CHICAGO — Let us conjure up a fictional college basketball player for the Sweet 16. His name will be Mr. This Can’t Be 2026. That’s because stories like his don’t seem to happen much anymore, so it will require some imagination.
He will never have seen the inside of a transfer portal, but rather be a true one-and-done player. Meaning he picked one school and was done looking. That school will be just down the road, maybe 2 ½ miles from where he grew up with his parents and three sisters, almost as close to campus as the Houston Cougars are to their South regional this week. He will have been in elementary school when he first saw that college team play a game. There he sat with his father in the stands—wishing, hoping, dreaming.
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He will have played on the local high school team and helped win a state championship. His high school coach will be quoted as remembering the day he saw a new face in a youth summer camp, scoring and stealing the ball at will against other third and fourth graders. Except when the coach asks, he’ll be told the little house afire tearing up the court is actually a kindergartner.
Once he lands in college he will be anchored to the starting lineup season after season, feat after feat, roar after roar, as nightly a constant as the national anthem. Players by the hundreds will change college basketball zip codes. Not him. Never him. His parents will be there for the games because they will work at the same university. Both of them. His sisters will often be there, too. They will have gone on to various medical fields. All of them. They will watch their son and brother become a local legend. Emphasis on local.
He will be newly married his senior year, to a girl he first got to know in high school geometry class.
He will be the total hometown-kid-makes-good package. Little tyke in the stands wanting autographs, high school phenom, college star, all-conference scholar-athlete, national defensive player of the year finalist, son, husband. All that in the same town. All that at home.
Wait a second. That’s no fictional character. That’s Tamin Lipsey. And it is 2026.
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The Iowa State-Tennessee game Friday night will showcase one of the more unique roads to March. Lipsey will be playing in his 137th game as a Cyclone, all 137 of them as a starting guard. Father Rob, the director of student support services at Iowa State, will be in the stands to watch. So will mother Holly, the professor of kinesiology. So will wife Samantha.
How does this sort of thing happen in 2026, where the college basketball landscape looks like an airport hub? Perhaps Mom and Dad can help.
“It’s been a long journey,” Rob Lipsey begins. “It’s been the whole buffet of blood, sweat and tears and injuries.
“We didn’t imagine that he would accomplish so much, but we knew where his heart was. We knew his work ethic.
“And we know how much joy he has putting on that uniform.”
Holly adds, “He loves being a Cyclone, we love being Cyclones, it’s just been a fabric of our family for a long time living in Ames. I think that adds even more meaning for us.”
The public at large will see Iowa State’s point guard helping lead the way against Tennessee Friday; a Sweet 16 game with his scoring, his assisting, his defense, his savvy in the middle of it. If All-American Joshua Jefferson can’t go, Lipsey’s contributions will be even more vital. Might be his biggest win yet, might be his last game. A man just never knows in March.
But Rob and Holly Lipsey will see other things, too.
They will see the little boy who worshiped the Iowa State Cyclones and just wanted to meet them. Only now he is the Cyclone the kids want to meet.
“I remember when that was him, he was that kid,” Rob says.
“Little bits of that come back, seeing him on the court, just his dream coming full circle,” Holly says.
They will see the old days when they marked off a 3-point line in the front yard basketball court with chalk, or sometimes gold spray paint. Some of that arc is still there, a faded monument to a childhood of jump shots.
“The neighbors would watch him shoot. From sun up to sun down he was out there,” Rob says.
“When he got into probably middle school we had a younger family move across the street and she’d put the kids to bed, she had two little boys,” Holly says. “They’d be sleeping and Tamin would be out summer nights shooting and they’d look out and watch him. It’s been fun for the neighbors and community, too, because a lot of them have watched him grow up literally.”
They will remember how Tamin came to be Tamin. Pronounced Tay-min. It all started when they found Jamin in a book on baby names. Rob didn’t like J, so they changed to T.
“I really wanted my only son to have a name that would stick out. You don’t hear any other names like Tamin. It just became natural and fun to have a name that none of his friends had,” Rob says.
“Now the negative of it is,” Holly added, “especially track when names are being announced over the intercom, often his name was said wrong many, many times.”
They will see the child who is their youngest, with three sisters ahead of him.
“There’s always been a sense of birth order so the oldest has always led the way whether it’s academic or sports and the others were to follow,” Rob says. “When he got older and bigger than everyone he still remained in his birth order and if he ever got out of line we’d all together make sure he understood it. You’re still the youngest. That was always fun to watch him grow up. He’s not a baby but he’s still the youngest. “
So the pecking order remained in forced. Phaedra, Amara, Teagan and then the brother with 597 career assists and 313 steals.
And they will remember how he never left for somewhere else. College basketball has become a blizzard of moving pieces. Tamin Lipsey stayed put.
“Within our fight song it’s ‘Loyal Sons Forever True’” Rob says. “I think he believes in that, This is his home and he wanted to be a Cyclone his whole life, so I don’t know if leaving here was an option for him.”
Holly mentions the loyalty her son feels to the school and to the coach who recruited him, T.J. Otzelberger. “I think that was a big part of it as well, mutual respect and commitment to coach.”
It will be over soon, this extraordinary journey of a young man who has gone so far by basically staying in one place. Back in Ames, his bedroom has not been changed. It is there whenever he needs it. Meanwhile the parents of this made-in-Iowa tale are proud, but know their home has sent four academic high-achievers into the world. One of them just happened to get 26 points and 10 assists against Kentucky.
“It really just fits into our family,” the father says of his son’s special road traveled. Still, when it ends, it will be impossible for anyone to miss how remarkable it has been.
“It’s always hard to put into words,” Rob Lipsey says of the emotions to come when his son plays his actual final minute as a Cyclone. “We know there’s going to be some tears but at the same time there’s going to be some happiness and elation because he gets to graduate here in a few weeks. It’s really a closed chapter within his life. There’s still more to come with him.”
Tom Izzo talked of college basketball’s challenges Thursday and how “the system is broken.” More Tamin Lipseys would help.
