Three summers ago, Todd Golden and his coaching staff hit the recruiting trail for the first time as Florida Gators. It was a big jump from the days of hunting for sleepers up and down the West Coast as head coach at San Francisco, now hopping on private jets to pursue some of the nation’s top prospects.
One of those July days, Golden’s Gators rolled three deep to an Under Armour–sponsored event in the Chicago suburbs to watch his first high school commit in that class. The court he was at was loaded with college coaches from the highest levels of the sport, there to see the main attraction: top-20 recruit and elite scorer Elmarko Jackson, who eventually landed at Kansas. Florida’s guy? A gangly three-star forward who was a role player on Jackson’s WE-R1 team named Thomas Haugh.
The thought was natural. That’s the guy? At Florida? In the SEC?
Among those thinking it: This writer, who sat down to watch the game with Golden and his staff. Whether Golden could recruit the type of talent necessary to keep up with the big dogs of the SEC had been the question when he got the job, and watching him zero in on this slightly awkward potential role player was doing little to assuage those concerns.
Three years later, Golden sat at the dais ahead of coaching Haugh in the Final Four and took a well-deserved victory lap. In two seasons in Gainesville, Haugh has emerged from the 42nd-ranked power forward in his class, per 247 Sports, into an essential piece of one of the best teams in the country. In Haugh and fellow sophomore Alex Condon, the Gators have taken two deep sleepers from question marks to potential NBA draft picks, pivotal moments in a three-year build that has the Gators back in the Final Four for the first time since the Billy Donovan era.
“At the time that we got [them], I don’t think a lot of people outside of our building appreciated it,” Golden said.
Florida assistant Kevin Hovde (who’ll assume the role as head coach at Columbia when the Gators’ run ends) brought Haugh to the table. The sell: His defensive chops gave him a high floor. At worst, he’d be a player Florida could put in games to eat minutes as a glue guy. He also wanted to be a Gator, having grown up a big football player and fan of Tim Tebow.
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“We thought he would be a really good player defender at this level for sure,” Hovde says. “You could tell that he had a good feel for the game and was easy to play with.”
Haugh’s recruitment moved quickly. He entered that spring being recruited by mostly low-majors, picked up some higher-level offers in April and by the end of June was officially a Gator. Northwestern, Illinois and Maryland had jumped into his recruitment late, but Haugh had his heart set on Florida. He became the first commit in the Gators’ 2023 class.
Months later, Condon became the second sleeper on the Florida radar. The Gators had just missed on African big man Rueben Chinyelu, who picked Washington State out of the NBA Academy Africa. Jonathan Safir, Florida’s director of basketball strategy and analytics, decided to watch another of Chinyelu’s games anyway, a matchup with the NBA Academy Global team in Las Vegas. Condon was playing with the Global Academy team for the first time after spending most of his time with the Australian Center for Excellence and was largely unknown to most college recruiters. He outplayed Chinyelu that day, and Safir immediately got to digging on who exactly this Alex Condon was.
Condon’s background was unique. He was still relatively new to basketball, having grown up as a top Australian rules football prospect. Before the 2022 Australian Football League draft, he decided to shift his focus to basketball. He was raw and sometimes couldn’t quite process what he wanted to do fast enough on the court, but he had a natural feel for the game and seemed to be on a significant upward trajectory. In doing his diligence on Condon, Safir came to understand that Saint Mary’s had its sights set on him and was hoping to keep him as under the radar as possible. Given the Gators’ ties to the Saint Mary’s, with Golden playing there under Randy Bennett and then coaching against him at San Francisco, they were well aware of the Gaels’ excellent history recruiting in Australia. If they wanted Condon, that was quite the endorsement.
“It was essentially a blind take that if Saint Mary’s wanted an Australian, they were gonna be able to play at Florida at that time,” Safir says. “Now, obviously, we watched the film … Coach Golden loved him and agreed that he made a lot of sense. But at that point where we were in the program, if there was an Australian that Saint Mary’s wanted, they would help us.”
So Safir launched into recruiting mode. The Gators staff had a Zoom call with Condon and his father, Damien, and invited them to visit campus. Condon was already set to come stateside to visit Saint Mary’s and Utah, so a visit to Florida got added to the itinerary at the end. Golden’s pitch was essentially that Condon owed it to himself to go out of the comfort zone of Saint Mary’s and come to the highest level. He had already bet on himself to ditch the certainty of a strong football career in Australia: Why settle with his college experience?
“He jumped at it,” Safir says. “He loved it. Two days later, he called us and said he wanted in.”
The only issue with that commitment call? It came just 20 minutes before Florida was about to take the floor against Tennessee, a game that ended up being the biggest win of the Gators’ first season under Golden. Golden checked his phone one last time before tip-off and had a pair of missed calls from Condon. He called back, took Condon’s commitment, but immediately had to run with just 18 minutes until the game.
“Up until a lot of moments this year, that was by far our best day as a program at Florida,” Safir says.
Condon and Haugh arrived in Gainesville that May and immediately raised the level of competition in practice. Both had plenty of seasoning to do, but Condon, in particular, was more college-ready than the Gators anticipated. Florida kept him on its second team in practice despite him emerging as a key part of the rotation to make sure he got more reps, especially offensively as a playmaker and passer. Those reps paid off, though, helping catalyze his major sophomore breakout campaign and take him from freshman energy big to sophomore focal point.
As for Haugh, the big swing skill was his shooting. Hovde called his shot in high school “inconsistent” but said the Gators always believed he’d emerge as a consistent threat from beyond the arc. Sure enough, it came along. He’s shooting 35% from deep this season, including two huge triples that sparked the comeback against Texas Tech in the Elite Eight.
“I think he had a beautiful stroke and natural touch with the ball,” Hovde says. “He didn’t really get serious about basketball until later since he was a football player … we did feel like now that he was completely dedicated to basketball year-round, he was going to be able to make another jump.”
A rebuild like the one Florida has engineered, from 16 wins and the NIT to 34 and the Final Four, always requires at least one story like Condon or Haugh, a guy no one saw coming and blossomed into stardom. The Gators found two in one recruiting class and have reaped the rewards.
“The two of them have changed our culture and raised the bar of our toughness,” Safir says. “They’ve been a turning point of our whole program.”
