If you look up “Yale Men’s Basketball” on Google Images, you’ll see photos from the last two Ivy Madness championship games, players in the class of 2025 on their senior night, a few team huddles, and former guard Yassine Gharram, SM ’25, celebrating after Yale upset Auburn in last year’s March Madness Tournament.
What you won’t find are pictures of Jackson Theil, ES ’26, the team’s head student manager. But he doesn’t need—or even want—the spotlight.
“My job is to be whatever the team needs me to be at a given moment,” Jackson said. “It’s one that can be done with raw enthusiasm and nothing else.”
On practice days, he rarely sits down. Between filling up water bottles, collecting loose balls, and serving as a go-to person for players and coaches who might need an extra blocking pad or more tape, Jackson is always on the move. When he does sit, it’s to man the clock—a task he has mastered to the point of making games out of how quickly he can adjust the time.
Jackson has a keen eye for detail. During scrimmages, he moves the water bottles to each bench, careful not to put them on the navy blue outline of the court where players might slip. He organizes the bottles in a line by jersey number so players can grab theirs without any trouble—giving them one more second to watch the scrimmage and focus on the practice.
These small deeds might go unnoticed, but this kind of work requires humility. Jackson is comfortable in the background because it means he’s doing his job well.
As he explained, “Our athletic trainer, for example, is really focused on making sure that everybody’s in shape for games and keeping everybody healthy. She’s doing the real work, so I have to make sure that she can focus on that and not have to do things like filling up the water coolers before games.”
He calls himself a “water boy,” but that’s an understatement. He’s the glue of the team, dedicating himself to jobs other people may not want to do but are every bit necessary. When the team traveled to Denver this year for March Madness, Jackson did everything from coordinating bus arrivals and attaching NCAA patches on jerseys to collecting intel on other teams and setting up hotel wake-up calls.
He may be at his best when his work is unseen, but the team sees him as one of their own. Case in point: the suit he dons on game days, just like the rest of the coaches.
But Jackson resembles a coach in more ways than just his game-day clothes. He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of basketball—capable of explaining any drill, breaking down nearly any play you can name, and recalling obscure college players from a decade ago. He’s equipped with witty, sports-announcer-esque one-liners like “You don’t keep a D1 job for 25 years by accident” and talks with the smooth, rhythmic cadence of an NBA coach.
Jackson isn’t just good at his job. He lives for it.
He grew up in Roscommon, Michigan, a small town of about 989 people. “There weren’t too many circles to run in,” he said, but a sense of community was forged through basketball. He and his friends followed college hoops all year long, and during conference championship week, they’d “get together, play two-on-two, and run in between games to check the scores.”
As Yale men’s basketball’s head student manager, Jackson pays homage to his roots. He can visit the arenas he and his friends used to watch on TV and spend his four years in a small, yet steady and close-knit Division I program, all while witnessing firsthand what drew him to college basketball in the first place: “These are people that are doing their best to play the sport out of love of the game and love of the school. There’s so much passion there, and you’d be crazy to say you don’t want to be a part of it.”
Enter Amir Khan from McNeese State University. This March, he became the first student manager to ever secure an NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deal. With a total of 12 partnerships from companies like Buffalo Wild Wings, Insomnia Cookies, TurboTax, and Under Armour, he’s earning upwards of six figures and is easily the most celebrated of anyone on the team.
I’ve previously talked about the downsides of college basketball’s stratified landscape. And for good reason. The direction of the NCAA seems to favor the most marketable schools that will attract millions of viewers on national broadcasts every time they play. In other words, schools like Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, and Florida. The bluebloods and other powerhouses have dominated March Madness for years with the best coaches and resources the game offers.
Still, it might not all be bad news. Amir Khan represents a niche world within the universe of college basketball. Student managers rarely get recognized for their work outside of their team, but they tend to be uniquely poised to become graduate assistants and leaders of the sport. Just two weeks ago, Khan announced that he was heading off to North Carolina State University to continue working under former McNeese State University head coach Will Wade, a decision that’s brought unprecedented attention to the trajectory of the student manager. I myself had to look up what exactly a graduate assistant is, but I discovered that a number of NBA coaches (like Nick Friedman of the Hornets, Ryan Richman of the Wizards, and Jeff Van Gundy of the Rockets and Knicks) once held this position. And I found that even more were student managers as undergraduates (namely, Mark Daigneault, head coach of the Thunder, and Frank Vogel, former head coach of the Lakers).
I’m not trying to say that every student manager in the country will suddenly be an Amir Khan. He seems more like an exception to the rule than a trendsetter for student managers spending weeks in the national spotlight in college basketball. Nor that being a student manager guarantees a graduate assistant position, which will then lead to the NBA.
My argument is that Amir Khan represents something positive from this whole NIL ordeal from the past few years. Sure, maybe the tunnel walkouts and the oversized Buffalo Wild Wings-themed boombox are gimmicks. And maybe Amir “Aura” Khan, the version of him whose fame is tied more to his personality than being a student manager, is distracting everyone from appreciating what student managers actually do for their teams. But, who cares? Here’s a student manager—not a player—who is probably his team’s highest earner of NIL money. The attention he brings to a profession that’s otherwise underrated at best and forgotten at worst is valuable; it could lead to more student managers becoming graduate assistants who might become valuable NBA coaches. Maybe I’m indulging my imagination a bit too much, but at the very least, it’s nice to see Amir Khan, now the symbolic mascot of student managers across the NCAA, get the recognition he deserves for the work people like him put into the game.
Oscar Heller was the Opinion desk editor for the 2024-25 school year. He has also been a staff writer. Currently, he is one of the Editors-in-Chief for the 2025-26 school year.
