By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
For the Northern Kentucky University men’s basketball team, it’s a matter of when can the Norse make ends meet in this 2025-2026 season.
As in when – and how – does a team with nine newcomers from all over the world learn to play together and do so with consistency?
And when does a group that clearly has the speed, athleticism and ability to pass the ball and score it also develop the toughness – mental and physical – to rebound the ball and defend the other teams’ scorers?
Good questions.
“A lot has changed in college basketball,” NKU’s seventh-year coach Darrin Horn of the new world of the transfer portal, instant eligibility and NIL money, “and not just at NKU. Almost every program has so many new players.”
Which means “a lot of learning has to go on,” both “in the league,“ and on his team with “almost entirely new roles” even for the guys coming back like 6-foot-8 senior LJ Wells and 6-4 All-Horizon second-team guard Dan Gherezgher.
“We’re really excited about this team,” Horn says, noting that it’s “a little more athletic” than in recent years with newcomers Ethan Elliott (6-3 freshman, Perth, Australia); 6-7 grad student Kael Robinson, a New Zealand native by way of Montana; 6-2 Texan Donovan Oday, a senior transfer from Cal-State Fullerton and McNeese State and 6-5 grad student Tae Dozier, a Louisville guy from Georgetown College.
Point guard Elliott and inside-out guy Robinson were the two position guys NKU most needed, even if they come from Southern Hemisphere locales that are a combined more than 20,000 miles from NKU.
“Coach (Horn) said I’m going to coach you really hard and make you a better player,” said Elliott, who communicated exclusively by Zoom calls with NKU in his recruitment process as a semi-pro player in his hometown of Perth, Australia. “It’s why I came here.”
“We knew we needed a guy like Kael,” Horn said of guy from Hamilton, New Zealand, who has played NAIA, NCAA Division II and now Division I by way of two schools in Montana before he got a waiver that allowed him to come to NKU. He can go down low and get the ball and set up for the three when the offense calls for it. “An inside-out guy,” Horn said.
And that got Horn on “an expensive flight that took forever to get there,” and he’s not talking about New Zealand but Montana in the recruiting process that saw NKU beat out Stephen A. Austin in Texas for Robinson.
Then there’s the high-scoring veteran pair of Oday – “as good an athlete as we’ve had since I’ve been here” and the slim Dozier, who can get his own shot and run the floor. And both can rebound, Horn says.
But if there was one focus from Horn in Wednesday’s Media Day, it was on Wells, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who said that “Honestly, I had no thoughts of entering the portal – this is like my second home . . . and last year left a sour taste in my mouth.”
His role change this year? “Leadership,” LJ says, “lead by example.”
“He’s one of the only guys, with walk-on Mitchell Minor, who’s experienced winning a championship,” Horn says. “He’s going to average more, shoot more, but it’s a level of consistency” that NKU will be looking from Wells.
Because if there’s one thing about this team, Horn says, “We have a lot of good players . . . we expect to win and when I say “win,” I mean win championships.”
Horn continued: “I like our length and athleticism . . . I like how we actually have a group that can play fast . . . we pass well . . . LJ (Wells) may be as good a passer as there is for big man in college basketball.”
Although there’s this: “We have to get a lot tougher,” he said, “a lot tougher, we have to value defense and rebounding a lot more . . . but we have a chance to be as good defensively as we’ve ever been.”
But they have this going for them as a team that represents both the new international world of global basketball, Horn says, and are “still doing things that people love about college basketball and what Northern was doing when the legend, Coach (Ken) Shields was here” — all the old-style family things that program did with so many local kids.
There’s also this, Horn says. In this day when athletes can earn money – rightfully Horn says – in their sport, he can promise them something else: a degree. “We have 100 percent graduation rate for basketball,” Horn notes.
Let Ethan Elliott tell how he got here, how after high school, he set off to the Australia athletic training center in the capital, Canberra, but got homesick and went back to Perth to play a couple of years of semi-pro basketball. Then decided he wanted something more, that his career had hit “pause.”
“I just asked a question: Can we do it?”
Do it, Elliott has, traveling the more than 11,000 miles from his home in Perth – the most remote major city in the world – to Northern Kentucky.
Asked how he would tell the folks back home where he is now, “Elliott agreed with his buddy Robinson that geography is not his focus right now.
“This is the only place in America where I’ve ever been,” Elliott says. “I describe it (Northern Kentucky) as the place where I am and the right place for me . . . the right place.”
NKU basketball fans can only hope that he’s right.
2025-2026 NKU Men’s Basketball roster
2025-2026 NKU Men’s Basketball schedule
