SAN FRANCISCO — In summer 2022, the new Florida men’s basketball staff had zero wins, an auspicious but limited track record and one guarantee: Thomas Haugh, the lanky three-star recruit in the practice gym, was not leaving Gainesville without plans to come back. He was possibly the only human ever to be both a native of New Oxford, Pa., and a die-hard Florida fan. A 6-foot-9 devotee of Tim Tebow Mania. If anyone was going to run to the front of the line, it was him.

“They had to do a lot wrong for Tommy not to show up and be a Gator the next day,” Ryan Haugh, Thomas’ father, said Saturday on the Chase Center floor. “That was his lifelong dream. He bled orange and blue while the rest of Pennsylvania was bleeding blue and white.”

These are the serendipities that college basketball teams ride into April without knowing they’re on that ride until they get there. First, there is a very tall kid from a town of about 2,000 people who plays quarterback. Then that kid falls for the stylings of a Heisman Trophy winner. Then that kid gets too tall to be a quarterback anymore, grows yet another couple of inches and plays basketball well enough to catch the eye of an assistant coach at Richmond.

Thomas Haugh was a BUCKET for the @GatorsMBK tonight 😤

🔥 20 PTS | 11 REB | 4 3PT

A much-needed spark off the bench to help Florida advance to the #MFinalFour in San Antonio 📈#MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/RVQ3InMnXZ

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— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 30, 2025

Then that assistant coach becomes an assistant coach at Florida and takes another look. The player can’t say yes quickly enough. And in less than three years, there is Thomas Haugh on Saturday evening, turning to the crowd with a smile on his face and his arms spread wide, celebrating the moment that Florida clinched its first trip to the Final Four in more than a decade. A moment that wouldn’t have happened without him. A moment that is the residue of a lot of other ones that might not have happened at all but did.

So Thomas Haugh scores 20 points, grabs 11 rebounds and hits two 3-pointers in the final three minutes to supercharge a No. 1 seed’s comeback from oblivion. Florida beats Texas Tech 84-79, securing the first spot in San Antonio next week. As fate would have it. “I feel like I’m dreaming,” Haugh said, with a souvenir championship baseball cap pulled low over his brow. “I was watching the round of 64 in the eighth grade, sneaking my phone into science class. Now, to say I’m playing in the Final Four is wild. It’s wild.”

And it’s, of course, not entirely providence.

Florida’s staff has built this monster of a roster by relying on its instincts and calculations in player evaluations, entirely unconcerned if they don’t align with whatever the consensus is. It’s a belief in seeing things a little differently that traces back to operating as part of an Ivy League operation years and years ago. It’s comfort with risky convictions. And it’s the process that gets you a hero of an Elite Eight game.

Haugh was, in the words of Florida assistant coach Kevin Hovde, “an insane late bloomer.” Six feet 7 going into his senior year of high school, maybe not as comprehensively serious about basketball as Division I coaches would prefer until a couple of years before that. He was on the radar when Hovde worked at Richmond. He was not, however, a must-sign no-brainer.

But Haugh did bloom, even if he needed a prep school stopover to do so. And once Hovde joined Todd Golden’s new coaching staff at Florida, the pair doubled back. Their re-evaluation recommended Haugh as a player worth adding, even if the particulars of the picture remained fuzzy. “He has a very high floor in his game,” Hovde said amid Florida’s celebration Saturday. “I thought he could defend at this level, and he has a great feel. He’s easy to play with. So I thought no matter what, he’s going to be able to play a role. But he’s surpassed our expectations.”

They imagined a steep trajectory. They got a player who is nimbly climbing a sheer cliff face.

Haugh’s per-40-minute rebounding is basically static from his first season to this one. But he’s almost incomprehensibly gone from a 45.7 percent free-throw shooter as a freshman to 80.4 percent as a sophomore. He’s better than doubled his assist rate (6.9 percent to 14.1), becoming what Golden calls a “pressure release” for the Gators guards. His 3-point shooting jumped from 25.5 percent to 33 percent, and through 37 games, he led one of the deepest and most talented teams in the nation with .225 Win Shares per 40 minutes.

Also, he comes off the bench. For all but seven of the games he’s played in two years. “He’s a winning player,” Golden said. “He just finds ways to impact the game and to help the team. One of, if not the most unselfish guys out there, just being comfortable coming off the bench when he could be starting for pretty much any team in America.”

Haugh is, essentially, the avatar for Florida’s plan and the success it’s engendering. The Gators have welcomed players other power-conference programs might not take. Though the idea was to create depth that can overwhelm teams, this also requires players willing to be depth components. The Gators, meanwhile, have been unflappable — their longest losing streak this year is one game — because they have so many alternatives for whomever might not have it on a given night.

So here was Haugh, a 9.5 points per game scorer once again content in a reserve role in the Elite Eight. Then he logged 30 minutes — third most of any Florida player against Texas Tech — and stepped into a 3-pointer to make it a six-point game with 2:50 to play. And another to make it a one-possession contest less than 30 seconds later. Walter Clayton Jr. might have taken it from there, but there was nowhere to take it without Haugh’s confidently seizing those two moments.

“I just got the ball and I was like, probably need a 3-pointer here, so just throw one up and see if it goes in,” Haugh said with a laugh. “No, my teammates found me, and I made the shots. Which, thank God, I did.”

His parents still might not quite grasp why a football player from Gainesville, Fla., caught hold with a kid from a pin dot in Pennsylvania — “I questioned every day why there was orange and blue in our house,” said Ryan Haugh, a former football player at Division II Shippensburg University — but they rolled with it. Jennifer Haugh even put Tim Tebow’s book in front of her son. And at any rate, there were worse idols to have.

“His drive, his tenacity, just never quit,” Ryan Haugh said. “That sunk in a little bit. As you saw today.”

And that brought everyone to Florida, and that brought Florida to a Final Four. Amid the postgame hubbub, Thomas Haugh wondered aloud about meeting Tebow someday. This almost surely will happen after what transpired Saturday at the Chase Center. The happy coincidences in Thomas Haugh’s story are being steadily replaced by sure things.

“Obviously,” Golden said of the selfless sophomore who helped will the Gators to San Antonio, “he’s going to start for us next year.”

(Photo: Kyle Terada / Imagn Images)

Making it to the WNBA or setting incredible NCAA records never crossed Shakyla Hill’s mind when she arrived at Grambling State in 2015.

She had other aspirations. She wanted to be a lawyer.

Recording a quadruple-double in a game was never part of the plan. Getting two in a career wasn’t even a thought.

But it happened for the student-athlete who preferred law over layups.

“I probably said my first two years a hundred times, I’m playing basketball to pay for school. I’m not in school to play basketball,” Hill told The Athletic. “But then the (first) quadruple-double happened, and it kind of just changed the trajectory of the things that I was supposed to do because it allowed me other opportunities to continue playing.”

As March Madness continues, she is paying attention to the tournament brackets on both the women’s and men’s sides. Basketball always will be of value to her life, but she’s now 28 and works in compliance. Hill plans to start law school in August.

She just happened to achieve phenomenal feats while playing collegiately — feats that aren’t expected to be duplicated any time soon.

The 5-foot-7 guard finished her career at Grambling as the only Division I player with two quadruple-doubles. Only five Division I NCAA players in the men’s and women’s game have ever achieved that stat once.

The first one was enough to catch the attention of a national audience — one that included NBA All-Stars. It was during Hill’s junior season, when she had 15 points, 10 assists, 10 rebounds and 10 steals in Grambling’s 93-71 victory over Alabama State on Jan. 3, 2018.

The effort drew praise from LeBron James, Chris Paul and James Harden.

Crazy!!! Not every day you see a quadruple-double! 👌🏾 https://t.co/ScVxD1XUdD

— Chris Paul (@CP3) January 4, 2018

“When they touched on it, I think that’s when I realized this is way bigger than I ever imagined,” Hill said. “Then it just got uncontrollable. I think the next day, that night, I had to turn off my phone because it was going crazy.”

Isayra Diaz was an assistant coach with Grambling at the time. She said when James spoke about it during a media session, that really got Hill excited.

“He commented on it saying how cool it was and all that, that no matter what level you’re on, it’s hard to do in general,” Diaz said. “For her to do it was pretty cool. I think we were on the bus for a road trip, and we showed her the (James) video. She started crying because he’s one of her favorite players of all time.

“When he is able to comment about that … it was cool.”

After notching just the 4th quadruple-double in women’s college basketball history (15p, 10r, 10a, 10s), Grambling State’s Shakyla Hill said she wanted to hear LeBron James’ reaction to her feat. Well, here it is: pic.twitter.com/IfWjzRcbJ8

— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) January 6, 2018

That game helped change Hill’s life … and then she did it again 13 months later.

On Feb. 2, 2019, Hill had 21 points, 13 rebounds, 13 assists and 10 steals in a 77-57 defeat of Arkansas-Pine Bluff. It was a special performance for her, as she is from Little Rock, Ark. Although the game was played in Louisiana, Hill, then a senior, was excited to play well against a team located 45 miles from her hometown.

That second quadruple-double, though unexpected, came with fewer surprises. After recording the first one, she was accustomed to the attention.

“I adjusted well. I feel like, definitely, those last two years kind of molded me into the person that I am now,” Hill said. “Everybody’s watching, and everything you did at that point in time was under a microscope. I think it kind of prepared me for the future and everything else.”

Hill credits her coaches for not allowing the moments to get too big. She was revered at Grambling, an HBCU best known athletically for legendary football coach Eddie Robinson and as the alma mater of Super Bowl XXII MVP Doug Williams and Pro Football Hall of Fame defender Willie Brown, among others.

After January 2018, media requests seemed nonstop for Hill. Fans and alumni wanted time and pictures — at home and on the road. Her social media following grew exponentially, and she became a celebrity in and outside of Grambling, La., with photos of her appearing in local stores and in the school café area.

Hill joked about having to be photo-ready at all times. Normally, she was fine with simply wearing a headband that never matched her shirt. But quadruple-doubles are life-changing beyond the court.

The 2017-18 season ended with the Tigers winning the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) tournament as a No. 3 seed and making the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 19 years. Grambling lost to Baylor in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

But the Tigers made waves with a guard who once had basketball as a secondary option.

“It just came natural to her,” former Grambling coach Freddie Murray said.

Hill was recruited to play at Grambling by David Pierre Jr., who now is an assistant coach at the University of Texas-Arlington. Hill credits her first Grambling coach, Nadine Domond, for pushing her on the court by using a stern approach when she arrived on campus. Domond now is the coach at Division II Virginia State.

Pierre was recruiting another player when he saw Hill on film. She wasn’t as big on playing AAU basketball during the offseason as other recruits. Pierre said Hill was more into spending time with her family than competing on the summer circuit, which might have contributed to larger schools missing out on signing her.

“Hill was one who could have played anywhere,” Pierre said.

The Grambling coaching staff knew Hill was talented coming out of high school. She was a sophomore when Hall High won the Arkansas Class 6A state championship. The coaches considered her a game changer in high school, but they wanted to see her do more with that talent in college.

“We stayed on her about getting in the gym, putting in extra time,” Murray said. “She’d come, then she’d leave, and then come back. and then she’d leave. Initially, I think she was just kind of getting caught up in college life and enjoying college. I think it didn’t really click with her until going into junior year, when she really, really started putting the time in.”

That’s when the Breakfast Club became the norm. The Breakfast Club was a group of players who met with Diaz for workouts at 4:30 a.m., 90 minutes before practice. That was in addition to workouts later in the day. That group helped Hill mature as a serious college athlete.

“It took some time, but when she started coming in the gym with me and coach Pierre, it showed improvement in her game,” Diaz said. “I think once she started realizing, ‘I’m consistent with it, and now I’m reaping what I sow,’ it just went on from there. Then she just kind of got addicted to doing actual workouts and things of that nature.

“She started falling in love with the whole Breakfast Club.”

Hill became more of a team leader. She remained someone her teammates could rely on, both on and off the court.

“As stern as we were with her, pushing her, challenging her, she was as stern on her teammates,” Pierre said. “Sometimes it’s hard being the best player and being liked. She was our best player, but they liked her and liked playing with her.”

Hill finished her college career as a first-team All-SWAC performer her last three seasons. She was the SWAC Defensive Player of the Year as a senior. And, of course, there were the two quadruple-doubles.

No longer was she playing only to pay for school.

Murray said Hill was projected as a third-round pick in the 2019 WNBA Draft after averaging 18.9 points, 7.6 rebounds, 6.3 assists and 4.6 steals during her senior year. But Hill went undrafted. Murray said colleagues with WNBA ties liked Hill’s athleticism, but they wanted to see more from her that translated to the pro game, like playing in the pick-and-roll with post players. The 14-player Grambling roster during the 2018-19 season had only one player taller than 6-foot-1, so guards like Hill were forced to play bigger than they were in most games.

When Hill was going through the draft process, no HBCU players had been drafted since 2002, when Andrea Gardner (Howard, second round), Amba Kongolo (North Carolina Central, fourth round) and Jacklyn Winfield (Southern, fourth round) were selected. It wasn’t until Ameshya Williams-Holliday (Jackson State, third round) in 2022 that a player from an HBCU was drafted.

Grambling has never had a player drafted to the WNBA, and Pierre believes Hill could have been based on how she fared against opponents from bigger schools. He also believes Hill would have been an even bigger sensation had she played in today’s name, image and likeness era.

“She just was in the wrong era,” Pierre said.

After the draft, Hill chose to play professionally overseas. She headed to Serbia to compete with ZKK Kraljevo of the First Women’s League of Serbia (ZLS).

And guess who recorded another quadruple-double?

On Jan 26, 2020, a month after her 24th birthday, Hill had 15 points, 10 rebounds, 10 assists and 10 steals in an 86-62 win against ZKK Partizan 1953.

“They made it a huge deal,” Hill said. “They threw me a huge party. I was on the news. It was a big deal there because (a quadruple-double) had never happened in that league.”

Covered two of these when @shakylaa_ was at @GSU_TIGERS and now she added to her impressive resume with a professional quadruple-double #womensbasketball🏀 #goat pic.twitter.com/OQOGnUfanv

— 𝘽𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙃𝙤𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙙 (@brianhoward33) January 25, 2020

Her team went on to win the Serbian Cup. The team also played in the WABA (Women’s Adriatic Basketball Association) League and was 17-1 when Serbia shut down basketball because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hill averaged 13.3 points, 8.1 rebounds, 6.3 assists and 5.7 steals in the ZLS. She averaged 14.3 points, 6.4 rebounds, 6.1 assists and 4.2 steals in the WABA League and was the Defensive Player of the Year. She said she wanted her play that year to send a bigger message than delivering quality stats.

“How people talk about the SWAC and HBCU sports, they kind of downplay it,” Hill said. “That was kind of like vindication for myself, and also like, ‘OK, I am really a hard worker.’ Outside of the skills it takes to score, you definitely have to have a lot of grit and a lot of grind to get a quadruple-double because it’s not only time-consuming but energy-consuming.”

Hill wanted to give the WNBA a try in 2020, but she said a training camp contract with the Indiana Fever didn’t pan out because of the pandemic. She then played for Bashkimi Prizren of the Kosovo Women’s Basketball Superleague and won the Kosovo Cup in 2022.

Murray and Diaz said they weren’t surprised Hill had success in Europe. Diaz said she wouldn’t mind watching Hill give pro basketball another shot. Hill, however, is content with her current life. She said she is “completely done” with playing and also doesn’t have interest in coaching.

When she graduated from Grambling, Hill ranked third on the all-time scoring list with 2,052 points. She also ranked second all time in rebounds as a guard with 925.

Diaz said with the way Hill spoke during film sessions, it’s no surprise she’s pursuing law. Hill said she’s considering Southern, Howard and Texas Southern for law school. She also wouldn’t mind returning to her home state of Arkansas to practice.

“I can see her as a lawyer because she likes to debate and she likes to talk,” Pierre said. “She’s passionate. She lights up a room. She has a big personality that’s contagious.”

Hill is ready to take that passion to law school. She said she is leaning toward studying corporate law, but she is keeping her options open. Being a district attorney was a goal at one time.

The only thing that delayed that plan was basketball. And those quadruple-doubles.

(Photo: Ken Murray / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

TAMPA — Dan Moeller’s known for two decades what some of the kids on his staff are about to find out: When pulling a tarp across an infield in the rain, it’s best to pull from the corners. The guys who pull from the middle are the ones who trip, slip, and end up underneath the thing. Also, a wet tarp is a heavy tarp. Getting it off the field is often harder than getting it on.

“You feel it in your hammys,” Moeller said.

As director of projects and field operations for the Tampa Bay Rays, Moeller is in charge of the team’s grounds crew. He has seven full-time employees and eight part-time workers, and most of them gathered in the infield grass 32 minutes before first pitch on Friday to watch one of their own spray a yellow sunburst logo on the back of the mound.

For the first time ever, that logo fit more than the franchise’s name. The Rays really were playing baseball in the sun.

Friday’s season opener at George M. Steinbrenner Field could hardly have gone any better. Six months after Hurricane Milton shredded the roof of Tropicana Field, the Rays had a new home. The building was transformed with Rays signage. The temperature was 84 degrees with a cooling breeze to left field. Ryan Pepiot pitched six innings, a two-run rally tied the game in the seventh, and Kameron Misner — a 27-year-old on his first Opening Day roster — hit a walk-off homer in the ninth. The whole thing was a triumph of organizational problem-solving and late-inning execution. The Rays are undefeated.

And now the real challenge begins.

It begins for infielders dripping with sweat in the Florida humidity, and for outfielders fighting the wind in an open-air stadium with no third deck. It begins for starting pitchers trying to get through six innings in the blazing summer heat, and for a coaching staff worried about rain delays and dreading bullpen-wrecking doubleheaders. There’s going to be no place in baseball this summer quite like Steinbrenner Field.

“We want to create some home-field advantage with that,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “I’d like to look up in two or three weeks when it gets hot in the summer and see that we are embracing it, and other teams are bitching about it.”

Moeller doesn’t want to hear any complaints. The mound is still 60 feet, six inches from home plate. The bases are still 90 feet apart. Baseball is baseball. But a Rays grounds crew that cut its teeth maintaining artificial turf in a climate-controlled environment now has to water and mow and maintain a ballfield in the sun.

Moeller and head groundskeeper Mike Deubel know what people assume about their jobs at Tropicana Field: that they’ve been in charge of carpet, basically. It’s a description that’s both completely wrong and utterly unfair (though, the fact they’ve had to sweep sunflower seeds with a dustpan and broom hasn’t helped dispel that notion). Do you know how to maintain moisture in infield dirt that’s being constantly sucked dry by the concrete underneath and the air conditioning above? It’s not easy.

But Moeller and his crew are now managing natural grass in a notoriously precarious climate that goes from blazing heat to sudden downpour in an instant. Moeller and Deubel have worked outside before. They know what they’re up against. Some of their staff, on the other hand, are in for a nightly lesson in patience, precision and wet socks.

Moeller increased his budget to afford extra clothes so that his crew can change when they get soaked in a popup shower, and he sent most of his crew to work for the Yankees during spring training so that they could learn first-hand how to prepare the field (some of the Yankees crew is sticking around to help).

The Rays’ crew actually got to pull the tarp a couple of times this spring, but they still haven’t pulled it in the middle of the eighth inning, when Pete Fairbanks is getting loose in the bullpen and a mid-game shower has become a total downpour because umpires waited too long, fingers crossed, hoping the rain might magically go away. They haven’t pulled the tarp when they’re already soaking wet, it’s getting late, and there’s no telling when they’re getting home.

“Welcome to the big leagues,” Moeller said.

That same idea holds true for the Rays players, as well. Many of them have been in the big leagues for years, but never quite like this. Pepiot spent a little more time in the sauna this spring. He also lingered in the hot tub and went on post-workout walks with his wife. Anything to get his body used to the heat.

“No one is ever going to get used to 105 and disgusting humidity,” Pepiot said. “But a little bit more acclimated to it.”

The Rays tested their players in spring training to determine how much they sweat — second baseman Brandon Lowe is a Tier 2, moderate sweater — and used that information to help individualize plans for how much water and sodium players are going to have to replace each night. Shortstop Taylor Walls, though, grew up in Georgia and played college ball at Florida State. He’s convinced the heat and humidity will be manageable for nine innings. He’s more worried about the rain, because when those sudden Gulf Coast showers linger, they’re going to rain out some ballgames, and doubleheaders in this climate are going to be exhausting.

That’s what Cash is most worried about, too. He can limit his team’s pregame work to keep players rested, and he can pump them full of water to keep them hydrated, but doubleheaders are hell on a pitching staff, and while Steinbrenner Field has fans with misters in the dugout, it has nothing to stop the rain.

Major League Baseball has tweaked the Rays schedule in deference to the Florida weather. The Rays play 19 home games between March 28 and April 20, meaning they’ll play almost a quarter of their home schedule before the summer even begins. The tradeoff is that the Rays will play only 12 home games between June 23 and August 18. They’re going to spend about half of August on a two-week, four-city, West Coast road trip that will include a stop in Sacramento to play the Athletics in the other minor league ballpark hosting Major League games this season.

Sun, rain, wind and shadows at home. Longer-than-usual trips on the road. It’s going to be completely unfamiliar, but the Rays won on Opening Day with a strong pitching staff and a deep bench, so maybe it’s not so different after all.

“A lot of differences,” Cash said. “But now we can probably take a breath, and we’ll spend probably hours talking about how we can make it to our advantage.”

(Top photo of Steinbrenner Field on Friday: Mike Carlson/MLB Photos via Getty Images)