UConn center Tarris Reed (5) goes up for a shot against Michigan in the national championship game, April 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
In another world, Tarris Reed Jr. might have been celebrating a national championship with Michigan on Monday night in Indianapolis. Instead, his college career ended one win short of a title.
After two seasons at Michigan, Reed transferred to UConn before the 2024–25 season. He earned Big East Sixth Man of the Year honors last year, then emerged as the Huskies’ primary post presence this season, landing on the All-Big East first team.
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His career took a rare path — playing for two programs that combined to win three of the last four national championships, yet he wasn’t part of a title team.
UConn returned from Indianapolis around 5 p.m. ET Tuesday. Reed could have called it a season and gone home. Instead, two hours later, he was at an Athletes in Action meeting on campus — and not only was he there, he was speaking to the whole group, sharing his testimony.
He later shared the video of his talk on Instagram and included a lengthy caption in which he shared even more thoughts and perspective about his college basketball journey.
“I’ve been wrestling with God about this all day, really the past 24 hours,” he wrote. “It’s been one of the hardest, yet most peaceful and freeing stretches of my life. Coming to terms with the fact that the college basketball journey I’ve been chasing since I was a little kid is over hurts. Losing the biggest game of my entire basketball career hurts. Knowing how hard I worked and the sacrifices I made just to be in that position, and still coming up short, it hurts.
“At the same time, I’m reminded to be content in every situation. Looking back at the game, I know I gave it my all, but I still see the mistakes I made. I want to be better. I tend to be a perfectionist, but only Jesus was perfect. So it’s been tough wrestling with that.”
On the flight back to Storrs, he said he felt like Jesus put it on his heart to go to the AIA event and speak. He knew he’d have little time to prepare, “but I told myself I would let the Holy Spirit speak through me.”
“And I’m so glad I went,” he wrote. “That night, two of the women’s basketball players got baptized. It was truly a blessing. Even after that, I’ve still been wrestling with God about whether I should post this video. But it’s not my will, it’s His.”
In the video, which has more than 15,000 likes and 500 comments, Reed shares about his faith upbringing. It’s a familiar story — he grew up in a Christian home that regularly attended church, but he didn’t have a strong personal relationship with God. Looking back, he can see how basketball became an idol in his life during his teenage years.
He started at Chaminade College Prep, a Catholic school in St. Louis, before transferring to Link Academy (Branson, Missouri), where he received strong mentorship and grew in his faith.
“That’s when Jesus started really putting things into perspective,” he told the AIA crowd.
But when he arrived at Michigan for his freshman year, things shifted. “That’s where everything took a turn.”
Reed said he got involved in the wrong things and went down a path he knew wasn’t right. One day, a strength coach overheard him talking about God and asked if he was a Christian. Reed said he was, but when the coach asked if he had actually been reading the Bible, Reed realized that wasn’t something he had been doing.
The coach challenged him to start with the Gospels, so that night Reed went home and opened Matthew.
“It was my first time really learning about Jesus — who He was, how He walked, how He taught, who He helped,” Reed said.
As he read through the Sermon on the Mount, though, he hit a moment that didn’t sit well with him. The passage about cutting off your hand if it causes you to sin confused him enough that he closed his Bible and walked away. His first interpreted it as him having to give up basketball, and that didn’t make sense to him. Why would God ask him to do that if He gave him the skills to play at a high level?
“The next morning I decided, ‘Let me give it another shot,'” he said. “I looked up what it meant, and it was talking about addressing the sin and what’s causing you to sin.”
From there, Reed kept reading and began to better understand who Jesus is. He remembers coming back to the Sermon on the Mount and breaking down in tears.
“From there, that fire was lit,” he said. “I started to understand who Jesus was and really build a relationship. It put everything into perspective — not making basketball an idol, but seeing it as worship.”
When head coach Dusty May was hired at Michigan in March 2024, he and Reed (who had started 31 games for Michigan in 2023-24) talked about his potential future in Ann Arbor. May was honest about the frontcourt players he planned to bring in and the two realized it probably wouldn’t work for Reed to stay at Michigan. So he ended up at UConn and blossomed into a player who will most likely end up on an NBA roster this summer.
His stellar play in the NCAA Tournament certainly helped his draft stock. Punctuated by a 31-point, 27-rebound performance against Furman in the first round, Reed averaged 19.5 points, 13.2 rebounds and 1.5 blocks over the course of the tournament. Some analysts see him as a potential late first-round or early second-round pick.
After the loss to Michigan on Monday, Reed was full of gratitude about his journey, even though it didn’t end with a championship.
“I thank the Lord for it every day,” he said in the postgame press conference. “It wasn’t easy choosing UConn the first time, and it’s choosing UConn to come back again out of the portal. So I give all thanks to the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and thanks to the man to the left of me (Coach Dan Hurley). I mean, recruiting me out of the portal, coming back after a bad Michigan year. He saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself.”
He then cited Ecclesiastes 7:8, which says, “The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride.”
“Just looking back at the whole journey, I done had a journey with these guys,” Reed said. “I’m going to miss it. The Lord does things in mysterious ways. I got all my tears out. I’m just blessed to be in the position I’m in today. I love these guys for life. They’re my brothers for life.”
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