High school graduation is the end of the road for most high school athletes.
For men’s basketball, there are only around 5,600 Division I spots available to the domestic and international scenes full of top talent. Crossing over into the adult world means you likely won’t be able to find high-level opportunities to compete in the sport you love.
At NC State, men’s club basketball provides students with a chance to continue playing at a high level and even compete on a national stage. This year, a youthful team of NC State students went all the way to the 2026 NIRSA national championship game, falling in overtime to Utah Valley.
Jack Williamson, a first-year studying business administration, along with many others on the team, could have pursued opportunities to play DII or DIII ball. But he chose to attend NC State instead.
“College basketball was never my move,” Williamson said. “I never thought that I was going to be a college basketball player, and even when I got good enough, I knew that I wanted to focus more on my life in education rather than sports. And club basketball is a really good thing for me that I found because I could focus on academics, and I could come to my dream school while also being able to play basketball at a high level.”
It all came together at the end of the year for the clubbers, but for much of the season, the squad was disjointed and inefficient.
“We split into the [A and B teams] around halfway through the year,” Williamson said. “Who they thought were the best 11 guys to take to nationals. And very early on, we had some struggles. We would lose to the B team, or we would play them close, and that’s not how it’s really supposed to go. We have the best team, so we’re supposed to kind of beat down on them.”
Even as the national tournament approached, there were still questions about the capabilities of the team.
“Being completely honest, we had a pretty rough year, and we were pretty unsure about our performance going into nationals,” Kaleb Roope, a second-year studying business administration and team MVP, said. “I feel like we really dialed in as a team and kind of solidified our identity.”
To open the national tournament hosted in Madison, Wisconsin, the squad handled Northwest Missouri State with ease before taking on Grand Canyon, a tougher squad who had won the NIRSA title in 2024. A win over Grand Canyon stamped NC State as the team to beat, and they upheld that reputation with a dominant performance versus Loyola Chicago. Then with a win versus Penn State — the 2025 NIRSA champion — the Pack was headed back to the semifinals to face Gonzaga.
The semifinal game was more of the same for the Pack, who laid down the hammer on Gonzaga.
“We came out with a lot of energy, and we’re going to the national championship, and we hadn’t played a game within 10 [points] yet,” Williamson said.
The only team left in the way was Utah Valley.
“We were feeling really good, we were feeling really confident,” Williamson said. “We hadn’t been hit in the mouth yet, and they came out and hit us in the mouth. They just ended up hitting some shots on the stretch that we didn’t hit. But, I mean, I think if we play that game 10 times, we win it six or seven of them.”
The Wolfpack clubbers did not leave Wisconsin with a NIRSA title, but at the end of the day, that’s not what club sports is about. It’s about making life-long friends, having fun and getting an opportunity to compete in the sport you love.
“If you asked everybody on the team what their favorite moment was of that weekend, I’m sure more than half of them would say something off the court rather than on the court,” Williamson said. “… We were all best friends off the court too. So the Airbnb, we were laughing all the time. Buffalo Wild Wings … We were all laughing and having fun.”
