Georgetown men’s basketball head coach Ed Cooley is ready for the 2025-26 season. In an October interview with the Voice, he said he aims to return to the BIG EAST championship and engage the broader Georgetown community. These may sound bold given the team’s losing conference record last year, but Cooley has confidence and a lofty plan for the program.
Just under three weeks out from the team’s Nov. 3 opener against Morgan State, Cooley admitted it is still “too early to say” who the starting five will be. He said he is prioritizing overall “development” on the court over rigid roles for players. With this philosophy, Cooley wants this to be the season Georgetown “competes for a BIG EAST championship,” bids for an NCAA tournament berth, and is recognized as “the most hard-playing and connected team in America.”
But he won’t just focus on on-court development. He wants his players to “be an example to other student athletes” and show that education, community, and engagement are as important as their sports. Beyond that, he said he wants to foster players who are fun to be around and, ideally, who stick around.
Following the end of the 2024-25 season, the Hoyas lost two key players to the NBA: graduate guard Micah Peavy and freshman center Thomas Sorber. Cooley said it will be a “team effort to fill the shoes” of Peavy and Sorber.
While most Georgetown players do not leave to join the NBA after just one season as Hoyas, many have transferred to other institutions in hopes of receiving more playing time or a better chance at development. The transfer portal has created a high rate of turnover for all teams and Georgetown is no exception.
Another change the transfer portal has brought to the sport is a decreased emphasis on high school recruitment. Cooley was quick to highlight that although the Hoyas have no academic freshmen, they have athletic freshmen in Seal Diouf and Julius Halaifonua, who spent last season redshirted—kept out of play for a year to extend their eligibility.
This season, Cooley said he didn’t recruit freshmen so he could have an older team on the court who could bring more developed skills and experience. Last season, Georgetown men’s basketball was one of the youngest teams among those in the nation’s top conferences. The Hoyas, who finished seventh of the eleven BIG EAST teams last season, stand to benefit from a more veteran roster.
The age of homegrown, four-year student athletes seems to be a relic of a bygone era, like the days when Georgetown regularly competed for national championships. Nobody epitomizes that era more than John Thompson Jr., whose role as head coach at Georgetown from 1972-99 inspired Cooley when he was just a college player.
Cooley continues to recognize Thompson’s impact, both on the program and on the diversification of head coaches. Thompson was the first Black coach to win a NCAA championship. He led a generation in combating racism and socioeconomic barriers, including through his walkout protesting an NCAA rule that threatened to eliminate athletic scholarships for low-income students.
“I am only head coach because of that vision,” said Cooley, who is also Black, in reference to Thompson’s pioneering tenure.
Cooley envisioned what he wanted to do from a young age; even as the youngest of seven children, he said he was “born to lead,” and that he knew he “was going to be a head coach.” But Cooley said Thompson’s activism and success painted a clearer path for him to get there.
Cooley acknowledged that Thompson’s work is not yet finished, noting that the BIG EAST’s 11 teams have just four Black head coaches, despite the large percentage of minority players on their rosters. Doing the math on the spot, Cooley listed the ratios of current Black head coaches across other major NCAA conferences: of the 68 men’s basketball teams in the Big Ten, SEC, Big 12, and ACC conferences, just 25% have Black head coaches.
Georgetown is Cooley’s third appointment as head coach, following stints at conference rival Providence and Fairfield, which he led to a 2011 MAAC championship. When asked if coaching at Georgetown changed his leadership style, he said that “you have to adapt to your environment.”
“You always have to evolve or devolve,” Cooley said. He holds both himself and the team to this standard.
To kickstart the program’s return to national dominance, Cooley believes Georgetown must first be competitive in the name, image, and likeness (NIL) world, which “puts you in the hemisphere to compete.” Now that student athletes can profit off their NIL, colleges with dominant brands have greater recruitment appeal.
Cooley also hit upon recruiting athletes who are good for the program and who stay healthy—particularly important after star player Sorber’s February 2025 injury took him out of play for part of the 2024-25 season, to the noticeable detriment of the Hoyas’ defense.
Georgetown’s last need, according to Cooley, is a home-court advantage. Cooley emphasized the power of students, staff, and companies in seeing the games as events. Support from those constituencies is crucial, as there is “power in numbers.” Over the last 10 years, average attendance for home games at Capital One Arena has failed to reach even 50% capacity.
“Be the class,” Cooley said, “to infuse energy and strength back into the D.C. community.”
Of his high expectations for the team this season, including a return to the BIG EAST championship, he holds strong in his optimism. “The word ‘if’ is a nonstarter,” he said, so he instead relies on an active and definitive mindset: “we will.”
