MANHATTAN — It took years of trial and error for Sherron Collins, Tyshawn Taylor and the rest of the Kansas alumni team to crack the code on the Elam Ending.
The Basketball Tournament’s unusual final stanza, in which the fourth-quarter clock stops inside of four minutes and both teams play to a target score set at eight points above the score of the team that currently leads, was not kind to the KU alumni in recent years. They suffered heartbreaking losses in winnable games against Team Colorado (2024) and Heartfire (2025), both in the third round.
Maybe they haven’t mastered it completely, but the pendulum has at least swung back in their direction after they rallied from eight- and four-point deficits at the start of the Elam Ending — and double-digit deficits earlier in the fourth quarter — to knock out the Kansas State alumni in a best-of-three series, shaking off Tuesday’s loss with victories on Wednesday in Topeka and Friday in Manhattan.
Their success was the product of “years of losing,” as Taylor put it.
“We take a little bit and we try to correct it,” Collins said. “Now I think we got a better understanding of what we want to do, how we want to be close and score and how we want to guard and defend, using our timeouts. All of that comes into it.”
Collins, Taylor and their charges will need to reach a higher level of play than ever before if they wish to keep advancing.
“This can’t be the highlight of our (run),” Collins said. “They ain’t come here for that. They ain’t come here just to win this game or win this series. We came here to win the whole thing.”
To do that, they will still need three more victories, although the tournament is single-elimination from here on out. For their upcoming quarterfinal matchup on Monday, they won’t have to travel far: They will head to a familiar venue, Charles Koch Arena in Wichita, to face the Wichita State alumni team AfterShocks, which weathered a stiff test against New Mexico alumni team The Enchantment and rallied from a 14-point deficit to win Friday night’s decisive third game, 73-67.
The AfterShocks are also the defending TBT champions. This will be the first time they have actually faced the KU alumni despite the regional foes repeatedly being placed close to each other in TBT brackets over the last several years.
QJ Peterson, a 6-foot guard who attended VMI, has played in China and is on his way to Turkey next season, scored all nine points for the AfterShocks in their Elam Ending on Friday’s series decider against The Enchantment. Peterson contributed 16 points off the bench, but the headliner as usual was Markus Keene, who tallied 23 points on 8-for-16 shooting.
Keene is a veteran, a 5-foot-9 point guard from Central Michigan — where he famously averaged 30 points per game one year — most recently of the French league who was last year’s TBT MVP. He was, however held to four points in the middle game against The Enchantment, which the former Lobos won.
Marcus Santos-Silva — a 6-foot-7 center who played at VCU and Texas Tech — and former Tulsa guard James Woodard are AfterShocks’ other two imports. The rest of the roster consists of more familiar names, including veterans of last year’s championship squad like Rashard Kelly, Markis McDuffie, Trey Wade and of course former Jayhawk reserve and Wichita native Conner Frankamp.
Taking them on in the so-called Roundhouse, which is consistently among TBT’s best-attended and loudest venues and where they have been extremely difficult to beat over the course of many years, will be quite a challenge.
Tipoff is set for 8 p.m. on Monday night, and the game will be televised on FS1. The winner will face either a Kentucky or Syracuse alumni team on Wednesday.
