San Diego sent four teams to March Madness and no one cared
For three days, the city stood alone
San Diego is the best college basketball city in the country.
There are more accomplished regions, of course. North Carolina’s “Research Triangle” boasts 13 men’s national championships among Duke, University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University.
There are more accomplished states. What would be the point of Indiana or Kentucky if not for college basketball?
And there are cities that have produced more NBA players, including Los Angeles, which, to many San Diegans, is like Voldemort. It’s the city that shall not be named yet we are fixated on it.
But there is only one city—not a metro region, not a state, but a single city—that sent four teams to the men’s and women’s NCAA tournament this year, and that is San Diego. That accomplishment has been years in the making, and it improbably starts with the nerds.
Until last weekend, UCSD had 27 more Nobel Prize winners than NCAA tournament berths, which is to say the university has 27 Nobel Prize winners. For years, the men’s and women’s basketball teams dominated the Division II ranks, and in a move compelled by student-athletes UCSD athletics rose to Division I in 2020.
“The students were the ones that created the impetus for Division I, because as they looked at UC San Diego, and they looked at other high profile schools, [Division I] was a missing denominator,” UCSD director of athletics Earl W. Edwards told me in October. “So the students came to us and said, ‘We'd like to move to Division I.’”
Because the NCAA makes no sense, that move initiated a four-year “reclassification period,” in which the university would compete in Division I athletics but not be eligible for postseason play. A lot of locals probably didn’t know that the school could make March Madness this year, and to most non-San Diegans UCSD is irrelevant. (Just don’t say that to an aspiring engineer or scientist.)
Perhaps surprisingly, the men’s team won the regular season Big West Conference title in a wire-to-wire romp, then won the conference tournament to earn an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. They entered March Madness on a 15-game winning streak and with 30 wins overall. Only five other teams in Division I eclipsed that mark heading into the tournament. Three contributors stand out.
Senior guard/forward Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones was named the Big West Player of the Year and also took home the Out in Left Best Name Award. Head coach Eric Olin was honored as the Big West Coach of the Year for the second consecutive season. Senior guard Hayden Gray was named the conference’s best defensive player and is one of ten finalists for the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year Award. The three sat shoulder-to-shoulder at the podium after the team’s victory in the Big West final over UC Irvine.
“They’re the ones that changed our program. They’re the ones that people come out to watch,” Olin said of his players. “The way that they play, the way that they share the ball, how selfless they are, how much fun they have—it resonates with people. That’s what people come out to see. Our campus and the San Diego community will absolutely support great basketball, and these guys played great basketball all year. The sellouts at home, the fans we had at Irvine, the fans in line to get in at our home games—all of that is a byproduct of the way they play basketball.”
The UCSD women’s team had a less successful regular season, entering the Big West Conference tournament at 17-15, but behind star sophomore guard and San Diego native Sumayah Sugapong the Tritons beat three teams in the conference tournament to punch their ticket to the Big Dance.
It’s a similar story across town for the San Diego State women’s team. (UCSD is a few stops down the Blue Line and a transfer at Old Town away from SDSU. Please let me know what the rail connection is between USC and UCLA.) A solid regular season preceded a remarkable conference tournament—the Aztecs won in an epic triple-overtime final against Wyoming, giving the program its first NCAA tournament bid since 2012.
For the SDSU men’s team, it’s business as usual, and that business is being pound-for-pound the best college basketball program in the country. Their at-large bid marked the fifth-consecutive appearance in the NCAA tournament. It would have been the sixth, had Covid not cancelled the 2020 NCAA tournament. At 30-2, the Aztecs were then having their greatest season ever.
This year’s tournament bid is their 14th since 2002, when legendary coach Steve Fisher turned the program around. Sprinkled in that span are four Sweet Sixteen appearances and, under current coach Brian Dutcher, a run to the 2023 championship game. Dutcher is San Diego’s Coach K, if Coach K had been underpaid, under-resourced, and underappreciated.
Discussing San Diego sports requires qualifiers. It’s the largest media market without an NFL team. Until Peter Seidler’s ownership, the Padres had long been dismissed as a small-market minnow (and the team is devolving into that again after Seidler’s passing in 2023). The city’s college programs are considered mid-majors. There have been no major sports championships since 1963.
Finally, with four teams in the NCAA tournaments, the city had something to claim as its own, and it’s a claim that’s hard to argue, at least before this weekend: San Diego is the best college basketball city in America.
That’s without mentioning the University of San Diego, another Division I school, or Point Loma Nazarene, which boasts a top Division II basketball program, or San Diego City College, which is one of the best junior college programs in California. San Diego is known as a laid-back surfing town, when it’s really a big city brimming with and great at basketball.
“I don’t think we have to prove anything to them,” UCSD’s Hayden Gray said, referring to the bigger, more famous Michigan team they faced in the first round of the men’s NCAA tournament. “Teams don’t win 30 games by accident. We’re going to go out there with confidence and see if they can stop us.”
UCSD would ultimately lose to Michigan, which featured two ballyhooed seven-footers, after a would-be game-tying three rattled off the rim at the buzzer. Gray’s words are those that a proud city—a confident city—can live by.
Except no one cared. No one made the argument that San Diego is the best college basketball city in the country, and no one here cared that the city had four teams in the tournaments. National media mostly ignored the San Diego bids, besides patting the UCSD men’s team on the head and saying Aw, look at you trying. The St. John’s program has been irrelevant for all of my life, but this year on ESPN I’ve seen more clips of head coach Rick Pitino’s dyed hair plugs than actual basketball.
Locally, San Diego’s NCAA bids elicited a balkanized and almost indiscernible response. Some news hits on the local TV affiliates here. Some boosterish social media posts there. Local news outlets covered them. In real life, there was no buzz. There were no watch parties or lead-up hype or prideful and knowing nods towards strangers dressed in school colors. It’s standard fare to light up a civic building or skyscraper with the colors of a city’s teams, except, I guess, in San Diego.
This past week, I asked several San Diegans what they thought about the city’s quad bids, and because no one had thoughts about it I asked why no one cares about San Diego’s quad bids. Almost to a person, the response was some version of “San Diego is too busy surfing.”
This is as lazy as it is ridiculous. La Jolla and Ocean, Mission, and Pacific Beaches, the neighborhoods with most of the city’s surf spots, are home to just 8% of the population. Most San Diegans live in denser and more urban communities east of the 5 and south of the 8 freeways. In 2019, a local nonprofit organized a trip to the beach via public transit for kids from City Heights. The 11-mile trip took an hour-and-a-half. For decades, Barrio Logan had been cut off from San Diego Bay despite sitting next to it. As for youth participation rates, over 2,000 boys and girls play high school basketball across 168 teams in the city of San Diego. Across the city’s 17 surf teams, there aren’t 200 participants.
Saying most San Diegans are too busy surfing is like saying most New Yorkers are too busy hanging out in Times Square. It’s by any metric inaccurate and dismissive. Perhaps I’m taking the insinuation too literally, that the idea of surfing, of laid-back hangs with suntanned friends, is really what people mean, but I can’t think of a worse idea than bobbing in freezing cold water with territorial white people.
One friend’s response has stuck with me. “No one’s going to think we’re the best if we’re not saying it ourselves,” he said. It’s a higher order thought that makes me sad.
More than any big city I’ve experienced, San Diego is preoccupied with what others think of it, rather than what it thinks of itself, which leads the city to try to appeal to everyone, which leads to banality and mediocrity. “America’s Finest City” is the nickname invented by former mayor Pete Wilson to obscure the local establishment bungling and ultimately losing the 1972 Republican National Convention to Miami. The “-est” is inherently a comparison, and aspiring to be “fine” reflects the city’s tired adherence to milquetoast suburbanism.
I’ve written about another example in Snapdragon Stadium. We had a blank canvas for a world-class facility, but instead we built a cheap, multipurpose bowl surrounded by parking lots. It’s exactly what we had there before the Chargers vacated it for Los Angeles. It’s as if building a replica of Qualcomm Stadium would conjure some mid-century magic and wind the clocks back to when rampant greenfield development and Cold War defense spending made San Diego feel important. A friend from LA stabbed us in our inferiority complex and twisted the knife: “You’re obsessed with us, but we never think about you,” she said. Oof.
The other side of that coin is a lack of vision. Proclaiming greatness, or striving for it, requires a suspension of disbelief. A better world is possible if we accept the possibility of a currently fictional world, and it’s risky to do that. It’s more comfortable to accept the familiar shitty public services and infrastructure and to tolerate the resorts that extract wealth and send it to multinational REITs incorporated in Delaware.
An exception is Petco Park. The Padres market it as America’s No. 1 ballpark, and not coincidentally it has shown up in recent years at the top of ballpark rankings. It’s a Greatness Feedback Loop. The more the Padres call their home great, the more that outsiders consider it that way, and the more people think Petco Park is great, the more the Padres want to keep it that way. It is astonishing and refreshing to see someone, or something, in San Diego make an unqualified claim to greatness.
I don’t expect everyone to be sports or basketball fans, and that probably isn’t advisable. Sports are at the center of culture in Philadelphia and it is a deranged place. Big 5 partisans think Philly invented basketball and the Palestra is the only arena in the world and that it’s still 1955 when La Salle was the reigning national champion. Remind them that Villanova isn’t actually in the city and they stuff a soft pretzel in your mouth, throw you in the back of a van, and dump your body into the Schuylkill.
It’s also a generalization for me to say that no one cares about college basketball in San Diego. SDSU’s and UCSD’s local alumni networks are massive, and any casual sports fan—or anyone with a pulse—can buy into a championship run. Whenever I’m in a funk thinking about, say, a president illegalling consolidating power or a major political party ceding the government to an unelected billionaire, I think back to the packed bar at which I watched Lamont Butler drain a buzzer beater in the Final Four. Limbs, as they say across the pond.
But for the first round of this year’s NCAA tournaments the Gaslamp should have been closed to cars for a watch/block party. The County Administration Building should have been lit up in alternating colors of blue and red. Fans should have been bussed to the tarmac at Lindbergh Field so local news cameras could get a clip of the teams being sent off in style. Employers should have relaxed their dress codes and encouraged school colors. The city should have hung basketball hoops on light posts. (I’m for anything that makes NIMBYs lose their minds.) None of that happened because San Diego doesn’t have a civic language or tradition that informs and enlists normies into something important/fun.
It’s a sentiment and history worth exploring more in a different piece, but a major reason is that we mistake climate for culture. Think of any major city or region and the first thought would be about people. London: keep calm and carry on. Midwest: friendly cheese-eaters. New York: assholes. Think of San Diego and you think of the weather. That’s in large part because the modern city1 was founded that way.
We had no water. We had no arable land. We had no oil. We had no precious metals. We had no mountain passes for trains. The bay was mostly unnavigable. So in the early 1900s local robber barons turned to tourism to stabilize San Diego’s economy.
“[John D. Spreckels] owned major tourist assets and appreciated the obvious business logic of moderate public investments in parks, beaches, and pageantry,” Mike Davis writes in Under the Perfect Sun. “At least while waiting for the satanic mills to arrive from the East, it made sense to package the climate for sale to a leisure class of wealthy retirees, consumptives, and cultists—all of whom might stay in Spreckel’s hotels and tent cities or buy lots adjacent to Spreckel’s streetcar lines.”
In essence, San Diego adopted—it was sold—a hollow identity. Weather is inanimate, and everywhere has it. It’s nothing distinctive. Culture, on the other hand, is human. One definition of culture is so beautiful I’m going to get it tattooed across my clavicles: “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.”
Alumni and students hit the bars for the UCSD and SDSU games, of course, but that’s closer to networking than culture. The seeds of culture are Juan in accounting and Julie in marketing, hypothetical colleagues who rarely interact, realizing they can needle each other in good fun (i.e. bond) because, at the office on gameday, one wore a Tritons polo and the other wore an Aztecs shirt, even though neither of them can name a single player. San Diego is big enough for two research institutions with relevant athletics programs, and it should be big enough, and mature enough, to have a civic fabric that strangers can plug into and feel connected with the place and its people.
Last Sunday, San Diego became the only city to send four teams to the NCAA tournaments. In the ensuing three days, San Diego stood alone, and—brace yourself, Chamber of Commerce—it had nothing to do with the sun.
In the 1840s, white people took San Diego from the Mexicans, who had taken over the area from the Spanish, who stole the land from the Kumeyaay.
This writing has a flaw. San Diego State Univ. "Aztecs" men's basketball went to the NCAA Division I tournament 17 times since 1969. In 2023 they reached the Championship game, losing to UConn. Yet San Diego State doesn't appear here until the 15th paragraph.