Wyoming Cowboys Retain Three Starters, Wicks Eyes Championship Contention

Three starting guards are staying put at the Arena-Auditorium, and Sundance Wicks has declared Year 3 of his Wyoming rebuild officially open for championship business.

Wicks confirmed that guards Naz Meyer, Uriyah Rojas, and Khaden Bennett will return for the 2026-27 season, along with forwards Gavin Gores and 6-foot-9 redshirt freshman Neil Summers. Together, the five returning players represent 50% of the Cowboys' production from a season that finished 18-15 with UW's first NIT appearance since 2003.

"Our future is so bright with these young guys, and that's our biggest plight right now at Wyoming is retention so we can have the consistency to compete for championships," Wicks said.

Five Cowboys entered the transfer portal this offseason, including guards Damarion Dennis, Jared Harris, and Adam Harakow and big men Simm-Marten Saadi and Abou Magassa, carving holes into a roster that just reached the postseason. Wicks has begun filling them through the spring portal window, which opened April 7 and closes April 21. His first addition: forward Michael Mora from Cal State Monterey, where Mora averaged 17.2 points per game last season, tied for the league lead, and earned all-conference honors. Wyoming assistant Nick Whitmore previously served as head coach at Cal State Monterey, a connection that proved useful in bringing Mora to Laramie.

The 18-win total was the program's best since the 2021-22 squad that reached the NCAA Tournament First Four, and the NIT bid was only the program's second since 2003. Wyoming fell 74-70 to Wichita State at Koch Arena in the NIT first round, capping a season that had also included a 73-70 Mountain West Tournament loss to UNLV in Las Vegas.

Those results mark the midpoint of a three-part rebuild Wicks laid out publicly when he arrived as the Cowboys' 23rd head coach on May 12, 2024. Year 1 was survival: Wyoming went 12-20 after Wicks assembled a roster of seven transfers in just 27 days. Year 2 was improvement: the Cowboys reached 18-15 and the postseason. Year 3, now underway, is the championship push.

The roadmap carries credibility because of what Wicks did before arriving in Laramie. At Wisconsin-Green Bay, he inherited a program that had gone 3-29, then guided it to 18-14 in a single season, a 15-win improvement that ranked as the ninth-biggest single-season turnaround in NCAA Division I history. That earned him the Joe B. Hall National Coach of the Year Award, given annually to the top first-year Division I head coach.

Supporting the rebuild financially, Athletics Director Tom Burman signed a five-year, $4.5 million jersey patch deal with Tallgrass Energy, a Kansas-based energy infrastructure company. The revenue flows into men's basketball, women's basketball, football, wrestling, and volleyball, giving the athletic department a broader financial foundation to retain and recruit talent in the revenue-sharing era.

The Cowboys play at the Arena-Auditorium, the 11,612-seat venue nicknamed the "Dome of Doom" that opened in 1982 and sits at 7,220 feet, the highest NCAA Division I basketball court in the country. Wicks, a Gillette native who spent three seasons as an assistant at Wyoming under Jeff Linder before leaving for Green Bay, has pointed to program legends Larry Nance Jr., Josh Davis, Fennis Dembo, and Eric Leckner as benchmarks for the multi-year development culture he intends to restore.

With the portal window still open through April 21 and three starters already secured, the Cowboys' third year is beginning to take the shape Wicks always said it would.