Upcoming Event: Men's Basketball at Baylor on October 10, 2025 at 2 p.m. (MST)
M Basketball
2 p.m. (MST)
at Baylor
.png&width=100&type=webp)
Grand Canyon University Athletics
Eric Bovaird
BasketBlog: Chaminade: College Basketball’s Magic Name
12/6/2012 9:11:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Chaminade: College Basketball’s Magic Name
A funny thing happens when Eric Bovaird walks Honolulu’s Waikiki Beach wearing a Chaminade shirt.
Few passersby recognize Bovaird as the second-year head coach of the men’s basketball team at Chaminade University. But plenty have something to say about his shirt, and it’s usually a comment about a game played 30 years ago.
That’s the way it goes when your school owns the biggest upset in college basketball history, a shocker in 1982 over No. 1-ranked Virginia at Blaisdell Arena in downtown Honolulu. Back then, Chaminade was only an NAIA school with an enrollment of 800 — about one-third of what the Catholic institution has now.
Final score: David 77, Goliath 72.
“I hear about the Virginia game at least once a week, and usually every two or three days,” said Bovaird, whose team lost, 75-64, on Wednesday night to the Antelopes in Pacific West Conference play at GCU Arena.
He’s not complaining, but you couldn’t blame him if he were. After all, Bovaird’s team stunned Texas, 86-73, on Nov. 19 in the Maui Invitational — and that’s much more recent. All of the accounts of that game mentioned the Virginia game, of course.
One big difference: After the win over Texas, Chaminade was trending No. 2 in the world on Twitter. Bovaird was hearing from everyone he knew — and some he didn’t know.
“That night was ridiculous,” he said. “I never realized I had so many friends. I thought I had about three or five, and all of a sudden I had a hundred. It was an unbelievable experience.
“Everybody in the basketball world knows the name of Chaminade.”
However, not everyone knows what it’s like to coach there — and it’s more challenging than you might think.
Although they host the glamorous Maui Invitational, aired by ESPN and featuring several Division I powerhouses, the Silverswords play their home games in a poorly lit high school gym on O’ahu. Resources aren’t remotely comparable to GCU’s, and recruiting can be difficult because of a shallow talent pool in Hawai’i and the long distance from the mainland.
“Hawai’i sounds good, but when it comes time to sign and pack their bags, they get scared,” Bovaird said of prospective players. “American kids tend to want to stay close to home, and I was the same way. Anything more than two hours away seems far.”
Even coaches think twice before uprooting and moving to Hawai’i. At the end of the 2010-11 season, Bovaird, then an assistant coach at West Liberty (W.Va.) University, had second thoughts after being offered the Chaminade job. He turned it down and it was offered to Jerry Carrillo, the longtime coach at Cochise College in Douglas, Ariz.
Then Carrillo backed out, not wanting to move his family, and Bovaird contacted the school to say that he never should have pulled out in the first place. He was hired again.
“It was a big decision for us as a family, not necessarily for me,” Bovaird said. “I had played professionally in Germany and Australia and coached in the South. But our kids growing up will be far from their cousins and aunts and uncles.”
It helps, he said, that his two children are younger than 2 and that his wife also has a position at Chaminade. And Hawai’i is … well, it’s rather nice living in paradise.
“We love the Hawaiian people,” Bovaird said. “It’s a happy state. You can’t be in a bad mood in Hawai’i.”
A winning program at Chaminade — which went 11-14 last season and is now 3-5, including losses to Illinois and North Carolina — would complete the picture for him. Two of his better players, 6-foot-4 De’Andre Haskins (a transfer from Valparaiso) and 6-6 Kevin Hu (a freshman from Taiwan), didn’t play against GCU because of injuries. They combined for 48 points against Texas.
Bovaird is trying to install West Liberty’s fast-paced, high-scoring offense by recruiting to Chaminade a mix of international players and transfers from Division I and junior college, figuring they’re more mature and better equipped to handle being far from home.
At West Liberty, where he was an All-American in the mid-1990s and served as an assistant for seven years to Jim Crutchfield, scoring is downright mind-blowing. The 2010-11 team, which won 33 games in a row before losing to Brigham Young University-Hawai’i in the Division II semifinals, averaged 111 points and launched 35 three-pointers a game. This season, West Liberty (7-0, ranked No. 1 in D-II) is putting up 112.6 points on average.
“It requires kids playing harder than they ever imagined,” Bovaird said of Crutchfield’s system. “They’ve got to reach their full capacity mentally and physically. You need guys who can handle the ball, shoot, and make smart, split-second decisions — and they’re hard to find nowadays.”
Email Doug Carroll at doug.carroll@gcu.edu.
A funny thing happens when Eric Bovaird walks Honolulu’s Waikiki Beach wearing a Chaminade shirt.
Few passersby recognize Bovaird as the second-year head coach of the men’s basketball team at Chaminade University. But plenty have something to say about his shirt, and it’s usually a comment about a game played 30 years ago.
That’s the way it goes when your school owns the biggest upset in college basketball history, a shocker in 1982 over No. 1-ranked Virginia at Blaisdell Arena in downtown Honolulu. Back then, Chaminade was only an NAIA school with an enrollment of 800 — about one-third of what the Catholic institution has now.
Final score: David 77, Goliath 72.
“I hear about the Virginia game at least once a week, and usually every two or three days,” said Bovaird, whose team lost, 75-64, on Wednesday night to the Antelopes in Pacific West Conference play at GCU Arena.
He’s not complaining, but you couldn’t blame him if he were. After all, Bovaird’s team stunned Texas, 86-73, on Nov. 19 in the Maui Invitational — and that’s much more recent. All of the accounts of that game mentioned the Virginia game, of course.
One big difference: After the win over Texas, Chaminade was trending No. 2 in the world on Twitter. Bovaird was hearing from everyone he knew — and some he didn’t know.
“That night was ridiculous,” he said. “I never realized I had so many friends. I thought I had about three or five, and all of a sudden I had a hundred. It was an unbelievable experience.
“Everybody in the basketball world knows the name of Chaminade.”
However, not everyone knows what it’s like to coach there — and it’s more challenging than you might think.
Although they host the glamorous Maui Invitational, aired by ESPN and featuring several Division I powerhouses, the Silverswords play their home games in a poorly lit high school gym on O’ahu. Resources aren’t remotely comparable to GCU’s, and recruiting can be difficult because of a shallow talent pool in Hawai’i and the long distance from the mainland.
“Hawai’i sounds good, but when it comes time to sign and pack their bags, they get scared,” Bovaird said of prospective players. “American kids tend to want to stay close to home, and I was the same way. Anything more than two hours away seems far.”
Even coaches think twice before uprooting and moving to Hawai’i. At the end of the 2010-11 season, Bovaird, then an assistant coach at West Liberty (W.Va.) University, had second thoughts after being offered the Chaminade job. He turned it down and it was offered to Jerry Carrillo, the longtime coach at Cochise College in Douglas, Ariz.
Then Carrillo backed out, not wanting to move his family, and Bovaird contacted the school to say that he never should have pulled out in the first place. He was hired again.
“It was a big decision for us as a family, not necessarily for me,” Bovaird said. “I had played professionally in Germany and Australia and coached in the South. But our kids growing up will be far from their cousins and aunts and uncles.”
It helps, he said, that his two children are younger than 2 and that his wife also has a position at Chaminade. And Hawai’i is … well, it’s rather nice living in paradise.
“We love the Hawaiian people,” Bovaird said. “It’s a happy state. You can’t be in a bad mood in Hawai’i.”
A winning program at Chaminade — which went 11-14 last season and is now 3-5, including losses to Illinois and North Carolina — would complete the picture for him. Two of his better players, 6-foot-4 De’Andre Haskins (a transfer from Valparaiso) and 6-6 Kevin Hu (a freshman from Taiwan), didn’t play against GCU because of injuries. They combined for 48 points against Texas.
Bovaird is trying to install West Liberty’s fast-paced, high-scoring offense by recruiting to Chaminade a mix of international players and transfers from Division I and junior college, figuring they’re more mature and better equipped to handle being far from home.
At West Liberty, where he was an All-American in the mid-1990s and served as an assistant for seven years to Jim Crutchfield, scoring is downright mind-blowing. The 2010-11 team, which won 33 games in a row before losing to Brigham Young University-Hawai’i in the Division II semifinals, averaged 111 points and launched 35 three-pointers a game. This season, West Liberty (7-0, ranked No. 1 in D-II) is putting up 112.6 points on average.
“It requires kids playing harder than they ever imagined,” Bovaird said of Crutchfield’s system. “They’ve got to reach their full capacity mentally and physically. You need guys who can handle the ball, shoot, and make smart, split-second decisions — and they’re hard to find nowadays.”
Email Doug Carroll at doug.carroll@gcu.edu.
Makaih Williams | Media Availability | 9.3.25
Thursday, September 04
Dusty Stromer | Media Availability | 9.3.25
Thursday, September 04
Kaleb Smith | Media Availability | 9.3.25
Thursday, September 04
Non-Conference Schedule Release | Men's Basketball
Monday, August 04