SAN FRANCISCO — In summer season 2022, the brand new Florida males’s basketball workers had zero wins, an auspicious however restricted observe file and one assure: Thomas Haugh, the lanky three-star recruit within the follow fitness center, was not leaving Gainesville with out plans to come back again. He was probably the one human ever to be each a local of New Oxford, Pa., and a die-hard Florida fan. A 6-foot-9 devotee of Tim Tebow Mania. If anybody was going to run to the entrance of the road, it was him.
“They needed to do so much flawed for Tommy to not present up and be a Gator the following day,” Ryan Haugh, Thomas’ father, stated Saturday on the Chase Heart ground. “That was his lifelong dream. He bled orange and blue whereas the remainder of Pennsylvania was bleeding blue and white.”
These are the serendipities that faculty basketball groups journey into April with out understanding they’re on that journey till they get there. First, there’s a very tall child from a city of about 2,000 individuals who performs quarterback. Then that child falls for the stylings of a Heisman Trophy winner. Then that child will get too tall to be a quarterback anymore, grows one more couple of inches and performs basketball nicely sufficient to catch the attention of an assistant coach at Richmond.
Thomas Haugh was a BUCKET for the @GatorsMBK tonight 😤
🔥 20 PTS | 11 REB | 4 3PT
A much-needed activate the bench to assist Florida advance to the #MFinalFour in San Antonio 📈#MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/RVQ3InMnXZ
— NCAA March Insanity (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 30, 2025
Then that assistant coach turns into an assistant coach at Florida and takes one other look. The participant can’t say sure rapidly sufficient. And in lower than three years, there’s Thomas Haugh on Saturday night, turning to the gang with a smile on his face and his arms unfold extensive, celebrating the second that Florida clinched its first journey to the Remaining 4 in additional than a decade. A second that wouldn’t have occurred with out him. A second that’s the residue of a variety of different ones which may not have occurred in any respect however did.
So Thomas Haugh scores 20 factors, grabs 11 rebounds and hits two 3-pointers within the last three minutes to supercharge a No. 1 seed’s comeback from oblivion. Florida beats Texas Tech 84-79, securing the primary spot in San Antonio subsequent week. As destiny would have it. “I really feel like I’m dreaming,” Haugh stated, with a memento championship baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. “I used to be watching the spherical of 64 within the eighth grade, sneaking my telephone into science class. Now, to say I’m taking part in within the Remaining 4 is wild. It’s wild.”
And it’s, after all, not fully windfall.
Florida’s workers has constructed this monster of a roster by counting on its instincts and calculations in participant evaluations, fully unconcerned in the event that they don’t align with regardless of the consensus is. It’s a perception in seeing issues slightly otherwise that traces again to working as a part of an Ivy League operation years and years in the past. It’s consolation with dangerous convictions. And it’s the method that will get you a hero of an Elite Eight sport.
Haugh was, within the phrases of Florida assistant coach Kevin Hovde, “an insane late bloomer.” Six ft 7 going into his senior 12 months of highschool, perhaps not as comprehensively critical about basketball as Division I coaches would like till a few years earlier than that. He was on the radar when Hovde labored at Richmond. He was not, nonetheless, a must-sign no-brainer.
However Haugh did bloom, even when he wanted a prep faculty stopover to take action. And as soon as Hovde joined Todd Golden’s new teaching workers at Florida, the pair doubled again. Their re-evaluation really useful Haugh as a participant value including, even when the particulars of the image remained fuzzy. “He has a really excessive ground in his sport,” Hovde stated amid Florida’s celebration Saturday. “I assumed he might defend at this degree, and he has an ideal really feel. He’s simple to play with. So I assumed it doesn’t matter what, he’s going to have the ability to play a job. However he’s surpassed our expectations.”
They imagined a steep trajectory. They bought a participant who’s nimbly climbing a sheer cliff face.
Haugh’s per-40-minute rebounding is principally static from his first season to this one. However he’s nearly incomprehensibly gone from a forty five.7 % free-throw shooter as a freshman to 80.4 % as a sophomore. He’s higher than doubled his help fee (6.9 % to 14.1), turning into what Golden calls a “stress launch” for the Gators guards. His 3-point taking pictures jumped from 25.5 % to 33 %, and thru 37 video games, he led one of many deepest and most gifted groups within the nation with .225 Win Shares per 40 minutes.
Additionally, he comes off the bench. For all however seven of the video games he’s performed in two years. “He’s a successful participant,” Golden stated. “He simply finds methods to influence the sport and to assist the workforce. Considered one of, if not essentially the most unselfish guys on the market, simply being snug coming off the bench when he might be beginning for just about any workforce in America.”
Haugh is, primarily, the avatar for Florida’s plan and the success it’s engendering. The Gators have welcomed gamers different power-conference applications won’t take. Although the thought was to create depth that may overwhelm groups, this additionally requires gamers prepared to be depth parts. The Gators, in the meantime, have been unflappable — their longest dropping streak this 12 months is one sport — as a result of they’ve so many alternate options for whomever won’t have it on a given evening.
So right here was Haugh, a 9.5 factors per sport scorer as soon as once more content material in a reserve position within the Elite Eight. Then he logged half-hour — third most of any Florida participant towards Texas Tech — and stepped right into a 3-pointer to make it a six-point sport with 2:50 to play. And one other to make it a one-possession contest lower than 30 seconds later. Walter Clayton Jr. may need taken it from there, however there was nowhere to take it with out Haugh’s confidently seizing these two moments.
“I simply bought the ball and I used to be like, in all probability want a 3-pointer right here, so simply throw one up and see if it goes in,” Haugh stated with amusing. “No, my teammates discovered me, and I made the photographs. Which, thank God, I did.”
His dad and mom nonetheless won’t fairly grasp why a soccer participant from Gainesville, Fla., caught maintain with a child from a pin dot in Pennsylvania — “I questioned day-after-day why there was orange and blue in our home,” stated Ryan Haugh, a former soccer participant at Division II Shippensburg College — however they rolled with it. Jennifer Haugh even put Tim Tebow’s e-book in entrance of her son. And at any fee, there have been worse idols to have.
“His drive, his tenacity, simply by no means stop,” Ryan Haugh stated. “That sunk in slightly bit. As you noticed at this time.”
And that introduced everybody to Florida, and that introduced Florida to a Remaining 4. Amid the postgame hubbub, Thomas Haugh questioned aloud about assembly Tebow sometime. This nearly certainly will occur after what transpired Saturday on the Chase Heart. The completely happy coincidences in Thomas Haugh’s story are being steadily changed by certain issues.
“Clearly,” Golden stated of the selfless sophomore who helped will the Gators to San Antonio, “he’s going to start out for us subsequent 12 months.”
(Photograph: Kyle Terada / Imagn Photographs)