like: guard-heavy, aggressive, and deep. Seniors Grant Kemp, Jakevion Buckley, Coleton Benson and Hercy Miller gave the backcourt veteran steadiness, while juniors like Irish Coquia and the 7-foot Mathok Majok provided size and versatility in the middle. UNO finished above .500 in Southland play — a meaningful marker for a program that had fallen to the league’s lower half — and the Privateers closed the season believing their best basketball was still ahead.
That belief is rooted in the building. Lakefront Arena, UNO’s 8,933-seat home on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, is one of the great mid-major venues in the South — a big, modern barn that can turn genuinely loud when the Privateers are rolling. UNO fans remember what a packed Lakefront feels like in March, because 2017 happened there. That spring the Privateers, under Slessinger, ripped through the Southland regular season and tournament to reach the NCAA Tournament — the program’s first Division I dance since 1996 — and the nets coming down on the Lakefront remains the modern standard. Every UNO team since has been measured against it.
The program’s history runs deeper than most people realize. UNO basketball began in 1969, and its coaching lineage reads like a mid-major hall of fame roll call: Ron Greene, the program’s first architect, who built the foundation across eight seasons; Butch van Breda Kolff, the old ABA showman; Tim Floyd, who won 126 games from 1988 to 1994 before taking his talents to the high-major ranks; and Buzz Williams, who spent the 2006–07 season on the Lakefront before Virginia Tech, Marquette and Texas A&M. Across 13 head coaches and 55 seasons, the Privateers have won over 880 games.
The glory years span two eras. At the Division II level in the mid-1970s, UNO reached back-to-back Final Fours and finished national runner-up in 1975 — the program’s first taste of the big stage. At Division I, the Privateers danced in 1987, 1991, 1993 and 1996, collecting Sun Belt championships in 1978 and 1996 along the way, plus an American South crown in 1990. The 1990s Privateers, bouncing between the American South and Sun Belt, were a genuine regional power: regular-season titles in 1993, 1996 and 1997, with the kind of veteran, physical teams that made bigger programs miserable in November.
Slessinger’s 12-year run (2011–2024) brought the program home to the Southland and produced the 2017 breakthrough — a Southland regular-season and tournament double that ended a 21-year NCAA drought. The Privateers fell in the First Four that March, but the banner hangs, and the night the nets came down at Lakefront is the game every UNO recruit hears about.
Now it’s Hollowell’s show, and the 2026–27 season is the one where his program has to announce itself. The Southland is as rugged as ever — McNeese’s recent dominance, Southeastern Louisiana’s steadiness, Nicholls’ toughness, and a hungry pack behind them — but the league’s parity is the Privateers’ opportunity. UNO doesn’t need to win 25 games to matter; it needs to be playing its best basketball in March, when the Southland tournament’s single-elimination chaos turns every possession into a season.
There’s also a hometown current running through this roster. New Orleans kids grow up on UNO basketball — the Privateers are the city’s team, the Division I program that actually plays in New Orleans proper — and Hollowell has leaned into that identity. The pipeline of Louisiana and Gulf Coast talent, mixed with the program’s long-standing Texas connections, gives UNO a recruiting footprint as distinctive as its setting. When the Privateers sign a kid from the Westbank or the Northshore, it resonates in a way a generic transfer never will.
The “Privateer” nickname fits the program’s fighting spirit. This is a team that has always played with a little swashbuckle — fearless on the road, dangerous when overlooked, at its best when the gym is loud and the stakes are high. That identity carried the 2017 title team, and it’s the template Hollowell is building toward: guard play that pressures, depth that wears teams down, and a March mindset that treats the Southland tournament as the season’s true opening tip.
What’s happening now is the climb. A 15–18 season doesn’t hang banners, but for a program in year two of a rebuild, it’s the kind of year that precedes something. The 2026–27 Privateers return core pieces, add another recruiting class shaped by Hollowell’s vision, and play in a league where the door is open. On the Lakefront, the water is calm, the gym is waiting, and the next chapter of UNO basketball — the one that gets measured against 2017 — is being written right now.