The Wright State Raiders have a championship in their DNA — literally. Before the program ever played a Division I game, the 1983 Raiders won the NCAA Division II national title, beating the District of Columbia 92-73 in Springfield, Massachusetts. That banner is the foundation of everything that followed in Fairborn, Ohio: a program that moved to Division I in 1987, joined the Horizon League, and built a reputation as the team that shows up in March. The Nutter Center — 10,449 seats, one of the biggest arenas in the mid-major world — has seen it all: the 1993 NCAA trip under Ralph Underhill, Brad Brownell's 2006-07 Horizon champions who knocked off Butler in the title game, and the Scott Nagy era that produced Horizon titles in 2018 and 2022 and a 25-win team in 2019-20.
The modern standard was set by Nagy, who coached the Raiders from 2016 to 2024 and won with a formula as old as the program: tough defense, disciplined offense, and players who got better every year. DaShaun Wood became an All-American. Bill Edwards and Vitaly Potapenko reached the NBA. The Raiders played in seven Horizon championship games in 14 seasons. But when the Nagy era ended after the 2023-24 season, Wright State didn't go hunting for a savior. It promoted the man who had been in the room for all of it: longtime assistant Clint Sargent.
Sargent's first season was a bridge year — 15-18 overall, 8-12 in the Horizon, with Brandon Noel carrying the load at 19 points a game. The foundation was being poured, and in year two, the building rose. The 2025-26 Raiders were the best team in the Horizon League from wire to wire: 23-12 overall, 15-5 in conference play, regular-season champions. And then they did the hard part — they won the tournament too, completing the regular-season and tournament sweep, a feat that made them the third straight program to pull it off after Oakland in 2024 and Robert Morris in 2025.
The championship game was an instant classic. On March 10, 2026, in Indianapolis, top-seeded Wright State fell behind third-seeded Detroit Mercy by 12 points with ten minutes to play — the season slipping away in real time. Then the Raiders ripped off a 25-7 run, tournament MVP TJ Burch scoring 16 of his team-high 19 points in the second half, reserve Logan Woods knocking down two three-pointers in the final 2:11 — his only baskets of the night — and the defense strangling the Titans to three made field goals over the final 9:51. With seconds left and Detroit Mercy down two, Kellen Pickett blocked Orlando Lovejoy's potential game-tying layup, and the Raiders escaped 66-63. Pickett finished with 17 points and seven rebounds, Michael Imariagbe added 12 and seven boards, and Wright State was going dancing — its fifth NCAA Tournament appearance, and its first since 2022.
The NCAA trip ended in the first round, but the season was an unqualified triumph: 23 wins, a regular-season crown, a tournament title won the hard way, and a program that had reclaimed its place at the top of the Horizon League. Sargent, in just his second season, had done what took most coaches a career: he had won the league, both ways, and taken the Raiders back to March.
The names on the roster told the story of a team, not a star. Burch, the tournament MVP, was the closer. Pickett was the two-way anchor, Imariagbe the interior muscle, Woods the fearless reserve. Sam Alamutu, Solomon Callaghan, Dominic Pangonis, Alex Bruskotter, Andrea Holden and Michael Cooper all played their roles in a rotation that defended, rebounded and never panicked — even down 12 in a championship game with ten minutes left. That's not talent. That's culture, and it's the culture Wright State has been building since 1983.
The 2026-27 season is Sargent's third, and the Raiders wear the target now: defending Horizon champions, the team every league rival circles. The conference won't sit still — Detroit Mercy brings back its core, the league's middle class is deep — but Wright State's formula is proven and the Nutter Center remains one of the toughest road trips in the mid-majors. The 2025-26 Raiders proved that the program's championship DNA survived the coaching transition intact. Now the question is whether Sargent's Raiders can do what the great Wright State teams did: not just win the Horizon once, but make winning it a habit. In Fairborn, they know exactly what that looks like. They've seen the banner.
Sargent's path to the head chair is the program's favorite kind of story. He played at South Dakota State under Nagy, then followed him to Wright State in 2016 and spent eight seasons as the architect of the Raiders' player development — the steady hand behind the 2018 and 2022 title teams. When he took over in 2024, he didn't tear anything down; he tightened what was already there. The result was the Horizon's best defense and its most resilient team, and the 2026 championship run — down 12 in the final, winning with stops — was pure Sargent: tough, together, and utterly unbothered by the moment.