Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Officials name senior vice president, chief of staff
By Fiona Riley, Assistant News Editor • March 26, 2024

Seniors close careers at GW with disappointing loss

It wasn’t supposed to end this way. At the end of Tuesday’s game, the Colonials stood in their customary circle as GW’s alma mater played. Senior forward Jabari Edwards tucked his head inside his jersey, shielding his face from sight. Senior center Joseph Katuka bowed his head, gazing at the court as junior forward Aaron Ware gently placed a hand on his back.

Barring an invitation to a postseason tournament, it was the last game the two seniors would ever play inside the Smith Center.

“It doesn’t feel good that we didn’t win the game,” Edwards said in the Smith Center hallway after the game.

“We let it slip away. It’s painful. We’ve been here four years,” Katuka agreed. “We don’t like feeling like this, nobody wants to feel like this.”

Tuesday night, Edwards and Katuka left more than the Smith Center behind, walking away from their careers as Colonials. A win over Saint Joseph’s would have sent GW to Atlantic City to continue on in the Atlantic 10 Tournament, an opportunity the two seniors were never given a chance to experience during their time in Foggy Bottom.

“It’s really tough,” Edwards said. “You always want to take the next step in the league, and we didn’t make it.”

Katuka and Edwards joined the Colonials in the 2007-2008 season, after the team had made NCAA Tournament appearances three seasons in a row. Despite the team’s previous successes though, Katuka and Edwards arrived at GW during a period of transition, after the departure of key Colonials from the successful teams of the mid-2000s left huge holes to fill.

During the 2007-2008 season, Katuka and Edwards’ first at GW, the team failed to qualify for postseason play for the first time since 1974 – the beginning of a two-year stretch in which GW failed to qualify for the 12-team A-10 tournament.

This season didn’t seem poised to send Edwards and Katuka to postseason play either. GW was picked to finish 10th in the A-10 even before the team lost Preseason All-Atlantic third team guard Lasan Kromah, and the Colonials struggled to find their footing in the beginning of their schedule. As the season progressed, however, so did the team, adjusting to life without Kromah and evolving into a legitimate contender within the conference. Cementing GW’s success were its two big men – Katuka and Edwards.

“Everybody’s really close, really close-knit,” Edwards said. “I think that’s what really got this going late in the season, because as long as everybody stays together, there’s always a chance.”

The defensive force of the Colonials’ two senior players was the team’s anchor in the paint. Edwards, despite undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery early in the season, led GW in blocked shots with 35, rejecting opponents’ shots as one of the most imposing presences on defense for the Colonials. Katuka, too, made his presence known, placing second on the team in both defensive rebounds with 86 and blocked shots with 27.

Both were key figures on a team that grew to surpass many of its preseason expectations, a result, Katuka and Edwards said, of the camaraderie present among its players.

“I’m just proud of how everybody stuck together,” Edwards said. “We went through a lot of adversity, we could have easily turned the season in, everything that went bad. But everybody stuck together. We just kept pushing.”

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