Warrior Insider

Casdon Jardine has a final year of college basketball, master’s level classes, and a honeymoon to take care of. His first trip to Hawai’i – where all of the above will take place – can’t come soon enough.

Jardine will join the University of Hawai’i basketball team as a graduate transfer for the upcoming 2020-21 season. He is a 6-foot-7, 212-pound forward who played last season at Utah Valley, where he was a starter and averaged 10.1 points and 4.8 rebounds per game while leading the team with 57 3-pointers.

“At UVU, I committed to the head coach (Mark Pope) who is now the head coach at BYU,” he said. “So once I graduated this past semester, I wanted to know my options and make the best decision for my last year of college and I entered the transfer portal.”

Numerous programs expressed interest, but Hawai’i is the one that stood out to him during the unique recruiting process caused by the pandemic.

“I wasn’t able to go on a visit, which is usually huge in a decision like this, especially for a place like Hawai’i,” he said. “I’ve never been to Hawai’i before, so I had nothing to compare it to. But the coaches did an awesome job with the Zoom calls. After talking to them, you could just tell that Hawai’i had a different culture from anywhere else. They told me about the feeling of ‘ohana and they made me feel like I would fit in.”

It helped that Jardine played with both McKay Johnson and Lewis Johnson while at UVU. They are the younger brothers of Gibson Johnson, a former UH player and current Graduate Assistant for the Warriors.

“When Hawai’i started recruiting me, I got in touch with Gibson and his brothers to find out more about the program,” he said.

Jardine is expected to make an immediate impact due to his Division I experience and shooting ability.

“I think Hawai’i recruited me the most for my shooting ability,” he said. “I should be able to stretch the floor and provide opportunities for my teammates because other teams have to respect me as a shooter. But I’m 6-7, so I can be an inside presence, rebound, play defense and bring energy. I feel like I can do a little bit of everything.”

Jardine will also fit in with the team’s academic standards. He graduated from Utah Valley in May with a Bachelor of Science in Business Management. He received Magna Cum Laude status at the graduation, and was also an All-Academic selection for the Western Athletic Conference.

At UH, he will begin his pursuit of a Master’s degree in Finance. “Academics is something I’ve always taken seriously, so it’s going to be about time management. It sounds like a lot of my classes will be online so that might actually help me. I’ll just have to stay disciplined and prioritize my time in the right way to get things done for basketball and academics.”

Jardine graduated from a college in Utah, then found a new basketball team and school in Hawai’i, all while the pandemic was shutting things down around him. Yet, those were hardly the only life-changing moments he experienced.

Jardine and his wife, Savannah, were married in Utah on March 20. That was an impromptu date change due to the pandemic.

“We were supposed to get married in May, but COVID had other plans for us, so we pushed it up and had an intimate ceremony with just our parents and a couple of my siblings,” he said. “It was very different from what we planned but it was still a beautiful moment and I’m grateful we were able to get it done.”

Jardine’s hometown is Twin Falls, Idaho, but the newlyweds opted to stay in Utah for the time being while waiting for travel issues to clear. As a new husband, he took it upon himself to take a paid internship in the Accounting/Finance department with a business in Utah.

“I just graduated from UVU, so there’s no scholarship or housing,” he said. “I had to go out and earn some money to pay for things.”

He also had to get creative with his workouts, running up and down hills near his home, and putting up shots on the outdoor courts in his neighborhood.

“My wife rebounds for me and has been helping out a lot through this; she’s a trooper,” he said.

Her payoff is a few weeks away.

“We just got word that we’ll be heading over to Hawai’i on August 2,” Jardine said. “Our original plan was to go to the Dominican Republic for our honeymoon, but that was obviously cancelled. Our new plan is to turn it into a 10 or 11 month honeymoon in Hawai’i.”