Three wins in three days. That's what it took, and that's what the Hofstra Pride did in March 2026 — storming through the CAA tournament to beat Monmouth 75-69 in the championship game, claiming the program's second CAA title and its first NCAA Tournament bid since 2000. The 24-11 season (12-6 in the CAA) was a coronation for head coach Speedy Claxton and a validation of the most Hofstra story in college basketball: the hometown hero who left, conquered the NBA, and came back to finish the job.
Craig "Speedy" Claxton is not just the coach; he is the program's living history. A Christ the King High School legend from Middle Village, Queens, Claxton starred at Hofstra from 1996 to 2000, then played a decade in the NBA — the 76ers, Spurs, Warriors, Hornets and Hawks — averaging 9.3 points and 4.3 assists per game, with a best season of 13.1 points and 6.2 assists for Golden State in 2004-05. He returned as an assistant in 2013, spent eight years on the staff, and was named the 13th head coach in program history on April 7, 2021. Through five seasons he is 105-62 overall and 59-31 in CAA play. Last April, he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Citi Field before a Mets game — the city's way of saying the Pride's championship belonged to all of New York.
The 2025-26 season announced itself in November. Hofstra went on the road and beat Pitt. Then it beat Syracuse. Two high-major road wins in the same non-conference slate will get the whole country's attention, and they got it — the Pride of Long Island was suddenly appointment viewing. There were bumps, because there always are: a January afternoon when Claxton and two rotation players were out and assistant Mike DePaoli had to coach a gut-it-out 66-63 win over UNCW anyway, with senior guard Jean Aranguren's three-point play in the final 31 seconds providing the winning margin. That's the kind of win that tells you about a team's character before March ever arrives.
By February the Pride had found their gear, closing the regular season on a four-game winning streak and carrying that momentum into the conference tournament — where, as the old cliché goes, the best team doesn't always win, but the toughest usually does. Three games, three wins, one net to cut down. The championship over Monmouth was the program's second CAA crown, joining the 2020 team that won the league tournament days before the world shut down and the NCAA Tournament was canceled — a team that never got its dance. The 2026 Pride got theirs: a date with Alabama in Tampa on March 20, the program's first NCAA Tournament game in 26 years.
The roster was built in Claxton's image: New York-tough guards who defend and make plays late. Aranguren was the senior closer. Junior guard Jaquan Sanders and senior German Plotnikov gave the backcourt its depth and edge, with redshirt sophomore Khalil Farmer stepping into bigger moments as the season wore on — including that shorthanded January win over UNCW. It was not a roster full of future pros. It was a roster full of players who understood the assignment, coached by a man who had lived every version of it.
The setting matters here. The David S. Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex in Hempstead is the Pride's on-campus home, and when it's full it is pure Long Island: loud, proud, and convinced — correctly, last season — that the team on the floor can play with anyone. Hofstra's identity has always been the city's game in a college package: the program that produced Claxton, that won under Jay Wright at the turn of the century, that has spent the last decade knocking on the CAA's door with 20-win seasons (21-11, 25-10 with an NIT second-round run in 2022-23, 20-13) before finally kicking it down.
What's happening now is the morning after the breakthrough. Fall practice is underway in Hempstead ahead of the 2026-27 season — Claxton's sixth — and the Pride open in early November with a target on their backs they haven't carried before: defending CAA champions. The league won't sit still — Charleston, UNCW, Towson and the rest of the CAA reload every year, and the team that won three games in three days in March will get everyone's best shot in January. The graduation losses in the backcourt mean the next wave of Hofstra guards has to grow up fast. But the program's foundation has never been stronger: a coach with a 105-62 record and a lifetime contract's worth of goodwill, a championship banner that finally hangs without an asterisk, and a fanbase that watched its own hero bring the Pride back to the bracket. On Long Island, they don't call it a rebuild anymore. They call it the standard.