There is a moment every March when the Coastal Athletic Association tournament tips off and everyone in the building knows who the problem is. For five straight years, that problem has been wearing teal. Under Takayo Siddle, UNC Wilmington has ripped off five consecutive 20-win seasons — a program record — including three 27-win campaigns. The Seahawks do not rebuild. They reload, they defend, they win at Trask Coliseum, and they ruin somebody’s March. It is the most reliable machine in the mid-major ranks.
Siddle took over in 2020 after the program bottomed out under C.B. McGrath, and the turnaround was instant and total. Year two: a share of the CAA regular-season title and four wins in four days to capture the 2022 College Basketball Invitational championship in Daytona Beach. Year four: a win at No. 12 Kentucky, 80-73, in Rupp Arena on December 2, 2023 — the first road win over a ranked opponent in school history. There was poetry in it: as a player at Gardner-Webb, Siddle had helped beat Kentucky in Rupp too. Some coaches are just built for the big road game.
The peak — so far — came in 2025. UNCW won its league-record seventh CAA Tournament title and returned to the NCAA tournament, with Siddle the fourth-youngest head coach in the entire 68-team field. He remains the fastest coach in program history to 100 wins, reaching the mark in just 144 games, and the only coach at UNCW to ever stack five straight 20-win seasons. His record sits at 133-54, a .711 winning percentage that would be the envy of any power-conference athletic director.
What made 2025-26 remarkable is what Siddle lost first. The Seahawks said goodbye to their top five scorers from the CAA championship team — the kind of exodus that craters most mid-majors. Siddle and his staff simply restocked through the transfer portal: CAA Sixth Man of the Year Madison Durr, All-CAA First Teamer Patrick Wessler, and a supporting cast that fit the system like a glove. They kept key contributors Nolan Hodge, Noah Ross and Greedy Williams — Hodge and Ross finished their careers tied atop the program’s all-time wins leaderboard with 99 victories apiece.
And then UNCW did not miss a beat. The 2025-26 Seahawks went 27-7 overall and 15-3 in the CAA, winning the regular-season crown outright — a program-record-tying 26 regular-season wins, a school-record-tying 15 conference wins, and a record 12 road victories. They were the only team in the league to finish top-four in both offensive and defensive scoring, led the CAA in rebounding at 39.9 per game, and authored six double-digit comebacks — including erasing a program-record 24-point deficit at Stony Brook in January. Six different players led the team in scoring across the season. In March they won the program’s first-ever NIT game at Yale before falling in the second round.
The formula is no secret: pressure defense at the point of attack, physical rebounding, depth that wears opponents down, and a home floor at Trask Coliseum that has become one of the CAA’s genuine fortresses. UNCW has now reached the CAA championship game in 2022, 2023 and 2025, won four in-season tournament crowns under Siddle, and collected two regular-season titles. The teal and navy, Sammy the Seahawk, the student section shaking the old barn on the Cape Fear — Wilmington has built a real basketball culture, the kind that survives roster turnover because the system is the star.
The program’s history runs deeper than the Siddle era. UNCW has been Division I since 1976-77 and owns CAA tournament titles in 2003, 2006, 2016, 2017 and 2025 — the Kevin Keatts years of 2014-17 produced back-to-back 25-plus-win seasons and NCAA trips before he left for NC State. But nobody has sustained it like Siddle. The question hanging over Wilmington used to be whether a young coach with this résumé would get poached; the 2025-26 season answered it again — he is still here, still winning, still building.
The 2026-27 campaign opens with the Seahawks as the hunted: defending regular-season champions in a league that keeps getting deeper, with Charleston, Hofstra and Towson all loading up. But betting against Takayo Siddle’s UNCW has been a losing proposition for half a decade. Five straight 20-win seasons. Three 27-win campaigns. A machine in teal. March in the CAA runs through Trask Coliseum until somebody proves otherwise.
Siddle’s success has made him one of the hottest names in every coaching carousel, and Wilmington has held onto him through it all — a testament to what he has built and how deeply the community has bought in. Trask Coliseum sellouts, a student section that travels, and a roster pipeline that keeps producing all-conference players: UNCW has every ingredient of a permanent mid-major power. The rest of the CAA is chasing a program that refuses to slow down.