For a Jesuit school of about 4,000 students tucked into Baltimore’s Charles Street corridor, Loyola Maryland has produced an outsized share of basketball history. The Greyhounds’ defining modern moment came in March 2012, when Jimmy Patsos’s team tore through the MAAC Tournament and punched the program’s first NCAA bid since 1994. Dylon Cormier and Erik Etherly led a gritty, defensive-minded group that gave the Greyhounds their taste of the Big Dance and their first winning season of the decade — 23-12, with a CIT quarterfinal run for good measure. It remains the high-water mark of the modern era and proof of what Loyola can be when the pieces align.
The program’s most famous alumnus took a longer route to stardom. Santi Aldama, the 6-11 Spaniard from Las Palmas, starred for the Greyhounds before being selected 30th overall in the 2021 NBA Draft — the program’s first NBA first-round pick — and establishing himself as a rotation big man for the Memphis Grizzlies. Aldama’s success is the ultimate recruiting pitch for a program of Loyola’s size: come to Baltimore, develop under a coach who believes in you, and the league will find you.
The last decade, though, has been a grind. Loyola joined the Patriot League in 2013-14, trading the MAAC for a conference of academically elite programs and a very different style of basketball — methodical, defensive, unforgiving. G.G. Smith’s teams had moments (a CBI quarterfinal in 2016-17), but winning seasons never materialized. Tavaras Hardy, the former Northwestern star hired in 2018, brought energy and recruiting chops, but six seasons produced a best finish of 14-16 and a last-place 7-25 campaign in 2023-24 that led to his resignation. Loyola hadn’t posted a winning season since 2012-13, and the program needed a reset.
The reset came in the form of a homecoming. On March 30, 2024, Loyola named Josh Loeffler its 22nd head men’s basketball coach. Loeffler was no stranger to the Charles Street campus: he’d been an assistant for the Greyhounds from 2013-17 before building a Division III powerhouse at Johns Hopkins, where he went 114-27 (.809) over six seasons with four NCAA Tournament appearances and three Centennial Conference titles. A year as an assistant at Cincinnati under Wes Miller refreshed his high-major credentials. He arrived in Baltimore with a career head-coaching record of 160-40 and a simple philosophy: defend, rebound, and retain your people.
The first two seasons of the Loeffler era have been steps in the right direction. The 2024-25 Greyhounds went 12-19 (6-12 in the Patriot League), improving by five wins and reaching the league quarterfinals, where they beat Lehigh before falling to top-seeded Bucknell. The 2025-26 team went 12-20 with an 8-10 league mark, good for a tie for sixth — another incremental climb, another year of the program’s young core getting seasoned in the Patriot League’s grind-it-out wars.
Year three — 2026-27 — is the roster Loeffler has been building toward. The senior class is his foundation: guards Garrett Brennan (Reston, Virginia), Tyson Commander (Belcamp, Maryland), and Peter Sposito (Glastonbury, Connecticut) are all four-year program guys who embody the culture Loeffler preaches. The junior class has real upside: Jordan Stiemke (6-5, Bel Air) and Troy Cicero Jr. (Joliet, Illinois) in the backcourt; Jonas Sirtautas, a 6-10 Lithuanian who came through Wyoming and Radford, and Jacob Theodosiou, a 6-4 guard from Waterloo, Ontario via Wyoming, adding international flavor and length. Sophomores Ben Menker (Mason, Ohio), Goap Kodi (6-10, Woodbridge, Virginia), Braeden Speed (Phoenix), and Sam Springer (Cleveland) return with a year of the system under their belts.
The freshman class is Loeffler’s most global yet: Carter Berg-McLean from Wellington, New Zealand; Sebastien Emenalo, a 6-6 guard from Walton-on-Thames, England, via the NBA Global Academy; Everett Barnes, a 6-9 forward from Burlington, New Jersey; and Emmett Adair, a 6-9 forward from Sydney, Australia, also from the NBA Global Academy. It’s a roster built for the Patriot League’s half-court chess matches: long, skilled, and deep enough to survive the league’s brutal travel and back-to-backs.
Home is Reitz Arena, a cozy 2,100-seat gym where the Greyhounds have always punched above their weight and the crowd sits close enough to hear every possession’s chess moves. The Patriot League calendar opens in Baltimore and runs through the usual gauntlet: Bucknell and Colgate have set the league’s recent standard, Army and Navy bring their own intensity, and every road trip in the league is a test of discipline. Loyola opens the 2026-27 season on November 12 with a Baltimore-area showdown at Towson’s SECU Arena.
What defines Loyola Maryland in 2026-27 is the slow, deliberate climb of a coach who wins everywhere he goes. Loeffler’s teams at Johns Hopkins didn’t just win — they dominated their league at an 80-percent clip. Translating that to Division I’s Patriot League is a different challenge, but two straight seasons of improvement suggest the foundation is real. The Greyhounds’ path back to the NCAA Tournament — a place they haven’t been since 2012 — runs through the Patriot League tournament, where one hot weekend erases everything. For a program built on Jesuit values and Baltimore toughness, that’s exactly the kind of mission that fits.