On the first weekend of January 2026, the Maryland Eastern Shore Hawks did something they hadn’t done in 30 years: they opened conference play 2–0. The second win was a grind-it-out victory over Howard — the program’s first 2–0 MEAC start since 1996, a snapped six-game losing streak to the Bison, and a night that felt like a corner turning in Princess Anne. Dorion Staples scored 16, Jaden Cooper added 13 including the late three-point play that sealed it, Michael Teal ran the show with 11 points and six assists, and Zion Obanla came off the bench for 10 points, seven boards and two blocks. Howard managed one point in the final two minutes. It was winning basketball — ugly, tough, earned — and it was the clearest sign yet that Cleo Hill Jr.’s rebuild is taking root.
Hill enters his third season in 2026–27, and the trajectory is pointing the right way. Year one was a teardown: 6–25, 2–12 in the MEAC, the roster and culture both starting over. Year two was the climb: 9–23 overall, 5–9 in league play, tied for sixth — modest numbers that don’t capture the texture. The Hawks played one of the most ambitious non-conference schedules in the country for a program their size: Georgia Tech and Georgia in the opening week, Nebraska and Creighton in the Cornhusker State, Virginia and Virginia Tech on the road, East Carolina, American, North Carolina A&T, Canisius, Binghamton, Longwood, and a home date with former MEAC rival Hampton — the first meeting between the two HBCUs since 2018. Twenty-one road games. Ten home dates at the Hytche Center. A schedule designed to forge a young team in fire, and by January, the forging was showing.
The roster Hill is building is deep, long and bought in. Staples is the alpha scorer, Cooper the clutch shot-maker, Teal the steady hand at the point. Obanla’s energy off the bench changed the Howard game entirely — four minutes, three-of-four shooting, two rebounds, a block, and the lead reclaimed — and Jaden Johnson, the Maryland product, gave Hill big decision-making minutes down the stretch. Trey Brown chipped in when called upon. This is a team that wins with defense, depth and free throws (18-of-22 against Howard), the classic formula for a program building toward March in a one-bid league. Hill’s teams have always guarded; the next step is turning those grinds into a top-four MEAC finish and a real tournament run.
Hill’s résumé says the breakthrough is coming. He arrived in Princess Anne on June 1, 2024, fresh off restoring Winston-Salem State — his father’s alma mater — to glory: a 19–10 CIAA championship season in 2019–20 that earned him conference coach of the year honors, a division title, a CIAA tournament crown and an NCAA Division II tournament berth in 2022–23, and a 19–9 mark in 2023–24. Before that, he went 116–67 in seven seasons at Shaw with a CIAA title and a Division II Sweet 16 run, plus head-coaching stops at Cheyney and assistant work at Nebraska. He knows HBCU basketball in his bones — and the name carries weight beyond the résumé. His father, Cleo Hill Sr., is a Winston-Salem State legend and a 2017 National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame inductee who was drafted eighth overall by the St. Louis Hawks in 1961, the first player from an HBCU ever taken in the first round of the NBA draft. Coaching is the family business, and winning is the family standard.
The program’s history has real texture, most of it from before the Division I era. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Maryland Eastern Shore — then Maryland State — was a small-college power, making eight NAIA national tournament appearances between 1956 and 1973 and winning conference tournament titles in 1965 and 1974, with regular-season crowns scattered across four decades. That’s the winning DNA the current program is trying to reconnect with. The Division I era has been harder: the high-water marks are Jason Crafton’s 18–13 team in 2022–23 and Bobby Collins’ 18–15 group in 2014–15, and the program has never won the MEAC tournament or reached the NCAA’s big dance. That unfinished business hangs over everything in Princess Anne — it’s the reason the rebuild matters, and the reason Hill was hired.
Home is the William P. Hytche Athletic Center, the 5,500-seat arena on the UMES campus, and the setting is one of the MEAC’s most distinctive. Princess Anne sits on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, on the Delmarva Peninsula — the bus trip there is the longest in the conference, the campus is pure small-town HBCU, and when the Hawks are competitive the Hytche gets loud in a way that belies its size. The maroon and gray, the bands, the homecoming energy — UMES game days carry the full HBCU pageantry, and the basketball program is the winter centerpiece of it.
The MEAC wars define the season. Norfolk State has been the league’s standard-bearer, Howard the brand name, North Carolina Central the recent power, Coppin State and Morgan State the blood rivals — every one of them a battle, every road trip a test. The league’s parity is the Hawks’ opportunity: in the MEAC, the gap between sixth and first is never as wide as it looks, and a team that defends and rebounds the way Hill’s teams do is never more than a hot week from changing its season. The 2–0 start last January was the proof; the task now is turning a good week into a good two months.
What defines UMES in 2026–27 is the oldest story in sports, told well: the climb. Six wins to nine wins, two conference wins to five, eighth place to tied-for-sixth. The next step is double-digit wins, a top-half MEAC finish, and a real March run — the kind that would end the program’s decades-long wait for its first NCAA Tournament bid. Cleo Hill Jr. has done this before, at two different schools, with two different rosters. In Princess Anne, on the Shore, the Hawks are building something the long way. The 2–0 start was the first time in 30 years. The breakthrough, whenever it comes, will feel like the first time ever.