The Wyoming Cowboys own one of the great origin stories in basketball history — and a claim to the single most important innovation the sport has ever seen. In 1943, the Cowboys won the national championship behind Ken Sailors, the Laramie guard credited with inventing the jump shot. Sailors elevated off two feet, released at the top of his leap, and changed everything. Every jump shooter who has ever lived — from the playground to the Finals — is standing on the shoulders of a Wyoming Cowboy.
The 1943 banner hangs in the Arena-Auditorium as the program's eternal flame. That team was small, skilled and fearless, the perfect expression of Wyoming basketball: outmanned on paper, unbothered on the floor.
The Arena-Auditorium — the "Dome of Doom" — sits at 7,220 feet in Laramie, the highest Division I arena in America. The altitude is a genuine weapon, not a marketing line. Visiting teams arrive the day before, feel fine at shootaround, and then spend the second half gasping at their own reflections while the Cowboys keep running. Generations of Mountain West favorites have learned this lesson the hard way. Laramie is the only home court in America where the building itself files a scouting report.
The modern era has produced its share of March returns. The Cowboys danced in 2002, in 2015 and again in 2022, when they landed in the First Four and reminded the country that Wyoming basketball is never really gone, just waiting for its next oxygen-deprived opportunity. The 2015 trip drew Northern Iowa; the 2022 team fought its way into the field after grinding through the Mountain West. The program's DNA is built for March — defend, rebound, and trust the jump shot's birthplace to carry you home.
That brings us to Sundance Wicks, now entering his third season in Laramie, and a program with real momentum for the first time in years. The 2025-26 Cowboys went 18-15, Wyoming's first winning season since the 2021-22 NCAA Tournament team, and earned an NIT berth — the program's first postseason appearance of any kind since that 2022 tournament run, and its first NIT since 2003. In a rebuild that many programs would have milked for excuses, Wicks' group simply won.
Five players from that 18-win team are back, and they're the core of the 2026-27 story. Senior guards Naz Meyer and Khaden Bennett form the backcourt engine: Meyer averaged 12.9 points and 4.9 rebounds last season in a breakout campaign, while Bennett poured in 10.2 points a night to cap what has been a quietly excellent career in Laramie. Forward Gavin Gores, the 6-foot-10 Wisconsin product, found his footing during Mountain West play and reached double figures six times, including a 20-point finale at San Jose State — a sign that his best basketball may still be ahead of him. Guard Uriyah Rojas, who averaged 6.2 points in a limited role last year, now takes on the biggest task on the roster: replacing graduated leading scorer Leland Walker as the point guard. And Neil Summers, the 6-foot-9 Laramie native, returns after a redshirt year — a local kid the staff has been raving about since he arrived.
Around that core, Wicks went to the transfer market for his "F.I.T.S." — feel, intelligence, toughness, skill — and came back with ten newcomers. Guards Parker Gerrits from Washington State and Mattia De Martin from Indian Hills Community College add backcourt depth; Gerrits, who Wicks has recruited since high school in Olympia, Washington, has already emerged as a leader with his motor and shooting gravity. Forward Renars Sondors arrives from ULM, Michael Mora from Cal State-Monterey Bay brings three-point shooting (and has surprisingly been the team's best offensive rebounder in practice), Micah Curtis comes from North Dakota, and Linus Ruf crosses the Atlantic from Rasta Vechta in the German Basketball Bundesliga. Freshmen Madden Smiley — the son of Northern Colorado head coach Steve Smiley, who has carved out a role with his defense — and Chris Pohl round out the class.
The goal, as Wicks tells it, is not subtle: win a Mountain West championship and punch a ticket to the NCAA Tournament. "We understand that the goal is to win championships and to compete for championships, but that's the product," he said at the first practice. "Our process just has to be better than others." The Cowboys open with an exhibition trip to Gillette to face Northern Colorado on October 11, then begin the real campaign at home against the College of Idaho on October 24. The Dome of Doom will be waiting, and so will the thin air.
In Laramie, Cowboy basketball is about altitude — literal and otherwise. A national title. The invention of the jump shot. The highest arena in America. And now, for the first time in years, a program that feels like it's climbing back toward the air it was born to breathe.