The San Diego State men’s basketball team has a handful of players with connections to the Bay Area. UConn has its own local tie.
Now those players, and the rest of the Aztecs and Huskies teams, will now be playing on college basketball’s biggest stage.
San Diego State beat Florida Atlantic 72-71 in Houston on Saturday as Lamont Butler’s buzzer-beater put the Aztecs into the national championship game for the first time in school history.
Monday, they’ll face a UConn team that has destroyed every opponent in its path over the last three weeks, including the Miami Hurricanes, who the Huskies walloped 72-59 in the other national semifinal.
UConn (30-8) will be vying for its fifth national title since 1999, but their first since coach Dan Hurley was hired five years ago to resurrect the storied program.
The Huskies will be favored over a San Diego State team that lost to Saint Mary’s 68-61 in a neutral site game in Phoenix on Dec. 10 but has since gone 25-3. The Gaels were blasted by UConn 70-55 in the second round of the tournament on March 19.
“We’ve always been knocked down,” said San Diego State’s Matt Bradley, a Cal transfer who had 21 points in Saturday’s win. “But the biggest thing we always do is get back up and keep fighting.”
Bradley, who was with the Golden Bears from 2018 to 2021, is SDSU’s leading scorer with an average of 12.7 points per game. But Marin City native Darrion Trammell has been an offensive catalyst for the Aztecs in the NCAA Tournament, averaging 15.3 points in wins over Furman, Alabama, and Creighton.
Trammell, who went to St. Ignatius High School in San Francisco, had 21 points to lead the Aztecs to a 71-64 win over the top-seeded Crimson Tide in their Sweet 16 game on March 24.
The Aztecs (32-6) also have Keshad Johnson, a 6-foot-7, 225-pound senior forward from Oakland who has averaged 7.5 points, 5.0 rebounds, and over 22 minutes per game this season. Johnson, who went to San Leandro High School, had five rebounds Saturday.
Demarshay Johnson Jr., a redshirt freshman who attended Salesian, has played in eight games this season, but at 6-foot-10 and 235 pounds, figures to be a big part of San Diego State’s future. Defense and rebounding are major reasons why San Diego State has made it this far.
One of the players UConn’s Hurley brought in last year was guard Joey Calcaterra, who attended Marin Catholic High School and is from Novato. Hurley calls him “Joey California.”
Calcaterra, who played for four seasons at San Diego of the West Coast Conference before he transferred to Connecticut, is averaging 5.8 points per game this season,
While players at the Bay Area Division I schools are all watching from home, a few others with local ties will be on college basketball’s biggest stage on Monday at NRG Stadium.
“They’re one of the best teams in the country,” Hurley said of San Diego State. “And I think it’s fitting that both of us kind of earned our way into this title game.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
