Conference realignment has spread throughout college basketball and the Big West is among the latest to be affected. As the 2026-27 season approaches, Hawaii and UC Davis will no longer be member schools. UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara are set to leave for the 2027-28 season.
Hawaii and UC Davis, both of whom already played football in the Mountain West, will become permanent members of that conference. UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara will join the West Coast Conference upon their departure. But the Big West already has programs lined up to take their place with the Sacramento State Hornets, Utah Valley Wolverines and Cal Baptist Lancers officially joining come July 1.
For Sacramento State, leaving the Big Sky Conference and joining the Big West is going to be much easier logistics-wise. The Hornets were the lone California team in the Big Sky. Now the only time they will have to leave the state is for one lone road game against Utah Valley.
For Hornets head coach Aaron Kallhoff, balancing out both the academic and sports side of being a student athlete will be eased with less travel.
”We’re not having long travel days. It’s simple, one flight. We’re not having layovers, we’re not landing somewhere and driving an hour, two hours to a campus,” Kallhoff told The IX Basketball. “I think that matters most, especially with most of the teams being in SoCal. There’s an airport within at least 30 minutes, often less than ten minutes. That’s the thing we look forward to the most is just being able to get in and out on road games.”
Kallhoff is entering his fourth season at helm as head coach. Sacramento State has improved in conference play each season he’s been there, going from a 4-14 Big Sky record three seasons ago, to 7-11 in his second year and finally being 8-10 last season. He took over a program that was coming off its first ever NCAA Tournament appearance in 2022-23 under former coach Mark Campbell.
In just those few short years, however, the college basketball landscape has changed significantly. The transfer portal has become increasingly popular while the introduction of Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) benefits have changed recruiting.
For the upcoming season, Sacramento State is bringing in six transfers and only one high school freshman. It’s become an adapt or get left behind mentality as far as what it takes to continue fielding competitive teams.
”It’s a landscape that’s ever-evolving and that’s why you’re going to see quite a few older coaches probably get out because it’s something that they just can’t keep up with because it does take a lot of energy,” Kallhoff said. “You’re looking at half a roster that’s new and some of them are coming from the bigger levels … so you got to be able to adapt … If you don’t adapt, you get left behind.”
One of the ways in which Kallhoff has attempted to respond to this new landscape is by recruiting players outside the Division 1 space. Players that have perhaps gone unnoticed or under-recruited. Kallhoff himself got his start as a head coach at Allen Community College in Kansas.
His first six years of head coaching experience was at the junior college level with stops in Texas at Hill College and Trinity Valley Community College as well. Of the 15 players on the Hornets’ roster for 2026-27, three of them are from outside D1.
Redshirt senior guard Jeniece Harmon played two seasons at Laney College, a junior college in California, before transferring to Division 2 Hawaii-Hilo. Junior center Ajong Lual played one year at Garden City Community College in Kansas before joining Sacramento State. And senior guard Tali Fa’i spent two years at Laney before transferring.
”There’s some really good players that maybe get overlooked because people live out of the transfer portal … If you got a good grasp on it and a good connection in the junior college realm, that can benefit you because that can fill some needs,” Kallhoff said. “I call them our bus conferences. They bus everywhere with the 15 passenger vans. So when they get here, they’re thankful for the amenities and resources … you got to know who you are and got to recruit that.”
With the move to a new conference, Kallhoff is counting on his returning players to keep growing the culture he’s hoped to establish and help ease the transition.
“We’re in a good spot, I feel good about that … we have half a new team coming in so you need your culture kids that are here already to establish it and maintain it,” Kallhoff said. “Your culture is going to be maintained by your returners, but also the expectations and the standard that you give the incoming kids right from the start. So I feel really good about it.”
While Sacramento State is looking forward to the eased travel logistics, the one program who is going to have to navigate longer mileage is Utah Valley. The Wolverines are exiting the Western Athletic Conference, a conference that no longer exists come the new season.
Several other schools departed the WAC as well, leaving the conference’s remaining programs to rebrand as the United Athletic Conference (UAC) along with a few other teams. The Wolverines had a couple of other Utah schools they played in the WAC, but were already used to kind of traveling about with the other schools being in Texas, and Cal Baptist in California.
But as the lone team in the Big West outside of California, Utah Valley head coach Dan Nielson believes it’s actually going to be easier than before when it comes to road trips.
”We’ve spent our entirety of being Division 1 flying all over the place. In the WAC going to Texas a bunch and going to CBU. Even way before back in the day when I was an assistant here, we were in a conference, the worst-named conference ever, The Great West, but we were the only team in the west,” Nielson told The IX Basketball. “We would play NJIT and Chicago State and North and South Dakota. So that’s kind of been our history as we’re traveling all over. We’re still going to California, but I think it simplifies things because there’s similar road trips every week.”
Nielson is no stranger to the conference realignment epidemic that’s sweeping through college basketball. He had multiple roles at BYU from 2001-2019 as the director of basketball operations and as an assistant coach, before becoming head coach at Utah Valley. During that time, BYU made the transition from the Mountain West to the WCC.
In between stints at BYU, Nielson was an assistant with Utah Valley from 2009-2013 which was when the Wolverines played in the aforementioned Great West. From talking with some of his peers at the power conference level, realignment hasn’t been as smooth as they may have hoped. But for Utah Valley, the Big West is a great opportunity to expand their horizons and square off against strong competition.
“I think the Big Ten stuff has been difficult. I think travel is really, really tough and they’re still 18, 19, 20-year old kids. It can be hard. I actually think this is one that makes sense … I think where we’re at financially, it’s all kind of being in a similar level,” Nielson said. “I think it makes for a super competitive conference that hopefully can get where we have multiple teams going postseason … I think the nice thing for us is the consistency and stability that the Big West has had for years where they’re just well-run. That’s something you want to be a part of for a school like us.”
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As with Sacramento State, Utah Valley is also trying to figure out the best approach to recruiting in the new college basketball landscape. And what Nielson has found thus far is taking a local approach. That and reaching back out via the transfer portal to players whom he recruited when they were in high school, but ultimately chose a different program.
The Wolverines have three true freshmen and two redshirt freshmen on the team for this upcoming season. Three of them are from Utah while another, Heather Stedman, had her older sister Ally on campus trying to get a waiver for fifth season. The waiver was eventually denied, as per Steve Garrison of Courthouse News Service, but the experience put the team in contact with Heather.
Relationship-building is the pathway that Nielson sees moving forward as the transfer portal and NIL threaten to overhaul rosters on a year-to-year basis.
”We’re definitely in a different spot being in Utah. Everybody’s like, what’s your niche. I think Southern California, if you’re one of those schools, it’s an easy sell. The weather, the location, there’s all that stuff. Utah’s different,” Nielson said. “We definitely do try to get kids, if they’re good enough, locally or regionally that can help us win at the level we need to. We want to have them here because they’re more likely to stay here long term.
“Here women’s basketball is supported by the community usually more than students. So if you get people the community knows, that’s going to build up your attendance and get more support and donations. So we do try to recruit locally, regionally, or people with ties to Utah … our transfer class was all built on prior relationships. They’re kids we recruited hard, had ties to the state of Utah and ended up going to some bigger schools.”
As the Wolverines prepare to join the Big West, they’ll be looking to build off of last year during which they went 16-15. They’ve had winning records in four of their last six seasons, including 2020-21 when Nielson led the program to its first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance.
In addition to the move, the Wolverines lost seven seniors from last year’s team. Although the incoming group is on the younger side, with only five of the 13 players on the roster being juniors or seniors, Nielson believes he has a mature group to where experience isn’t going to factor as much as it could.
And that’s done by design. During the recruitment process, be it high school or transfer portal, he’s looked for players that already had a maturity about them. Players who were ready from the moment they stepped onto campus and onto the court. That’s going to help as they transition to the Big West.
”I always tell them, if I’m having to talk to them about going to class or about being a good teammate, you probably won’t be here long. I’m too lazy to have a rule book this big for rules. I would say my rule is being an adult. If that means if you have to question should you do that thing, you probably shouldn’t,” Nielson said.
“We were intentional in who we recruit. We don’t recruit people that are drama kids that have issues. We just don’t waste our team with it at all. So while we do have some younger kids, I actually think one of our biggest strengths this year will be maturity.”
