In Conway, South Carolina, they play in teal and bronze, answer to the proudest nickname in college sports — the Chanticleer, Chaucer’s strutting rooster — and own one of the most singular achievements in basketball history. Tony Dunkin, the program’s immortal, was named conference player of the year in all four of his college seasons, a feat no other Division I men’s player has ever matched. Everything about Coastal Carolina basketball starts with Dunkin, and the program has been chasing his shadow — happily, proudly — ever since.
The Dunkin era was the Big South’s first dynasty. From the late 1980s into the early ’90s, Coastal Carolina was the team everybody in the league was trying to catch: regular-season championships in 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1993, tournament titles in 1990, 1991 and 1993, and NCAA Tournament trips in 1991 and 1993. Those teams didn’t just win the Big South; they owned it, and Dunkin’s four straight player-of-the-year awards remain the program’s signature accomplishment — the kind of record that sounds made up until you look it up.
The long middle decades belonged to Cliff Ellis, the veteran of nearly five decades in coaching who arrived in Conway in 2007 and stayed for 16 seasons, piling up wins on his way past 800 for his career. Ellis took the Chanticleers back to March: Big South tournament titles and NCAA trips in 2014 and 2015, with the 2015 team giving Wisconsin a genuine first-round scare that reminded the country Coastal still had fight. When Ellis’s tenure ended, the program turned to a new kind of leader: Justin Gray, the former Wake Forest star guard, who took over in 2024 and brought a player’s feel for the modern game to the teal.
Gray’s second season, 2025-26, was the breakthrough the rebuild promised: 19-13 overall, 11-7 in the Sun Belt, capped by a four-game conference road winning streak to close the year. Nine players wore teal for the first time, and four of them became the team’s heartbeat. Joshua Beadle, the Columbia, South Carolina native, was a first-team all-conference selection and the Sun Belt Newcomer of the Year, leading Coastal at 17.5 points per game with double figures in 26 games, thirteen 20-point performances and a pair of 30-point explosions. AJ Dancler was the team’s best outside shooter, hitting 39 percent from deep and knocking down a team-high 79 threes — six in a game, three times — with three 30-point games of his own. Reggie Hill started the final 30 games and led the team at 5.8 rebounds a night. And Nadjrick Peat, the Jamaican forward, became just the fourth player in program history to block 50 shots in a season, finishing with 54 — including a school-record seven rejections against Marshall in his final home game, when he came within shouting distance of the first triple-double in school history.
The roster told a bigger story about where the program is headed. Jerry Ngopot arrived from Bangui in the Central African Republic and Peat from Alexandria, Jamaica — the first players from their respective countries to ever suit up for Coastal Carolina, with Peat the first Jamaican in program history. Braeden MacVicar, the 6-foot-11 sophomore from Port Williams, Nova Scotia, carried the international pipeline forward. DaJohn Craig, Derrick Green and Tristan Thompson added young versatility. This is a program recruiting the globe to Conway, and it’s working.
They did it the hard way, too. The 2025-26 schedule was brutally road-heavy — nine non-conference games away from home, 18 total contests outside the HTC Center, 59 percent of the schedule, including trips to 2025 WAC champion Grand Canyon, Arkansas State, Jacksonville State and Saint Joseph’s. After a November 30 home game, the Chanticleers went 31 days without playing in Conway, not returning to the HTC Center until New Year’s Day. They won anyway. That’s the Gray imprint: relationships, confidence, and a team that doesn’t need home cooking.
The HTC Center itself — 3,600 seats, intimate and loud — is one of the Sun Belt’s great home-court advantages when it’s full and the teal is rocking. The program’s history in the league is still being written: Coastal joined the Sun Belt in 2016, and the chase for a first Sun Belt tournament title — and the NCAA bid that comes with it, which would be the program’s fifth trip and its first outside the Big South — is the mission now.
“Our seniors set our program in the right direction and established a great foundation that we’ll be able to build on,” Gray said after the season, and the direction is clear: up. The Chanticleers have the conference’s best newcomer pipeline, a coach who connects, a building that gets loud, and a history — from Dunkin’s four-peat to the Ellis Marches — that says this program knows how to win when it matters. The next March moment in Conway feels close. You can hear the rooster crowing.