New Mexico announced the hiring of Eric Olen as its new men’s basketball head coach shortly after 10 a.m. on March 30.
It took UC San Diego less than four hours to promote Clint Allard as his replacement.
The rest of the Tritons’ reconstruction project, though, will take a bit longer.
“It’s been a little hectic,” Allard said.
Over the ensuing days, UCSD lost three assistant coaches, both incoming freshman recruits and five of the 2024-25 roster to the transfer portal. That’s in addition to four seniors who exhausted their college eligibility, leaving the Tritons with no returning starters or their sixth man from a team that went 30-5 and came within a rimmed-out 3 of taking Michigan to overtime in the NCAA Tournament.
The top returning scorer was a walk-on, Aidan Burke, at 4.1 points per game.
Go to the Tritons’ website, and the 2025-26 roster consists of six guys — five on scholarship (Burke will get one next season) and one walk-on — and two coaches. That’s 90.8% of scoring, 92.4% of rebounding, 92% of assists, 89.3% of minutes … poof, gone.
Another way to look at it: There are as more Tritons coaches, scholarship players or prep commits (eight total) in New Mexico than are remaining at UCSD (six).
But this is the way of the world in college basketball now. And this is the job for the 39-year-old Allard, who bleeds Tritons blue and gold, having spent half his life on the campus as a player, assistant coach, associate head coach and now head coach.
“At UC San Diego, that’s not something we’re overly accustomed to,” Allard said. “We’ve had a little bit of retention. We just have a little more turnover than in past years, but that’s OK. The momentum is good. … I feel really good about where we’re headed.”
Before he can restock the roster with players from the transfer portal, he needs assistant coaches to help evaluate and recruit them. And that requires permission for four hires on a campus — and within a statewide university system — with a faculty and staff hiring freeze amid a projected budget shortfall that could reach $500 million, by some estimates.
The only assistant who didn’t go with Olen to New Mexico is Steven Aldridge. Allard said he’s been allowed to hire all four vacant assistant positions and hopes to have three filled by the end of the week, including one with previous head coaching experience.
“It was a little tricky,” Allard said. “It’s something we’ve had to navigate but it hasn’t put too much of a delay on us. I’m thankful we’ve been able to that through in this circumstance.”
In of players, they got a commitment from Hudson Mayes, a 6-foot-5 guard from Redondo Union High School who previously committed to Central Michigan and recently was named the Daily Breeze newspaper’s player of the year for the South Bay area of Los Angeles.
The remaining seven scholarships likely will come from the transfer portal, with an eye for the same analytic-based qualities that built the Tritons into a Big West regular season and conference tournament champions. That means a on basketball IQ and perimeter shooting to space the floor in their five-out “flow” offense, even at the expense of size and raw athleticism.
Allard served as the de facto defensive coordinator for the past few years, deploying an unorthodox matchup zone mixed with a switching man-to-man scheme that regularly confounded opponents. Michigan among them. The Tritons actually ranked higher in defensive efficiency (30th nationally in the Kenpom metric) than offensive efficiency (61st) last season.
“We’re going to be intentional about how we do things,” Allard said. “UC San Diego has an identity and that’s what has made us successful, and I’m going to keep that in mind as we’re building our roster – how do they fit with our high IQ, high skill level, floor-spacing identity, and making sure the pieces fit?”
The challenge is that their cheat code is no longer a secret: mining Division II for star players who have thousands of minutes in pressure situations instead of the more traditional roster-building approach of guys moving down a level after sitting on the bench for high-major programs. The Tritons’ top three players — seniors Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones, Tyler McGhie and Hayden Gray — all were Division II transfers with big roles at their previous stops.
Ben McCollum adopted a similar philosophy at Drake to much acclaim, upsetting Missouri in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, and was snapped up by Iowa.
The other bonus: Those players didn’t command much (or anything) in the way of NIL compensation, and resource-poor schools like UCSD and Drake were their only real options.
“The success that we had and the success that Drake had, there are definitely more people competing for some of these high-level Division II guys,” Allard said. “We kind of unlocked that part of the solution. We do value and will continue to value the reps that people get at their previous experiences. But I also think there is value in guys who are coming from a higher level and have had less opportunity, where when we open up the paint and there’s more space, that talent level is really going to show.
“There’s a balance. It’s just really digging into who they are and how they’re going to fit and how they’re going to be effective with the way we play.”
Winning the Big West Tournament and qualifying for the NCAA Tournament in the first year of Division I eligibility has its benefits, though.
“We’re in a much better position now,” Allard said. “When I reach out to recruits and talk about UC San Diego, there’s a lot more familiarity because of our success. That part is nice.
“We’ve set the bar pretty high. That said, I do think we’re set up for success. We might not win 30 games every year, but I think we’ll be a perennial Big West contender and compete for an NCAA Tournament berth every year.”
