RALEIGH, N.C. – Early morning. Dead of summer. The Florida basketball team had just wrapped a sweltering workout that started and finished with a rope run across campus bracketed around a grueling series of uphill sprints.

Strength/conditioning coach Victor Lopez huddled the players for the customary “Gators on 3!” dismissal when the sign-off was interrupted. 

“No, we ain’t done!” Alijah Martin snapped. 

Martin, one of the new guys but also the oldest Gator in the bunch, laid into his new teammates. Their performance, effort and tempo wasn’t good enough, he railed. Not for a group with such high goals. Martin even took a jab at the coaches and managers on hand, who he thought needed to show more energy and enthusiasm from the sidelines.

Real talk from a real dude with real intentions and a really impressive resume of winning to back it up. 

“I can’t speak for everybody who was there,” UF associate head coach Korey McCray said. “But I liked it.” 

In time, the Gators learned to love it. The 6-foot-2, 210-pound fifth-year guard wasted no time setting expectations that his teammates had no choice but to embrace. Martin was a proven winner whose reputation not only proceeded his arrival in Gainesville, but made him a college basketball headliner as he helped lead Florida Atlantic on one of the all-time great Cinderella runs to the 2023 Final Four. 

After getting the Owls back to the ’24 NCAA Tournament, Martin entered the transfer portal at the same time UF went looking for a difference-maker on defense, an area where the team had struggled mightily despite winning 24 games.

If the Gators wanted Martin, they were going to have to accept the whole pit bull package. 

“That was just my passion and experience coming out. I know what it takes to win and what everybody has to put into it to win,” Martin said Thursday from Lenovoa Center, where he’ll take the floor Friday night for fourth-ranked and top-seeded Florida (30-4) when it opens the ’25 NCAA Tournament against 16-seed Norfolk State (24-10). “I didn’t come here because of the [NIL] money or to get another year of college. I could have got a two-way [contract] in the NBA. I came to Florida to win and solidify my career in college. I said what I said and I hope the guys remembered it.” 

They did. 

[Read senior writer Chris Harry‘s “Pregame Stuff” setup here]

“Everyone knew the great player he was, but we saw the greater leader he was that day,” sophomore forward Alex Condon said of Martin, whose FAUM squad won 60 games his last two seasons there  “He came in and wasn’t scared to take the reigns and bring that winning mentality to us.”

Walter Clayton Jr., fresh off a Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Player of the Year season at Iona, was sitting on Coach Todd Golden‘s couch during his official UF visit two years ago when together they watched Martin and the Owls upset third-seeded Kansas State in the Elite Eight to reach the Final Four. Funny how paths cross.

While Clayton was having a second-team All-Southeastern Conference ’23-24 season for the Gators, Martin got his Owls back to the tournament, only to bow out in the first round. A couple months later, they were teammates. Not long after that, Martin was adding his voice to a locker room culture that already had a couple alpha males in Clayton and fellow senior guard Will Richard, neither of whom were put off by Martin’s vocal forwardness.

“We definitely welcomed it,” Clayton said. “You need multiple leaders on the team and we have a team full of them. So for Alijah to come in off the rip and be comfortable holding people accountable by saying something they don’t want to hear, yeah, that was a good thing. And it got us to this point.” 

That would be as a 1-seed for just the third time in program history and with a defense that rocketed from No. 94 in efficiency last season to No. 10 this season. Oh, and with a Southeastern Conference Tournament championship trophy already in Golden’s office.

Charting the Gators: Rookie 1-seed coaches

UF coach Todd Golden will try to join a small group of coaches whose first NCAA Tournament victory came as a No. 1 seed. 

Coach	School	Year	Their run
Bill Hodges	Indiana State	1979	Dude named Larry Bird took Sycamores on ride to NCAA title game before losing to dude named Magic Johnson. Basketball hasn’t been the same since.
Terry Holland	Virginia	1981	Center Ralph Sampson was in his second of three straight NCAA Player of the Year seasons; Cavaliers lost to North Carolina in Final Four.
Bill Frieder	Michigan	1985	Roy Tarpley-led Wolverines were upset by 8-seed Villanova in second round, with Wildcats going on to become lowest seed ever to win NCAA title.
Bill Gutheridge	North Carolina	1998	Gutheridge took over after Hall-of-Famer Dean Smith’s surprising retirement two months before season; Tar Heels reached Final Four, but lost to Utah.
Lorenzo Romar	Washington	2005	Huskies had future NBA stars Nate Robinson and Brandon Roy, but lost to Louisville in Sweet 16.
Juwan Howard	Michigan	2021	Franz Wagner and Hunter Dickinson headlined Wolverines during Covid-impacted season that ended with loss to UCLA in Elite Eight at “bubble” NCAA Tournament at Indianapolis.
Tommy Lloyd	Arizona	2022	In his first year following 20 seasons as assistant for Gonzaga’s Mark Few, Lloyd took over for scandal-ridden Wildcats, went 31-3, but lost to Houston in Sweet 16.

* NCAA began seeding teams in 1979

Now comes his NCAA touch. Martin’s four NCAA Tournament wins are four times as many as his teammates’ and head coach have combined. In fact, sophomore center Rueben Chinyelu, who played eight minutes in Washington State’s win over Drake in the first round last season, is the only other UF player who has won a NCAA game. 

“It’s the biggest stage,” Chinyelu said. “It’s the games everybody wants to be in. The intensity is very different, but beautiful.”

Golden is 0-2 in the tournament. He lost in the first round to Murray State in his final game at San Francisco, the day before he was hired at UF. The Gators lost their first-round game last year against Colorado in a 102-100 buzzer-beating shootout when they allowed the Buffaloes to make 63 percent for the floor and during one stretch hit 11 consecutive field goals. 

Martin was targeted for that very reason. 

“We had a lot of guys who were talented and competed last year, but one of the things that maybe was not a strength of ours was communication. Calling guys out. Accountability,” said UF assistant and director of player development Taurean Green, a guy who knows a little something about winning NCAA games (12-0 with two championship rings his last two seasons as Florida’s point guard in ’06-07). “Now that we’re here, first and foremost, we’ve got to play defense. Winning in the tournament starts on the defensive end. We’ve addressed that.”

So has Martin, whenever the moment has called for it. The bar he set, through his words and actions, has basically been mirrored by every member of the team. When he spoke, the Gators listened. He’s as big a reason as any that this remarkable team is in a rare and enviable position. 

How they started last summer wasn’t good enough. A powerful voice spoke out and everyone fell in line.

All to get to this point.  

“You really have to get that first one under your belt and use it as momentum, use it as confidence and get the ball rolling in a tournament setting with the quick turn-arounds,” Martin said. “That first time, yeah, it felt special. I’m hoping to get that same feeling again.” 

Email senior writer Chris Harry at chrish@gators.ufl.edu