HOUSTON — David Vanterpool has played professional basketball in Italy, China, and Russia and coached in the N.B.A., yet even he was surprised on his first visit to Florida Atlantic University.
Vanterpool, who most recently served as an assistant coach with the Nets during the 2021-22 season, first set foot on the school’s 850-acre, palm-tree lined campus in Boca Raton, Fla., in January. He was on a recruiting visit with his son, Devin, a guard who is getting ready to graduate high school. It was a balmy 85 degrees, and they stayed at a nearby beachside hotel. (“Winning in paradise” is the school’s marketing tagline, and “1.8 miles to the beach” is stamped on its arena floor.)
“I asked if they could add me to the scholarship they offered my son and put me in some masters courses or something like that,” Vanterpool joked.
Devin Vanterpool ended up verbally committing to Florida Atlantic on March 12, one day after the Owls won the Conference USA tournament, which earned them an automatic bid to the N.C.A.A. men’s tournament. A few days later, Florida Atlantic started its current run of four wins in the national tournament to reach the Final Four. On Saturday night, the No. 9 Owls will meet No. 5 San Diego State in a national semifinal, with the winner facing either Connecticut or Miami on Monday for the championship.
The Vanterpools had a leg up on many others when it came to their familiarity with Florida Atlantic, a university many people had never heard of beyond a line in a March Madness bracket challenge. (Some basics: The team is named the Owls because the main campus is an owl sanctuary. It also sits on the former Boca Raton Army Air Field, which was used in World War II for radar training, well before the university officially opened in 1964.)
Florida Atlantic’s deep tournament run this year seemed to come out of nowhere. The team had only one previous tournament appearance, yet it has won 11 straight games.
“We describe the university a lot as an upstart stock,” said Brian White, Florida Atlantic’s athletic director. “It’s crazy how young we are, not only as an athletic department, but as a university.”
White said one area that the university had been developing in was its housing, with two new dorms that have been filled and a need for more.
“We had 300-plus kids living at the Fairfield Inn last year because we couldn’t quite house them on campus, so the demand is already high,” he said. “And with this basketball run, it’s going to go through the roof.”
White traces the rise of the athletic program to the school’s decision to hire Howard Schnellenberger as its director of football operations in 1998 and later as its football coach. He had previously led Miami to a national championship in 1983, coached at Louisville and Oklahoma and also was the head coach of the Baltimore Colts in the early 1970s.
Schnellenberger raised $13 million in pledges, lobbied state lawmakers for support and coined the phrase “football in paradise” as a recruiting tool.
Jim Rosemurgy, who attended the University of Wisconsin as an undergraduate and then the University of California, Berkeley, for a graduate school, moved to Boca Raton in 1970 and has been a prominent booster for Florida Atlantic ever since.
He said the school made a decision around the time he arrived to invest in sports as a way to enhance its overall profile and draw more applicants from out of state.
“They wanted to be a top-tier university,” he said. “They decided that sports had to be part of that mission.”
Florida Atlantic is less known for its athletic achievements than for being a last-chance saloon for coaches: Schnellenberger, Lane Kiffin, Willie Taggart and Tom Herman in football, and Mike Jarvis and Matt Doherty in basketball.
The work in progress has included some needed improvements to the facilities. Dusty May, Florida Atlantic’s coach, said that after he accepted the job in 2018, he immediately felt some regret after seeing where the team would work.
An assistant coach, Todd Abernethy, said that among other improvements, the team used a $3 million donation to turn a yoga studio that had been unused during the coronavirus pandemic into an informal practice space, calling it “The Bubble” after the N.B.A.’s decision to finish its 2020 season at Walt Disney World.
The converted studio is not a full court, but it is a place to get up shots. The space consists of two baskets with 3-point arcs and another two baskets with free-throw lines.
“The funniest thing is ‘The Bubble’ is right above Dusty’s office,” Abernathy said. “And so it sounds like elephants are on top of us. When he’s there early in the morning, and somebody’s pounding, we’ll say, ‘Hey, go to the other basket, if you don’t mind.’”
White said he had extended May’s contract multiple times already, and that he wanted to do so again after this run.
“I’d be crazy if I wasn’t going to give him a really good extension after this year,” White said.
May’s name has been linked to bigger jobs, though many of the high-major openings have already been filled during Florida Atlantic’s run. Next season, the university will move to the American Athletic Conference.
“I learned a long time ago you never mess with happy,” May said on Friday. “At this point in my career, I couldn’t be any more pleased and happy with where we are and just excited to continue building.”
This week, some of the Owls players shot outdoors close to the beach, Abernethy said, to get used to the depth perception issues that come when playing in a football arena, where the baskets have a significant amount of space behind them and the players compete on an elevated floor.
It was the latest chapter in what has been a season-long embrace of beach culture for the Owls.
“We call ourselves the Beach Boys,” said Brandon Weatherspoon, a guard who transferred from a junior college. “Earlier this year when we were playing Western Kentucky, they said we were the beach boys, calling us soft.”
Then, he explained, “We just took it and ran with it.”
Weatherspoon said that arriving in Houston for the Final Four had helped the players realize the significance of their run.
“Ten, 15 years from now we’ll come back to Boca knowing we’ve been to the Final Four,” he said.
“When we first started,” he added, “this wasn’t a goal.”
Billy Witz contributed reporting.