Oct. 29—Eastern Washington's three-game exhibition schedule this season took on more significance than usual, largely because two of the Eagles men's basketball team's key contributors are returning from layoffs that spanned not just one offseason, but two.
"I was nervous, but I was more excited," fifth-year guard Andrew Cook said after Eastern's 71-65 victory over Cal State Bakersfield on Oct. 18. "I feel like I've worked super hard to get back here."
For Cook, that exhibition — the first of three the Eagles played before the regular season that starts Nov. 2 at Stanford — was a landmark day. The last basketball game he played in was on March 8, 2025, when Northern Arizona eliminated the Eagles from the Big Sky Conference Tournament.
Cook led the Eagles with 24 points against Bakersfield, something the Eagles will look for him to do regularly as they begin a season of high expectations.
Cook's return is a significant reason for the Eagles' optimism, but so is the return of senior Alton Hamilton IV. Cook and Hamilton were named preseason all-Big Sky Conference selections. As a team, the Eagles were predicted to finish third in the 11-team league by coaches and media members.
"The expectations for this team are to win games late in March," Hamilton said in September. "And to get off to a faster start than we did last year."
Eastern didn't get its third win last season until Jan. 10. By then it had lost 13 games, including two in conference play.
But the Eagles won 10 of their next 15 games after that, earning the No. 3 seed in the Big Sky Tournament, where they lost in the semifinals to No. 7 seed Idaho.
Of the seven players who logged the most minutes for the team last year, just one returns. That's Hamilton, who in his first season of Division I basketball averaged 28 minutes, 13.5 points and 5.7 rebounds per game.
That might seem like a recipe for a rebuild, but the return of Cook — the team's leading scorer in 2024-25 at 15.8 points per game — gives them a proven scorer to pair with Hamilton. And the Eagles will rely on a core of returners and a handful of newcomers to backfill the production they graduated off last year's team.
Redshirt junior forward Emmett Marquardt, the program's longest-tenured player, is back after averaging 5.5 points and 2.8 rebounds last season. Sophomore guard Cole Scherer, who appeared in 29 games (and started 12) as a freshman, will likely see an increased role.
Hamilton, Cook and Marquardt started against Bakersfield and were joined by senior transfer Jalen Griffith and redshirt sophomore Jamil Miller, another transfer who played at Gonzaga Prep who stepped away from basketball last season after playing for Kennesaw State in 2024-25.
Griffith may be the Eagles' most proven 3-point shooter and its best distributor. He made 47 of 114 3s last season at Western Michigan, where he averaged 22.9 minutes, 11.9 points and 3.4 assists.
Eastern's nonconference schedule tilts, as usual, toward road games against power conference opponents. The Eagles will play at Stanford, Oregon, Oregon State and Utah in November, sandwiched around their home-opener against Corban on Nov. 13.
It's the sort of stretch that has hurt Eastern's overall record in years past but has also prepared them well for the rigors of the Big Sky schedule: Over the last 12 years, the Eagles have finished with a winning record in league play 11 times.
