The first stop was Iceland, the island nation of some 390,000 that sits just outside the Arctic Circle.
“I remember I liked it,” Steele, now the Miami RedHawks head basketball coach, was saying as he sat in his office after practice late Thursday afternoon.
Pressed on what he specifically remembered, he smiled, thought a couple of seconds, smiled again, and finally shrugged:
“Honestly, not too much. It was a long time ago and I was a teenager.”
But, if you think this means Steele knows nothing about Iceland, you are oh so wrong.
He has some very good Icelandic memories.
They’re just a little more recent.
Like the ones he had from just 30 minutes earlier when the RedHawks were going through practice in preparation for Monday’s season opener against Old Dominion at Millett Hall.
That’s when he last saw Almar Atlason, the RedHawks new, 6 foot-8 junior forward who arrived via the transfer portal from Bradley University, but was raised in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland.
Although Atlason spent the past two seasons at Bradley – where he played in 71 games and started 31 – some of his most indelible hoops’ memories came just two months ago when he was the youngest player on Iceland’s national team which competed in the EuroBasket 2025 championships.
The quadrennial tournament, played at four different sites – Latvia, Finland, Poland and Cyprus – drew teams from 24 nations and included many NBA players, including some of the league’s premier stars like Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece), Nikola Jokić (Serbia) and Luka Dončić (Slovenia).
“The weirdest thing was being in the hotels and walking past those guys you’ve been watching on TV,” Atlason said as we sat in the upper reaches of an otherwise deserted Millett Hall after practice.
“Our team played Luka Dončić’s team. He’s one of my favorite players, but then you get down on the court with those guys and you kind of forget that part and just focus on how good they are. That’s the really cool experience.”
Steele said it’s experiences like that, coupled with those at Bradley – Atlason had some big outings, including 28 points off the bench against Belmont last year and was named to the Missouri Valley Conference All-Freshman Team the season prior – that make him such a valuable addition to the RedHawks this year.
Miami lost three players in the transfer portal from last season’s 25-9 team:
Kam Craft, the 6-foot-6 guard who was an accurate three-point shooter, went to Georgia Tech; guard Mekhi Cooper ended up at Lindenwood; and 7-foot-1 sophomore Reece Potter, like the Dayton Flyers’ Kobe Brea the year prior, followed the lucrative NIL trail to Kentucky.
Miami, though, fared better than most schools amidst the revolving-door dynamic, keeping six of its eight top scorers from last season, including 6-foot-5 senior guard Peter Suder.
Suder led the Hawks in scoring and assists last season, won first team All Mid-American Conference honors and now, counting his first two seasons at Bellarmine, has 1,109 career points.
“When I met with him after the season, he said, ‘Coach, can I say something before we start our meeting?’” recounted Steele.
“I said, ‘Sure, what?’
“He said, ‘Just so you know, I’m staying.’”
Steele laughed at the memory: “I said, ‘OK! Meeting over!’”
Along with the returnees, Miami was adding five freshmen, and junior Jackson Kotecki, who played limited minutes last year, came back.
So, the RedHawks ended up adding just one transfer: Atlason.
In this new world of college basketball – where many teams rosters are being completely remade after each season – Steele and his staff are taking a different approach.
They are trying to build a perennial winner with freshmen who grow up in the program. That’s the old school model he believes still works with the right players:
“It’s all about fits: finding players who fit the culture; who fit academically; and positionally. It’s finding those who fit the style of play, the whole deal.
“Look at some of our guys, like Evan Ipsaro and Eian Elmer. They came in as freshmen and now are juniors. They have been in the program. That continuity is a big deal and it’s paying off for them.”
Steele said today’s quick-fix portal additions are like “speed dating.”
He said there’s a risk for all parties involved. You never know quite what you’re getting.
But the case with Atlason was a little different.
He came from Iceland to the U.S. for his senior season and played at Sunrise Christian in Kansas, which plays a national schedule and has had several alumni eventually go on to play in the NBA.
Credit: Andrew Wade
Credit: Andrew Wade
Steele knew the coaches there and said: “When (Atlason) was in school there I knew a little about him, but, truthfully, at that point, with where we were as a program, I thought he’d be getting recruited by programs above us.”
When Steele took the Miami job before the 2022-23 season – Atlason’s senior year at Sunrise – he inherited a program that had had 13 straight losing seasons.
Steele’s first RedHawks team went 12-20 and Atlason chose Bradley from a dozen offers that included Nebraska, North Texas, Indiana State, UC Santa Barbara and San Jose State.
Steele said he told Miami administrators to bear with him, that it would take three years to turn the program around.
Outsiders thought that was optimistic thinking, but last season – year three – the RedHawks won 25 games, the most in one season in school history.
‘Time for a change’
Atlason grew up in Reykjavik, which is a distant land from Oxford and not just because the two places are some 3,100 miles apart.
Iceland has a magical feel about it with its fire and ice landscape of volcanos and glaciers; and wondrous natural phenomena like The Northern Lights and the Midnight Sun.
There’s a past tied to Vikings and some believe in the presence of elves and trolls and woodland sprites.
A couple of years ago Dave Eminian, a celebrated Peoria Journal Star newspaperman, wrote about Iceland and noted that while people eat a lot of lamb, reindeer, potatoes and carrots, and that some see fermented shark a delicacy, there was also a ceremonial meal from a fall festival that he came across that included bull’s tongue, sheep esophagus, sheep testicles, and potatoes cooked in caramel and served on hot flat bread.
“Most people don’t eat everything on that plate,” Atlason told Eminian. “The sheep testicles, I haven’t been able to get myself to do it.”
When I asked Atlason about the favorite meal his mom makes for him, he didn’t hesitate: “There’s this soup she makes with meat (lamb) and (root) vegetables. I love it.”
It’s called Kjötsúpa.
While his palate may have developed a bit differently than some guys on his RedHawks team, his taste in sports was similar.
Credit: Andrew Wade
Credit: Andrew Wade
He embraced basketball even though Iceland hasn’t had a pipeline to the NBA like some European nations.
Pétur Guðmundsson, a 7-foot-2 center, was the first player from Iceland to play in the NBA and one of the first from Europe to make the league.
After playing collegiately at the University of Washington, he was a third-round pick of the Portland Trail Blazers in 1981 and over the next few seasons played 150 games with the Blazers, Los Angeles Lakers and San Antonio.
The only other Icelandic player to make an NBA team was Jon Stefansson, who signed with Dallas in 2003 but spent the season on the injured list.
Atlason’s family is tied to basketball.
His aunt, Birna, played with the national team and later with a semi-pro team.
His older brother Darri, an accomplished player himself, was a noted coach at several levels in Iceland and then went on to Harvard Business School. Now he lives in New York City and works for a start-up company, Atlason said.
His older sister, Gunnhildur, played at Saint Lawrence University, an NCAA Division III school in New York, and then played, coached and served as a basketball administrator back home.
Atlason’s skills became evident early and he eventually represented Iceland in age-division FIBA tournaments.
Playing for the U-20 team in June of 2024, he scored 40 points against Finland to lead Iceland to its first title in the Nordic Championships.
But after starting 19 of the 35 games he played in as a freshman at Bradley, he started 12 last season.
“I loved Bradley,” he said. “But I felt it was time for a change.”
‘Something bigger’
As we sat and talked, a few of Atlason’s teammates came walking through the gym and when one saw him getting some media attention, he teasingly called out, “Icemaaaaaanl!!”
There was a friendly feel to the gibe and there was an ease in Atlason’s return smile and both helped you understand what Steele would explain later.
“He’s fitting in seamlessly,” Steele said. “It’s almost like he’s been here the whole time.”
Atlason isn’t surprised by the transition:
“I talked to a lot of programs. I had a vision in my mind of what I wanted and what I thought they wanted.”
He soon narrowed his offers to Arkansas State and Miami and visited both schools.
“I liked the coaches and the team here at Miami and how they played,” he said. “It’s a great school; the people are really nice; and it doesn’t hurt that the campus is so beautiful. The experience could not be better,
“I think I’ve found the perfect fit because of the way they play and what I think I can offer to it.
“I think I can still accomplish what I hope to here, but more importantly I think I can contribute to what we need as a team so we can hang another banner up here high in the gym.
“That’s the key.
”Playing super well individually, but losing, that’s the most useless thing there is.
“It’s got to be about something bigger than that.”
And that’s why Steele smiles when you bring up Atlason’s name.
The Miami coach might not remember what he saw when he went to Iceland so many years ago.
But he certainly knows what he’s gotten now that Iceland has come to him.
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