A year ago, La Jolla was holding its breath. Eric Olen — the architect of UC San Diego's meteoric rise from Division II to the NCAA Tournament — had left for New Mexico in March 2025, and stars Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones, Tyler McGhie and Hayden Gray had exited through the transfer portal. Associate head coach Clint Allard was promoted on March 30 to lead a roster with 10 newcomers and zero returning starters. What happened next was a quiet triumph: the Tritons went 23–11, finished 12–8 in the Big West, and proved the program was bigger than any one coach or any one roster.
The 2025–26 season had two acts. Act one was a dream: a seven-game win streak to open the year, capped by a sweep at the Terry's Chocolate ESPN Events Invitational, and a 7–0 start that had La Jolla thinking the magic never left. Act two was a January nightmare — a loss to Cal Poly on New Year's Day began a stretch in which the Tritons went 4–10, trading wins and losses for 11 straight games. Redshirt junior forward Leo Beath's field-goal percentage cratered from 53.5 percent to 33.7 percent in conference play, and the turnovers piled up. It was, as the campus paper put it, a bleak month.
Then the Tritons found themselves. On February 12, a win over UC Davis ignited a five-game hot streak that salvaged the season. Graduate guard Emanuel Prospere II went down with an injury, and freshman guard Hudson Mayes stepped into the starting five and played like a veteran, cementing himself as a team leader. Junior guard Tom Beattie ran the offense at 3.4 assists per game, and the pieces finally clicked — the shooting rut ended, the defense tightened, and the Tritons finished the regular season fifth in the Big West.
The individual honors told the story of a collective. Beath, Mayes and redshirt junior Bol Dengdit all earned Honorable Mention All-Big West recognition — no Triton made the first three teams, but three made the honorable-mention list, the mark of a roster with no stars and no weak links. It was a team built on system and depth, the way Allard and Olen had always built it.
The postseason ended the way the regular season had: at the hands of Cal State Northridge. After a second-half comeback over Cal Poly in the Big West tournament opener, the Tritons fell to the Matadors for the third time in one season, ending the title defense before it started. It was a disappointing finish, but context matters — this was a team picked to crater after losing everything, and it won 23 games.
That context starts with 2024–25, the greatest season in program history. In their first year of postseason eligibility after the Division I transition, the Tritons went 30–5, swept the Big West regular-season and tournament titles, and took Michigan to the absolute brink in the NCAA Tournament's first round, falling 68–65 in Denver. Students crossed out every 'M' on campus in the days before the Michigan game. For a fleeting moment, UCSD felt like a sports school — and then New Mexico came calling for Olen.
Allard was the continuity hire, and it was the right one. He had been Olen's associate head coach since 2014, the second-longest tenured assistant in program history, and became the 13th head coach in program history and just the second at the Division I level. His staff — Skye Ettin, Rich Shayewitz, Steven Aldridge, Daniel Eberhardt and Denzel Brito — blends fresh energy with institutional memory. The message from Olen himself: 'There is no better person to lead the program into this next iteration of Triton basketball.'
LionTree Arena is the program's cathedral. Four thousand seats overlooking the Pacific, a building that sells out when the Tritons are rolling and turns into one of the Big West's best atmospheres. The 2026–27 season is the farewell tour — the Tritons' final Big West campaign before joining the West Coast Conference in July 2027, alongside UC Santa Barbara. Leaving the league on top, with a second Big West title, would be the perfect goodbye.
What defines UC San Diego is proof of concept. The program went from Division II to a 30-win Big West champion in four years, then survived the poaching of its coach and its stars to win 23 more. The system — development, defense, discipline — is bigger than any roster. Allard's second season is about turning a resilient debut into a sustained identity. In La Jolla, the future has never looked brighter.
The 2026–27 non-conference slate gives the Tritons a stage to build on last year's momentum, and LionTree will be packed for the Big West farewell — every league rival gets one last trip to La Jolla, and the Tritons intend to make each one count.