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No matter whether Emory or Mary Washington prevails on Sunday, the Division III men’s basketball championship will have a first-time winner — and its mascot will be an Eagle.
For Emory, the ascent has been long and steady. At one point in head coach Jason Zimmerman’s tenure at the Atlanta-based liberal arts college, the Emory Eagles played in 10 straight NCAA tournaments. Zimmerman’s teams have been to the Sweet 16 five times and to the Elite 8 twice, with the 2024-25 season being one of those years.
They’ve never won the whole thing, but if you take the Division III current rankings seriously, with the Emory Eagles No. 1 and Mary Washington Eagles No. 2, the former will be the favorite this weekend. (Yes, the two Division III national championship opponents share the same athletic nickname.)
“My AD said years ago that if you keep knocking on the door, sometime the door is going to open, right?” Zimmerman said. “We’ve just continued to knock on the door, and we’ve been able to get to this point.”
If you’re looking for a breakthrough point from this season, look no further than just over two months ago when Emory lost on back-to-back nights on the road. The opponents were both University Athletic Association foes, Washington University in St. Louis and University of Chicago. Both schools have been ranked throughout the season and made the NCAA tournament, but a weekend after the losses, Emory got its shot at redemption and beat both teams at home in overtime.
“We had the best week of practice that we’ve had maybe since I’ve been here,” said Zimmerman, an Indiana native who played his high school basketball with Rick Fox for Al Rhodes at Warsaw High School. “We have very experienced guys and they knew what it was doing to take to win those games. … I think that propelled us into the rest of the season. Did I think at the time that I was going to do that? Yeah, I couldn’t have told you that for sure, but it gave us confidence.”
Enough confidence, it turns out, to rattle off 13 wins in a row, which is where Emory’s streak now sits. But what has been the difference between this team that broke through and recent teams that kept getting close?
Here’s what senior guard John Coppolino IV said: “Last year had a big impact on us getting close in the Elite 8, losing in overtime. We all felt that we could have won that game. We should have won that game, so coming into this year, even last spring, off-season workouts, we really felt like we could do it, and we had so much confidence going into the year.”
If Emory’s rise has been one of a steady knocking on the door, Mary Washington’s has been more of a “slow and then all at once” model. Head coach Marcus Kahn has been to the NCAA Tournament a couple times in his 12 seasons in Fredericksburg, Va., including a Sweet 16 appearance in 2025 before falling by two to, well, Emory.
The difference is that last season, Mary Washington wouldn’t even have been in the tournament had they not won the Coast-to-Coast Athletic Conference tournament, and even then, only finished with a 15-15 record. This year, they’re 29-3 and winners of 11 straight, and like Emory, its winning streak came after its only back-to-back losses of the season, both against ranked teams.
So, the question is what happened at the end last season to propel the Mary Washington Eagles into such a successful 2025-26 campaign?
Kahn took most of the responsibility for the slow 2024-25 season during his press conference on Friday. “We had high expectations,” he said, “so I was a little bit more result driven. You know, in January, we were not getting the results we wanted, and I really had to look in the mirror and put it on my shoulders. So, we got back to more of the process and kind of started over with typical October/November practices into February and started to click more for our freshmen, and once that happened, we went on a pretty good run.”
In case Mary Washington needs any additional motivation than playing in the national championship game a year removed from a Sweet 16 appearance after underperforming for most of the season, the program has never beaten Emory.
Mary Washington is 0-3 all-time against the favorite, but that won’t matter much once the ball gets tossed into the air at Lucas Oil Stadium on Sunday afternoon at 4:30 p.m.
Chris Schumerth writes for the Sports Capital Journalism Program at IU Indianapolis.
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