Sports
Love and basketball: How former pro Pepe Garcia found his second act on Love Island
“I GOT A TEXT!” Chris Seeley shouted the four words which have become synonymous with Love Island before reading a message to the season 7 men in the villa. According to the text, they would be playing a game of 3-on-3 basketball.
The group’s euphoric reaction was swift. They were running, jumping and cheering. “Boys’ day! Boys’ day! Boys’ day!” chants broke out in their confessional. But one Islander, Jose “Pepe” Garcia, had mixed emotions.
It wasn’t due to a lack of confidence in his basketball skills or because he was intimidated by the other team captain, Seeley, who stands at 6-foot-8. After all, Garcia has faced plenty of top athletes as a former professional international basketball player.
An injury — not nerves — caused his reluctance. Garcia told ESPN that he stepped on a nail in the previous challenge, which made it difficult to walk and caused significant bleeding. But that wasn’t going to stop him from playing in this game.
“I’m limping everywhere. So for me, like yeah, I’m excited, but at the same time, I’m like ‘Damn, I can’t even walk,'” Garcia told ESPN last week. “But I was like, it’s good, I’m going, I don’t care. That competitiveness in me came out.”
The game gave the guys a few hours away from the Fiji villa — and set up the second meeting between Garcia and Seeley, who also played professionally overseas. As Garcia later learned from his dad, their first matchup came in high school.
This time around, Garcia scored the first points and nailed a few impressive jumpers, but ultimately, Team Chris won the battle.
“I think the original game was supposed to be to 11 because of my foot,” Garcia said. “And then, of course, like, I was like, now we’re playing at 15, and then I was like, now we’re playing at 21. By the time I got to 21, my sock was full of blood, but I was like, ‘Hey, do we push this to like, 25 or something like that?’
“We just kept wanting to push it and push it.” For a few short hours, the only thing that mattered to Garcia was playing basketball. It all felt familiar.
GARCIA DOESN’T REMEMBER the exact age when he first picked up a basketball, but he remembers when he started taking it seriously: eighth grade. That’s when he joined his first official team, and by high school, he began pushing himself — with a little help.
His freshman year he met coach AC, who would turn out to be an influential figure in his life. Their relationship began with what Garcia thought was a simple offer: Coach AC asked him to come to a workout, free of charge.
Garcia remembers two things about the aftermath of that three- or four-hour session that he still describes as “probably one of the hardest workouts I’ve ever done in my life.” One, he was so exhausted afterward that he sat on the floor completely gassed. And two, what coach AC said to him.
“I remember he told me, ‘Probably won’t see you next week, but you did good today,'” Garcia recalled. “Obviously, I found out years later that he says that to everybody, because it is true that 99% of people that do that workout do not come back the next week. As a 13-year-old, 14-year-old kid, that’s not most kids’ mentalities. And, yeah, I went back.”
And he kept going back. By his senior year at Los Alamitos (CA) High School, Garcia averaged 18.8 points and 3.2 assists per game.
Coach AC had experience coaching talents like Landry Fields and other players who went on to professional careers overseas. Leaning on his mentor, Garcia asked what it took to reach those heights, and learned that he didn’t need to attend Kentucky or Duke to have a rewarding basketball career.
There were plenty of other Division I schools to choose from that could serve as the steppingstone to reach his ultimate goal of playing pro. He chose nearby Cal State Fullerton.
“Having people like Kyle Allman Jr. and Khalil Ahmad, these two freaking hoopers that I get to play against every single day, that are just dogs really. I mean — they’re playing at insanely high levels — going against them every single day, it was like, ‘Alright, this is the best steppingstone you could ever ask for.'”
Garcia didn’t see much action on the court, but he stayed with the Titans from 2017-19 before deciding that he wanted to leave and get an agent.
“Being born in Spain, I had the opportunity to go and just play in Spain, not for any professional team; nobody actually called me, like from a specific team. They just said, ‘Hey, we have this thing. We want you to come. We know [you were born in Spain]. We know you don’t count as a Spaniard; you count as an American, but still, we want you to come play,'” he told ESPN.
Garcia took the opportunity and said that after his first experience, he received offers to play for overseas teams. According to Promo Sport, a FIBA certified agency, he played in Spain from 2019-21. And then went on to join Mexico’s Fuerza Regia and Toros Torreón from 2021-2022 — where he averaged 9 points, 1.4 rebounds and shot 35% from the 3-point line. He capped off his career back in Spain in 2023.
He told ESPN that his final season in Spain was “brutal” due to a lingering knee injury from the year prior. The plan was to go back to Mexico and play, but Garcia said that after completing his preseason evaluation, the team owner told him his patellar tendon was “completely dead” and that there was potential of it snapping again.
“And I remember my dad telling me that when I got home, ‘It’s going to end at some point,” Garcia said. “As a kid, you don’t think about it. And the stupid thing that I did was, as a pro athlete, I wasn’t thinking about it either.”
He finally took time to contemplate his future and ultimately decided to call it a career and focus on his next chapter in life as a personal trainer.
Garcia looks back fondly on his time playing overseas. It not only allowed him to live out his dream but also allowed him to find a new hobby he still holds close to him, playing the guitar. But he recognized that there were challenges that came with the lifestyle. From the time changes that affected calling loved ones to missing holidays to struggles in his dating life.
For years, he spent half of his time in Europe or Mexico and the other half at home in Los Angeles, so he dated with the intent to ultimately move on.
“I would try to date people from the States, but again, I’m living in Spain,” he said. “So, it just turned into, you’re talking to people, and it just never goes anywhere. So yeah, it definitely interfered with it all.”
ALL IT TOOK was one viral TikTok video for Garcia to start getting noticed. After one in particular blew up, reality TV shows — including Love Island — began reaching out. He shared the message he received from Love Island to an old college group chat and one of his friends, Ryan, reached out to him separately.
“He tells me, ‘I love Love Island. It’s the best show in the freaking world. If you’re gonna do any reality TV show, you have to do that one. You’ll love it,'” Garcia recalled. “It was like a four-page text, just the longest text I’ve ever had. And I was like, man, you know what? He convinced me to do it.”
The Love Island franchise is no stranger to having athletes appear on the show. Season 7 of LIUSA alone had three in Garcia, Seeley and TJ Palma, who was a part of the University of Tampa’s 2024 DII national championship baseball team.
Garcia, Seeley and the rest of the male contestants bonded over their shared love of basketball throughout the season.
“Every lunch and dinner, there’s a ‘I can beat you 1-on-1,’ or ‘Us three can beat you three, or us five can beat you five,'” he said. “It was just the topic of way too much.”
And the contestants’ wish was the producers’ command. After the group basketball game, the vibes continued to be high. Seeley even went as far as to say in the show’s final family dinner that playing basketball with the guys was “probably the most fun I’ve ever had.”
Garcia and Iris Kendall ultimately finished the dating show in fourth place — however, the two are speculated to no longer be together after they unfollowed each other on Instagram.
The summer still turned out to be life-changing for Garcia. He now has 1.4 million followers on Instagram, had the opportunity to attend the Los Angeles Chargers’ training camp and, most recently, played in the Big3 celebrity game.
“It’s, it’s unbelievable, you know.”
“You know as a kid, it’s like, I wish I could do this for a living,” Garcia said. “Now I get to go and play at the Big3 celebrity game, and I get to go and meet the Chargers and hang out with the guys … So blessed to be able to do all of that, and thankful that I get to do it all.”
When the Big3 reached out to him, he asked his management team if it could make it happen, and it did.
“I got to meet Ice Cube, I met Shaq, I met Mark Cuban, and I met all these people,” he said. “I got to chop it with Ochocinco, who is someone that I looked up to when I was younger. I got to hang out with Dez Bryant and Waka Flocka. It’s like, I mean people that I grew up watching, and now I’m just playing basketball with them on the same court.”
Garcia said there’s still a lot more to come from him as he continues to live out his new dream. But on Monday, Aug. 25, the Love Island Reunion will air, representing the highly anticipated final chapter of this unique experience (at least for now).
There’s bound to be drama and heated discussions, but Garcia was tight-lipped on any potential spoilers. His one-word preview? “Fun.”
Ball State has fired men’s basketball coach Michael Lewis after four seasons, the school announced Saturday.
The Cardinals ended their season with an 85-69 win over Central Michigan in the regular-season finale Friday to finish on a four-game winning streak but still missed the Mid-American Conference tournament after posting a 12-19 (7-11 MAC) record.
“We are grateful to Coach Lewis for the passion and commitment he brought to our program the past four years,” athletic director Jeff Mitchell said in a statement. “We appreciate the time and effort he invested in our student-athletes.”
Lewis went 61-64 in his four seasons at the helm of the Cardinals. He won 20 games in Year 1, finishing fourth in the MAC, but was unable to replicate his early success. Ball State has finished 7-11 in conference play in each of the past three seasons, going 41-52 during that time.
Lewis was a longtime power conference assistant before being tapped to take over at Ball State in 2022. He spent time on staffs at UCLA, Nebraska and Butler, working under three different coaches during his time with the Bulldogs. He was an assistant coach at Eastern Illinois and Stephen F. Austin prior to Brad Stevens hiring him at Butler.
His coaching career began as a graduate assistant at Texas Tech under Bob Knight, whom he played for in college at Indiana. Lewis was the Hoosiers’ team captain and an all-conference performer as a senior in 1999-00.
Had Michigan star Yaxel Lendeborg just seen a ghost?
His Wolverines — then the No. 1 team in the country — were used to overwhelming opponents on the glass and in the paint. Instead, they had just been outrebounded and outscored by Cameron Boozer and the No. 3 Duke Blue Devils, and Lendeborg couldn’t find the words to describe the superstar freshman.
“Um … man … um,” Lendeborg hedged when asked about Boozer’s play after the Feb. 21 game, shaking his head and trailing off.
Boozer has had that mystifying effect on every opponent he has faced when the stakes are high.
Clutch performances throughout the 2025-26 campaign have made him the clear favorite for national player of the year honors in a season that features arguably the most talented freshman class of the one-and-done era, not to mention multiple returning All-Americans. The gap between the 18-year-old and the country’s other elite players was widened in the win over Michigan, thanks to his game-altering 3-pointer and the draw of a key goaltending call in the final minutes.
Lendeborg was not the first star Boozer humbled this season. He had 24 points and 23 rebounds against Tennessee’s Nate Ament in a preseason win. Projected NBA draft lottery picks Darius Acuff Jr. and Thomas Haugh could only watch in awe as Boozer scored 64 points combined in wins over Arkansas and Florida, respectively. Boozer also bulldozed Jeremy Fears Jr. and Michigan State to the tune of 18 points and 15 rebounds. Meanwhile, the ACC is still trying to catch its breath from Boozer’s spectacular efforts throughout conference play, with rival North Carolina up next in Saturday’s regular-season finale (6:30 p.m. on ESPN) — a game that could seal Duke’s bid for the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament.
“We’ve been in a lot of big-time games, a lot of close games, against a lot of highly ranked teams or talked-about teams,” Boozer said about himself and his brother Cayden, also a five-star freshman for the Blue Devils. “So I feel like just being in a lot of those moments prepares you for this.”
Those who have watched the rise of Boozer — son of Carlos Boozer, a former NBA All-Star who won a title with Duke in 2001 — would agree. There is a common thread that ties his basketball career together, from middle school to present day: He’s a defensive dilemma not only because of his size, relentless motor, intellect and a skill set that has made a him a projected top-three pick in the 2026 NBA draft, but also because of the way the game seems to slow down for him in the highest-pressure moments.
Boozer won four state titles with Columbus High School at Florida’s highest level of prep basketball. He led the Explorers to a national title in 2025. His AAU team, the Nightrydas, won three consecutive Nike EYBL crowns. He was co-MVP of last year’s McDonald’s All American game. He won Gatorade Player of the Year twice, plus two gold medals with USA Basketball. That level of dominance means the same question opponents have always asked about Boozer will take center stage in March: How do you stop him?
Kansas’ Darryn Peterson might have the highest NBA ceiling in this freshman class. And BYU’s AJ Dybantsa is its most entertaining and explosive talent. But Boozer is, well, the winningest.
Every time championships have been on the line in his career, Boozer has won. And in the clutch moments of crucial games, he has delivered.
“It’s his greatest tool. It’s his greatest asset,” Miami head coach Jai Lucas, a former Duke assistant who recruited Boozer, said. “It’s like he’s been there before, and he’s been that way since he was in seventh, eighth grade. He’s always played with an older vibe, a veteran vibe about him.
“No moment, no situation is too big for him.”
Andrew Moran’s phone buzzed the night before a regional matchup in the 2022 Florida state playoffs.
As the Columbus High School coach was preparing his squad to face its next opponent, Boozer — a team captain as just a 14-year-old freshman — had watched the film and written a scouting report. He noted the hand signals the opposing coach had used for each set.
“It had descriptions of their plays and it had the time stamps in which it happened during the game. And at first I was confused,” said Moran, who is now an assistant at Miami. “I looked at it and I was like, ‘What the hell is he sending me?’ And then I realized, ‘Oh man, this guy is sending me detailed stuff.’ So for me, I was like, ‘This is another level of preparation at this age.'”
Boozer fell in love with the game early.
There is video of a seventh-grade Boozer blocking shots into the parents section of former NBA All-Star Chris Paul’s middle school combine in 2019, dribbling behind his back and throwing full-court passes. He already had a bag of skills players his age clearly couldn’t match.
“That’s a throwback. I think I had yellow hair back then,” Boozer said, referencing the gold hairstyle he sported at the time.
When the pandemic closed schools and gyms around the country, Boozer and his buddies played pickup games every day, sometimes in the rain, often on the full court at his house. That’s when his friends noticed a shift.
Dante Allen was Boozer’s AAU teammate then. He asked his father, Malik Allen, an assistant coach for the Miami Heat, to put their pickup crew through drills before playing 5-on-5. It was already evident Boozer had the tools to be a great player, but the drills showcased how his intensity was growing.
“I think that’s definitely when he started to get a lot better as a basketball player,” Dante Allen said. “I’d say every drill, he was very intentional with it. There was no point where he was going anything less than a 100% speed with it, just trying to be the best that he can. And then once we started playing pickup, it was just carrying over everything that we’d been doing, all the lessons he’d learned.”
During his freshman year at Columbus High School, Boozer’s combination of brains and brawn thrust his team into the state championship game against Dr. Phillips High School’s roster of now-Division I players Denzel Aberdeen (Kentucky), Ernest Udeh Jr. (Miami) and Riley Kugel (UCF). Boozer scored a team-high 17 points to help Columbus High capture its first state title.
“It was the biggest matchup that we had at that point, and he was just really poised and got us to the win,” Cayden Boozer said.
The victories piled up from there as Cameron’s game evolved.
Coach Mark Griseck figured his Windermere High School team would have its hands full against Boozer and a Columbus team seeking its fourth consecutive state title last year. Early in the game, he said, Boozer set the tone.
“The first time my point guard got hit with a ball screen from Boozer, he goes, ‘Man, it took me about three or four trips back down the court to get my senses back,'” said Griseck, whose team lost 68-36. “Because Boozer set a screen on him and it almost knocked him out. And it wasn’t illegal. It was just a screen by a tree.”
The opposing players in that lopsided affair noticed not only Boozer’s skills and dominance, but also the way he orchestrated the action on the court.
“He was anchoring his offense and not only anchoring it but calling out the plays,” said TJ Drain, a Windermere alum who now plays at Liberty. “He was very vocal with his teammates in encouragement, and that really stood out to me. Whether it was a good pass or a great cut or he’d say, ‘I know you’re going to finish the next one.'”
Boozer’s family background gave him a head start in basketball. His determination did the rest. To those who have witnessed his development, his success at Duke isn’t surprising. They saw the seeds of what he blossomed into a long time ago.
“He’s getting wherever he wants to,” Allen said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a 7-foot, 300-pound player in front of him or if it’s a pesky guard in front of him, Cam is going to get wherever he wants, regardless. And I think the really hard part about that is that he can get wherever he wants to and then the fact that he’s going to make the right play.”
Exactly 32 hours before Notre Dame was set to tip off against Duke, Fighting Irish head coach Micah Shrewsberry was concerned about how his team would handle Boozer.
Those worries were justified. Notre Dame scored only 22 points in the first half. Boozer had 20 on his own. The Blue Devils went on to win 100-56.
“I’m pretty sure he and his brother were probably dominating when they were 8-year-olds, all the way through,” said Shrewsberry, who left the game in a walking boot after suffering an Achilles injury while he coached his team. “He plays as hard as anybody out there. There is no arrogance to him. It looks like winning’s really important to him, and he’s going to do whatever it takes to win.”
1:05
Cameron Boozer tallies a double-double in Duke’s win
Cameron Boozer scores 24 points and grabs 13 rebounds in Duke’s rout over Notre Dame.
Howard head coach Kenny Blakeney knows what it takes to win, too. He was on the Duke team that won its second straight national title in 1992. Having played with Christian Laettner, Grant Hill and Bobby Hurley, Blakeney also knows talent. And he realized Boozer is a lot more than that when his Bison played the Blue Devils in November, saying the “ginormous” Boozer plays like a “baby Jokic” — comparing him to three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic.
“If you watch the Duke game against us, Duke was closing out the game, running ball screens for a 6-foot-9, 250-pound dude to get downhill and make decisions,” Blakeney said. “He shoots it well. He’s an incredible passer. He can do whatever he wants to do on the low block.
“It’s like the criticism from what I hear is that he’s not bouncy enough. Well, you can’t stop the stuff that he can do, so he doesn’t need to be.”
It was only this time last year that Cooper Flagg was authoring one of the greatest freshman campaigns in the one-and-done era. And Boozer is arguably outplaying him.
Boozer is averaging more points (22.6 vs. 19.2) and rebounds (10.0 vs. 7.5) than Flagg, and nearly as many assists (4.0 vs. 4.2). Boozer is also a better 3-point shooter and is playing more minutes. His current 135.3 offensive rating would set a record in the KenPom era (since 2003-04) if it holds. And he has led Duke to its best start (28-2) since 1998-99, when that squad started 29-1 (and won 32 games in a row).
Boozer has an opportunity to end his career as one of the greatest freshmen of all time — not just at Duke. According to data scientist Evan Miya, Boozer is having the best season in college basketball since at least 2009-10, surpassing Zach Edey’s second consecutive Wooden Award season in 2023-24 (25.2 PPG, 12.2 RPG, 2.0 BPG).
“I just think he’s wired for it. He lives it,” Duke head coach Jon Scheyer said. “He’s incredibly prepared going into the games of understanding the different coverages he can see. I mean, we’ve seen so many different defenses, whether it’s doubles or single coverage or heavy plugs, whatever it is. I credit his preparation. I credit the fact that he just lives it every single day.”
At the next level, Boozer will compete against players who might have traits he lacks. He’s not an above-the-rim threat or walking “SportsCenter” highlight like Dybantsa and Peterson, who are projected to go ahead of him in the NBA draft. But Boozer is a complete player with a knack for navigating adversity to win games.
“One of his biggest intangibles is a winning pedigree. Championships, MVPs, gold medals, he’s won at every stop, at a high level, and is a primary contributor on a team that is in position to win it all in April,” one NBA executive told ESPN. “He seems to be about all the right things.
“His actions indicate that he cares about winning, playing the game the right way, handling his business with maturity and professionalism.”
On Saturday, Boozer will lead Duke into its regular-season finale against North Carolina, the ACC outright title already in hand. After that, the Blue Devils will ask him to do what he has done throughout his career: lead them to a championship — their first since 2015.
Accepting that responsibility is all Boozer knows. He always has done his best work when the stakes are highest.
“There is a lot that comes with being at Duke, but you wouldn’t come to Duke if you were afraid of that or didn’t want to be a part of that,” Boozer said. “It’s the biggest brand in college basketball. There is always a spotlight, always a target on your back, so you come to Duke to play in these moments — to be in these moments.”
ISLAMABAD: Eight Pakistani officials have been appointed to key committees of the International Tennis Federation and the Asian Tennis Federation for the 2026–2027 term, marking a significant achievement for Pakistan’s tennis community.
The appointments are being viewed as a recognition of Pakistan’s growing role in the development and governance of tennis at both regional and international levels.
Representation in ITF Committees
Pakistan’s top tennis player and President of the Pakistan Tennis Federation, Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi, has been selected as a member of the ITF Athlete Commission.
Other Pakistani officials appointed to ITF committees include:
Sara Mansoor – ITF Coaches Commission
Syed Muhammad Ali Murtaza – ITF Juniors Committee
Pakistani Officials in ATF Committees
Several Pakistani representatives have also been appointed to committees of the Asian Tennis Federation:
Salim Saifullah Khan – Finance Committee, Development Advisory Group, Legal, Constitution & Ethics Committee
Ziauddin Tufail – Junior and Coaches Development Committee
Rashid Malik – Marketing and Sponsorship Committee
Shehzad Akhtar Alvi – Tournament Officiating Committee
Sara Mansoor – ATF Advantage All Committee
Muhammad Khalid Rehmani – Senior, Wheelchair and Beach Tennis Committee
Recognition for Pakistan Tennis
Speaking on the occasion, Salim Saifullah Khan said the appointments demonstrate the trust of international tennis bodies in Pakistani officials to contribute to the global development of the sport.
PTF President Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi also described the development as a proud moment for Pakistan, saying it will strengthen the country’s role in international tennis and open new opportunities for the sport’s growth in the region.
PTF Secretary General Ziauddin Tufail congratulated the appointed officials and expressed confidence that they would represent Pakistan effectively at the international level.
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