From low level to high impact: Eastern Washington men finding success with NAIA, Juco and D-III transfers

During his first year as Eastern Washington’s head men’s basketball coach, Dan Monson repeatedly cited the Eagles’ youthfulness, that they were one of the division’s least experienced.

The same cannot be said for this year’s squad, which continues a brief stretch of home games when it hosts Cal Baptist on Friday at Reese Court in Cheney.

“We’ve got a top team coming in here Friday that will probably be the best team we play all season at home,” Monson, the second-year Eagles coach, said following Saturday’s 90-66 home victory over Kansas City. “I think we’ll come out and play really well on Friday.”

The Eagles are off to a 2-7 start, the latter column of which includes what has become the program’s usual nonconference matchups against power-conference teams like UCLA and Colorado.

But the Eagles have held tough with many of those opponents, and a contributing reason for that is the team’s significant increase in age and experience.

Whereas three of last year’s top five leaders in minutes played were underclassmen, this year’s top five are all juniors and seniors, including four fifth-year players. It’s a stark contrast, and it’s largely been fueled by transfers from NAIA, junior college and Division III programs, not others in Division I.

It’s also no accident. Rather, it’s a reflection of the present reality of college basketball, where roster churn is the norm and where rosters often bear little resemblance year over year.

“Recruiting is all about not just who you want but who you can get,” Monson said, “and with the limited NIL that we have here, kids where Alton (Hamilton IV) was and where (Andrew Cook) was and stuff, when they get here, you want kids who are excited to be here. They don’t want NIL. They want to play. They want a chance to show people what they can do.”

Cook, who is out this season due to an ankle injury he suffered during a preseason practice, joined the Eagles before last season after a three-year run at Carroll College in Helena, Montana. After being named an NAIA All-America player in 2024, Cook led the Eagles in scoring last season at 15.8 points per game. He’s a fixture on the Eagles’ bench this season as he recovers from surgery.

During the last recruiting cycle, three of Eastern’s regular starters transferred: Mason Williams ended up at Iowa State, Sebastian Hartmann at Tennessee-Chattanooga and Nic McClain at Belmont. Cook and now-redshirt sophomore Emmett Marquardt remained.

Their departures left the Eagles with significant minutes to fill, and in order to do so Monson and his staff turned largely to the NAIA ranks. Hamilton was the Cascade Conference Player of the Year at NAIA Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. Johnny Radford and Straton Rogers, in addition to a raft of individual accolades, won an NAIA national title together at College of Idaho in 2023.

And there’s also Jojo Anderson, who started his career at Division III Whitworth and played at the University of Idaho last year before joining the Eagles for his final collegiate season.

That quartet – Hamilton, Radford, Rogers and Anderson – comprise four of the Eagles’ top-seven players in minutes per game, each averaging at least 17 per game.

Monson pointed to the Gonzaga team he coached in 1999 as an analog, not so much from a level-of-experience perspective but for something more intangible.

“Going all the way back to the Gonzaga days, five of those 10 guys that played every game had at one point redshirted or walked on,” he said, “and those kids played with a chip on their shoulder. We’ve got to get more of that chip on our shoulder, and those kids bring that.”

They’re winners, too, Monson said, which is a good combination for a team hoping to build some momentum across their four remaining nonconference games.

Those four aren’t the only reason for the Eagles’ sharp increase in experience. Their leading scorer, Isaiah Moses, spent the last two seasons at Division I UC Riverside. And Kiree Huie, their second-leading scorer, played previously at Miami and at Idaho State.

Yet even both of them have a junior college on their resume: Moses started his career at the College of Southern Idaho, where he played for current EWU associate head coach Ryan Lundgren. Huie first played at Odessa College in Texas, advancing as far as the Elite Eight in the NJCAA National Tournament.

Anderson, a Mt. Spokane High School graduate, said playing at Eastern comes with the added benefits of seeing more friends and family at games. But his experience at the lower levels of college basketball also gave him an appreciation for the opportunity to play Division I ball with the Eagles.

“Just to even be on a Division I floor is a great opportunity,” Anderson said, “but then to affect the game through effort and willpower is another thing. I think we have a lot of guys who have that grateful perspective, and I think it’s a superpower of our team.”