CBU basketball fans won't have to travel far to see their Lancers in NCAA Tournament action. The men will play the Kansas Jayhawks, Friday at Viejas Arena in San Diego. The women face UCLA at Pauley Pavilion. Both games are within driving distance of Riverside for a fanbase that has made a habit of showing up. This season the men averaged over 4,800 fans per home game, making CBU the highest attended non-football Division I program in California.
Both programs began the season with high expectations. The men were predicted to win the WAC. The women were returning most of a roster that had already been to March Madness. CBU achieved tournament eligibility in the 2022-23 season. The women are making their second trip in those three years. The men are making their first ever. For a program still new to Division I, that is a remarkable three-year run.
The men's program drew most of the preseason attention, focused on four-year Lancer Dominique Daniels Jr. who more than lived up to the hype. The senior point guard from Compton is the WAC Player of the Year and came up with clutch shots as needed to lead CBU to their first NCAA Tournament appearance.
His loyalty to a mid-sized program like CBU is notable in the modern era of NCAA basketball. When the transfer portal opened, a player of his ability had options. He stayed. Through the eligibility transition, through the building years, through all of it. On Saturday night he hit the go-ahead three late in the WAC Tournament championship game against Utah Valley to seal it.
Daniels recently scored his 3,000th career point, every one of them in a CBU uniform. In the WAC semifinal against Utah Tech he put up 41 points on 15 of 23 shooting, with 26 of those points coming after halftime. Daniels Jr. is the crux of the Lancers offense, and coach Rick Croy has built the roster around his unique ability to control the floor.
Daniels may have grown up on the far end of the 91 Freeway but this Lancer team is global. Jonathan Griman came from Caracas. Mouhamadou Dioum from Dakar. Senior guard Jayden Jackson was one of five seniors honored on senior night, each of whom made an impact in the win. Jordan Muller, a freshman from Neu-Ulm, Germany, scored 22 points in a win over San Diego earlier this season. Croy has built a program that fosters international talent while staying rooted in Riverside.
Dominique Daniels Jr. may have been the focus of attention on campus, but Filipa Barros offers every bit as compelling a narrative for the women's season. The junior point guard from Portugal is the most productive player in the WAC by almost any measure. She finished with 15 double-doubles. When the regular-season title was on the line against Abilene Christian, she scored 11 of her game-high 26 points in overtime to clinch it. In the WAC semifinal she posted 21 points and 13 rebounds, her fifth consecutive double-double. In the championship game she finished with 13 rebounds and 11 assists, just missing becoming the first player in WAC Tournament history to record a triple-double. That she nearly got there through assists rather than scoring tells you what kind of player she is.
Senior forward Emma Johansson from Sweden anchors the frontcourt, leading the team in blocks and defensive rebounds. Like the men's roster, this team carries a global passport: Spain, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, Portugal. Olson has built something genuinely unusual in the Inland Empire, and it has now won the WAC regular-season title and the WAC Tournament in the same year.
This tournament run is the end of the season and the beginning of something new. CBU joins the Big West Conference on July 1, leaving a league where it won 20 team championships since joining in 2018. The women won the WAC regular-season title and the tournament. The men won the tournament. Both programs leave as champions.
One detail in the realignment story is worth savoring. Utah Valley, the program that gave the men's team fits for years and was finally dispatched in Saturday's championship, is also headed to the Big West. CBU and UVU are packing their rivalry and taking it with them. The competition that defined this WAC era doesn't end. It upgrades.
The larger story belongs to Riverside. UC Riverside is already a Big West member. When CBU arrives this fall, Riverside joins a rare group of American cities where two Division I programs compete in the same conference. The crosstown rivalry between the Lancers and the Highlanders, which previously carried no conference stakes, suddenly has them permanently, for both the men's and women's programs.
CBU basketball didn't just arrive at the NCAA Tournament this week. It arrived as a program with two rosters worth watching, a city that just acquired a rivalry worth caring about, and a fanbase that can see both teams play in the first round without leaving Southern California. The bracket, like the season, broke favorably for Riverside.
More information: Tickets for NCAA Tournament first-round games are available through the NCAA's official ticketing site at ncaatickets.com.
