There is a banner somewhere in every Hampton basketball conversation, and it never comes down: March 16, 2001, when the 15th-seeded Pirates walked into Boise and beat No. 2 Iowa State 58-57, one of only ten 15-over-2 upsets in NCAA Tournament history. That is the program's north star. Two and a half decades later, in the Coastal Athletic Association under second-year head coach Ivan Thomas, the Pirates are still chasing that feeling — and the 2025-26 season showed both how far the climb is and how much fight the climb has.
Hampton finished 13-19 overall and 7-11 in CAA play, a record that reads like a step back from the 17-16 debut under Thomas in 2024-25 — until you look at where the program was before he arrived. The 2023-24 Pirates went 9-24 with a 3-15 conference mark, the bottom of the league. Thomas, a Portsmouth, Virginia native who spent decades winning as a high school coach in the 757 before coaching as a college assistant, was hired to rebuild the program's connective tissue: toughness, rebounding, and belief. Year two delivered flashes of all three.
The opening weeks of the 2025-26 season were brutal by design. Thomas scheduled one of the toughest non-conference slates in recent program memory: a season opener at Milwaukee, a six-game road swing through Charlottesville (Virginia), Providence (a win over host Brown 72-63 and a loss to Holy Cross in a tournament setting), Boston College, and the Battle of the Bay against longtime rival Norfolk State across the Hampton Roads tunnel, plus a trip to former MEAC foe Maryland-Eastern Shore. Those road games in tough environments were, in Thomas's words, about preparing the guys for league and tournament play. The Pirates took their lumps — but they learned the league's speed.
And then January arrived, and the Pirates announced themselves. Hampton opened CAA play 2-0 with a pair of grind-it-out wins: 62-59 over Stony Brook, then 63-62 over Towson — the league's preseason favorite — climbing, improbably, into a tie for first place in the conference. The architect was senior forward Xzavier Long, a preseason All-CAA selection who averaged a double-double in the early going (12.3 points and 12.3 rebounds) and grabbed 17 boards in the season opener at Milwaukee. Next to him, sophomore guard Daniel Johnson — also a preseason All-CAA pick — became the team's backcourt engine, leading the team in three-pointers and scoring at an 11.4 clip. Long's rebounding and Johnson's shooting gave Hampton a two-man foundation with real CAA weight.
The season's arc bent the other way after that hot start, and 7-11 is not where anyone at Hampton wants to live. But context matters: this is a program still absorbing the shock of conference realignment. The Pirates were MEAC royalty — six NCAA Tournament appearances (2001, 2002, 2006, 2011, 2015, 2016), four MEAC tournament titles in the 2000s and 2010s, the 2001 run to the Round of 32 — and then left for the Big South in 2018 before landing in the CAA for 2022-23. The CAA is a different animal: bigger budgets, deeper rosters, and road trips to places like Charleston, UNCW and Towson that play like fortresses. Thomas's mandate is to make Hampton's reflex blue and white mean something in this league the way it meant everything in the MEAC — and every season from here is judged against that bar.
The culture at Hampton University does the rest of the selling. One of the nation's premier HBCUs, set on the Virginia waterfront, Hampton has a student body and alumni base that treats the Pirates as an identity — and the 7,200-seat Hampton Convocation Center, when it's full and loud, is one of the most atmospheric buildings in the mid-major ranks. The Battle of the Bay against Norfolk State remains the season's emotional centerpiece regardless of records: two HBCU powers, separated by a tunnel, with a year of bragging rights on the line.
What's happening now is a program entering year three of the Thomas era with its pillars defined. Fall practice for the 2026-27 season is underway in Hampton, with the Pirates tipping off in early November and a schedule that will again test them before CAA play begins — the formula Thomas trusts. Long's graduation will cost Hampton its rebounding anchor, which puts the offseason's weight on player development and the portal: the Pirates need a new interior presence and a second scorer to pair with Johnson's shooting. The goal for this season is plain and has been since the day Thomas walked in: get out of the league's bottom half, get to Washington for the CAA tournament with a seed that matters, and put Hampton back in a March conversation — the kind that ends with the whole country learning what Pirate fans have always known. They've done it before. The banner in Boise says so.