In the first men’s basketball game ever played in RIMAC Arena, 2,125 fans saw the 1995 Tritons drop a brutal triple-overtime contest to Chapman University, 109-102. Just three years later, attendance was nearly postmortem — only 625 seats were filled at the 1999 La Jolla Classic — but as fate would have it, the Tritons were caught in the middle of an all-time season. It was a troubling paradox.
“We have an exceptionally exciting team this year and I think it would be great if more students could see it,” assistant coach Dave Dillon told The UCSD Guardian at the time. “So many people are missing out. The people that come to games have such a great time that I hope people who have never been will get out here.”
Dillon decided to hatch a plan. He grabbed a tent and climbed atop RIMAC. He would remain there, he said, until the students brought him down. To do it, they would need to set a new single-game attendance record. The mission was called: “Save Dave.”
I could not help but think of that campaign with a grin as the Tritons of 2025 (24-4, 14-2 Big West) swiftly and commandingly dismantled the Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors (14-13, 6-10 Big West) at LionTree Arena last Saturday night, Feb. 22.
Aggressive takes and easy baskets turned into Triton torrent after Triton torrent. The scoreboard read 42-17 at half, and the final margin, 83-44, offered far too much box-score mercy; Hawai’i shot a pathetic 15-56 from the field, doubled the Tritons in turnovers committed, and lost the points-off-turnovers battle by 14. The points line, UCSD -15.5, was blown to smithereens.
The Tritons cruised to yet another comfortable victory behind 19 points from senior guard Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones. Senior guard Hayden Gray’s trio of steals spearheaded another dominant showing from the second-best turnover defense team in the country. Tait-Jones notched his 1,000th point as a Triton, and graduate student forward Maximo Milovich drained a second-half 3-pointer to become the sixth player on the team to score 1,000 career points.
Saturday’s crowd of 3,084 had long lost its head, but as long as Hawai’i continued to aimlessly run and shoot, they kept howling. Years ago, on opening night, the Triton crowd screamed “Moo-Haa” at the Chapman center lining up for overtime free throws, but Hawai’i didn’t put up the fight required for that sort of thing; Saturday was more of a tally-up-the-bricks-and-emote-on-the-Jumbotron type of night.
UCSD has now led at the half in 20 games this year and has been undefeated when doing so. Head coach Eric Olen’s veteran group has suffered only two losses since November and avenged both with consecutive 20- and 18-point victories in January. The Rainbow Warriors flailed and died in front of a berserk crowd new to this sort of athletic dominance stuff, so please bear with them. The LionTree scene is not exactly steeped in the time-honored traditions of Notre Dame’s band camp, Michigan football fans sobbing and screaming along to Mr. Brightside, or West Virginia fans locking arms and crooning John Denver out across the Appalachians. In the meantime, another Triton fast break is loading up. Redshirt junior guard Justin Rochelin muscles to the rack … chucks it up … count the basket, plus a foul. The walls are shaking. It is a madhouse again, but it is a fickle one, and the striped bandits know how it goes. “Ref, you suck!” the crowd ultimately decides — a popular idea. “Ref, you SUCK!” they scream as one. That’s more like it.
Following this victory, the Tritons are now ranked higher than the two-time defending national champion UConn Huskies. Basketball on campus has come a long way from April Fool’s week 1969, when The Guardian broke news that “The UCSD physical education department confirmed reports that John Wooden of UCLA [and his 10 national championships] will replace Neil Stoner as coach of the Triton varsity basketball team.”
Even if Wooden had wound up in La Jolla, Roger Revelle might not have found that news particularly interesting. Back in 1956, when UCSD was just getting off the ground, Revelle pondered on the future of a hypothetical Triton football squad. If one ever came into existence, Revelle hoped “it would never win a game.” Revelle’s grand idea of UCSD, according to most accounts, was purely one of a research institution — becoming one of the biggest universities in the world, or a football powerhouse, was not exactly part of the plan.
Nevertheless, a football team did emerge. Triton football was born in 1968, helped break a 34-game CalTech losing streak, then promptly folded after a 0-7 record. I’m not exactly sure what Revelle would think today if he saw these 3,000 deranged fanatics spurring the Triton basketballers on toward March Madness — let alone a solitary, shivering man huddled atop the roof. You either get it or you don’t. On Jan. 22, 1999, 3,713 people filled the seats on Spirit Night to bring Dave down as the Tritons demolished UC Santa Cruz by 40 points. After the team’s latest 39-point win, I scurried out of LionTree Arena and into the chilly darkness of Seventh College and cosmic notions.
