There is a particular romance to a program that has never danced. The USC Upstate Spartans — Big South basketball from Spartanburg, South Carolina — made the jump to Division I in the late 2000s, and every winter since has been a chapter in the same quest: win three games in March, cut down the nets, and hear the school’s name called on Selection Sunday for the first time. No banners to polish. No glory days to mythologize. Just a group of Spartans grinding in one of the smallest gyms in Division I, in front of a community that knows the roster by name, chasing the breakthrough that would mean everything to the Hub City.
The building is the story as much as the team. The G.B. Hodge Center seats roughly 800 — among the tiniest venues in all of Division I — and on a big night it’s a wall of noise. There’s no bad seat, no wasted space, no hiding: the students are on top of the floor, the band is on top of the students, and visiting teams walk into an intimacy that feels less like a college arena and more like the world’s loudest high school gym. Upstate has always been a grassroots affair, the kind of program where the roster knows the town and the town knows the roster. The Hodge is the program’s edge.
The climb has been real, if slower than the faithful would like. The Division I transition — the Spartans joined the Big South in the late 2000s — meant starting over: new recruiting battles, new travel, a league where Winthrop had already written the book on how to win and UNC Asheville and High Point kept raising the bar. Upstate’s role for years was the dangerous spoiler — the team nobody wanted in their half of the bracket, the program with enough toughness and defensive edge to ruin somebody’s March. The D-II pedigree was real — NCAA Division II tournament runs in the mid-2000s proved the Spartans knew how to win when the stakes were highest — but the D-I breakthrough kept slipping away, one March at a time.
The man tasked with finishing the climb is Marty Richter, now opening his third season in Spartanburg in 2026–27. Richter inherited a rebuild and attacked it the way you have to at this level: outwork everybody in recruiting, find players the bigger programs missed, and build a culture that defends and shares the ball. The returns are showing. Last season brought a seven-game win improvement and 10-plus home victories for the first time since the 2022–23 campaign — the kind of quiet, unglamorous progress that actually means something in the Big South. The trajectory points up. In year three, the expectation is that it points all the way to March.
Richter isn’t waiting around for it. The 2026–27 non-conference schedule, announced in September, is a 16-game slate built like a statement of intent: six games inside the Hodge Center, ten on the road, and a murderers’ row of road tests at East Carolina, Coastal Carolina, Campbell, Davidson, Butler, and Miami. That’s not a schedule you make if you’re hoping to sneak into March. That’s a schedule you make if you believe your team can take a punch in November and throw one back in March.
The roster he’s built for the run is the classic Big South contender’s mix: development pieces, hungry transfers, and a couple of genuine bucket-getters. The headliner is Derek Edmond, a junior college scoring machine who put up 24.5 points a night as a sophomore at Southwestern College in California — two 40-point outings, five more over 30, the number-one juco scorer in the state — and chose Spartanburg as the stage for his next act. Then there’s Andrej Radivojevic, a seven-footer arriving from Switzerland’s pro pipeline with FIBA U19 World Cup experience, 10.9 points and 7.8 rebounds a night in the Swiss league, and the kind of size that simply doesn’t grow on trees in the Big South. Richter called him an immediate injection of size and international experience. The league’s frontcourts just got a problem.
The staff got an overhaul, too. Veteran collegiate coach Joey James — a former Division I and Division II head coach with two decades in the game — joined as an assistant in August, alongside Riley McGillan, a Clemson-bred rising star who helped Belmont Abbey quadruple its win total, and Shaun Vandiver. That’s a year-three staff build: experience, recruiting chops, and player development, all pointed at one goal.
The Big South math is the same as it is in every one-bid league, and it’s the only math that matters in Spartanburg. The regular season is seeding. The conference tournament is the season. Winthrop, UNC Asheville, High Point, Charleston Southern — the league’s powers have taken turns holding the trophy, and the Spartans have spent years as the team trying to kick the door in. One hot weekend in March. That’s all it takes. That’s all it’s ever taken.
What defines Upstate is the wait — and the belief that the wait is almost over. The Hodge Center’s 800-seat intimacy. The seven-win jump. The juco scoring champion and the seven-foot Swiss import. The road schedule that says this team isn’t afraid of anybody. One of these Marches, the Spartans will cut down the nets in the Big South tournament, and that little gym in Spartanburg will erupt in a way 800 people have no business erupting. Until then, they keep showing up — because the drought only makes the first Dance sweeter.