UNC JV players get chance to live the dream

On the outside they tried to play it cool because they knew that’s what they were supposed to do – act naturally, like they’d been there before – but on the inside they were feeling emotions and energy only felt in life’s rarest, most joyous moments.

Justin Coleman and Sasha Seymore, two former junior varsity basketball players at North Carolina, had just finished a practice with the varsity team in October. Roy Williams, the UNC coach, gathered his team in the locker room and broke the news casually: Coleman and Seymore had made the team.

On the inside Coleman, a junior, said he was jumping up and down. Celebrating.

But on the outside “I kept an even keel because we were about to watch film,” he said. “ So we’re still kind of zoned in and focused. But we definitely were excited on the inside after all the time and trying to achieve that goal of being a part of this team.”

Seymore, the senior class president who is in school on a Morehead Scholarship – the most prestigious undergraduate academic scholarship UNC offers – said his “heart dropped” when he heard the news.

“Because it was something that I had been working on and working on for years and years and years,” he said. “And it’d been a dream of mine since I was 3 or 4 years old to play for the North Carolina varsity team.”

Seymore just didn’t envision the way it would end.

Chasing, realizing the dream

For some, the dream starts like it did for Seymore, a New Bern native who grew up with a special appreciation of the history and mystique of UNC basketball. It starts at a young age and becomes a part of the conscience, always there. For others, it begins much later, maybe not until after arriving at UNC only to learn that it still maintains a well-worn path from the campus gym to the Smith Center.

Junior varsity basketball teams were once prevalent back in the long-ago days of freshmen ineligibility. Now, though, they’re extinct at nearly every Division I program. Except, that is, at UNC, which kept its JV program in large part because Dean Smith never wanted to see it go away.

Every fall, dozens of regular students obtain a physical exam – the only thing that’s required, along with hope – and show up at the Smith Center for two days of JV tryouts. Some were stars on their high school teams. Others didn’t play that much even there.

Some wear old, worn-out sneakers. Others wear thinning shirts with the names of their high school on them. Some look like they’ve been training for months. Others look like they decided earlier in the week to show up and just play for a little while under the banners, on the Smith Center court.

In one way or another, though, they all share the vision of making the JV team and then working their way up to varsity, of running out of the tunnel to the band playing and the cheerleaders waving their pom-poms, to 20,000 people wearing light blue standing and clapping and cheering.

That’s when it became real to Coleman, a UNC junior and Raleigh native who played at Broughton High. It became reality, he said, when he put on the jersey for the first time – the real jersey, and not the old used ones the JV team wears – and made his way to the court with the team.

“Just coming out of the tunnel for the first time,” he said. “That was definitely that moment that it really hit me.”

Doing their job

Coleman and Seymore spent their freshman and sophomore seasons on the JV team, which plays its games in the Smith Center hours before the varsity. The JV team, which is coached by a UNC varsity assistant – Hubert Davis is the coach this year, and was last year – plays in relative obscurity. Their next home game, Saturday against Wake Tech, starts at 9 a.m.

At some games there might be fewer than 100 people in the stands. Parents, girlfriends, friends. The games go on – against small-college JV teams, or community colleges, or military schools – and when they end, the JV players have prime seats behind the UNC bench for varsity games.

Coleman often sat there, in those seats behind the bench, dreaming of what it might be like. So did Seymore. He had to wait an extra year to make the varsity, because there were no available spots last year, during his junior season.

Four former JV players tried out for the varsity this season, and only Coleman and Seymore made it. If only Williams had more room.

“All four of those guys would have been good for us this year,” Williams said. “And those two guys just fit a need we had at that position. That’s always the biggest part, is do you need another point guard? If you don’t, then don’t take one.

“And do you need somebody that can guard the big guys? Yes. If you don’t, don’t take one.”

Williams liked Coleman and Seymore because they came highly recommended from Davis, who coached Coleman last season, and from C.B. McGrath, who two years ago coached Coleman and Seymore on the JV team. So that was part of the reason Williams kept them.

Another reason is how they filled their roles in practice. Coleman is versatile enough to guard any perimeter player. With Seymore, Williams liked his ability to bang around with UNC’s post players.

For JV players who are promoted to varsity – and just about all of UNC’s walk-ons will start on the JV team – the role they play in practice is their most important role. It can be grinding, humbling work, defending players who are stronger, more talented and often taller and bigger.

Coleman said he usually guards J.P. Tokoto, a junior small forward, in practice. If he’s not guarding Tokoto, then Coleman might defend Marcus Paige, who entered his junior season as a preseason All-American. Tokoto is known for his athleticism and dunking ability.

Coleman, though, says that in moments he’s “able to hold my own.”

“They definitely usually get the best of me. But I try to do the best I can to really challenge them without hurting anybody. And we definitely try to push them so when they get in the game, it’s not a shock when people really come at them.”

Their chance to shine

There are moments, though, that belong to them – to the guys who aren’t household names, or even names most casual UNC basketball fans would know. There are times when the walk-ons, the JV call-ups, have their own time.

Usually it happens late in blowout victories, with the student section chanting for biscuits – Bojangle’s runs a biscuit promotion whenever UNC eclipses the 100-point mark – and with the starters long on the bench, resting. Coleman has played in seven games this season.

He scored his lone point on a free throw during a 103-59 victory against Robert Morris in November. He came in late in a 24-point victory at Clemson and rushed a couple shots. He’s still awaiting his first made shot from the field.

Seymore accomplished that during a 108-64 victory against East Carolina on Dec. 8. He finished with four points after also making two free throws. It was a special moment, his first basket, and the moment was magnified because he’s a native of New Bern, about 45 miles from the ECU campus.

“There’s a lot of East Carolina people in New Bern itself,” Seymore said. “So to score against ECU and to get minutes against them, was I think a little bit more special for me than it might have been for some of the other guys.”

It was a moment many long to experience but few actually do: scoring as a varsity member of the UNC basketball team. Williams once dreamed of doing that, too, way back when he played on the freshman team at UNC.

So Seymore’s shot resonated with him. It made Williams think about a much younger version of himself.

“You think about how thrilled he is, or his family or his friends,” Williams said of Seymore making that shot against ECU. “And those are going to be moments they’ll remember forever. I played on the freshman team, and if you weren’t on scholarship, weren’t good enough (for varsity), you never played after that.

“Shoot, I’d have tried to play every year until I was 55 if I’d been in school.”

Not the fairytale ending

It hasn’t been all a fairytale, though. Seymore was living in that dreamy haze until Dec. 27, when he entered late in the final minutes of a lopsided victory against Alabama-Birmingham.

He came in possession of the ball and saw an opportunity – another rare one – to score. He drove to his right and jump-stopped – a move he said he’d done “10,000 times in my life.” He planted his foot and his knee gave in and he knew, in an instant, that he’d torn his ACL.

There was a flash of pain – “enormous pain,” Seymore said – but then it went away. The trainer came out and asked him if he could stand, and Seymore could. They helped him off the court, back into the training room and “it didn’t hurt at all,” Seymore said.

Then after he found out that he did indeed suffer an ACL tear, he learned that’s one of the signs: immense pain followed by nothing. Word of the injury spread quickly and one by one, members of team – Seymore’s teammates, if only for a while – came into the training room, where he had just learned he’d never again play in a college basketball game.

“You’ll be OK,” Seymore said they told him. “You’ll get through it. You’ve got this.”

“And it meant so much to me,” he said later, “that all these guys who I had sort of idolized as a child – big Carolina basketball players – were coming by and letting me know that I was still part of the team and they were saying they were there for me.”

One after the next they filed in with well wishes and kind thoughts and support. It was an emotional scene. A dramatic scene. Seymore’s dad and younger brothers were there. Seymore was on a training table, receiving the procession.

“And after about the third one, my dad looks at them and is like, guys – he’s not dead,” Seymore said. “It’s just a knee.”

Seymore laughed at the memory. And yes, it added some perspective.

It was only a knee injury. After this semester, anyway, he knew his basketball days would be over.

He’ll graduate with degrees in economics and global studies and then he’ll be off to Northern Ireland, where he’ll continue his studies thanks to a Mitchell Scholarship – one of 12 awarded nationally.

His college basketball career, one day, will be but a blip on his life time-line, but for now there is a sense of a loss – the feeling of a dream deferred. All that work and all those hopes, gone in an instant of a jump stop and one wrong step. He only played at the end of blowouts but there were still hopes.

“I’ve got a brother who plays basketball at Virginia Tech, and I wanted to play against him,” Seymore said. “I wanted to start on senior night against Duke. I wanted to be with the team as we were going through those ups and downs and helping in any way that I could.”

On one hand there is all of that, and the despair that comes with not being able to do any of it.

“And that really is tough,” Seymore said. “But at the same time, there are a million kids out there who have wanted to play basketball for North Carolina. And I’m part of that .0001 percent who ever got that chance.

“And so to even have the opportunity in the first place, I know that I’m just unbelievably blessed.”

This story was originally published February 15, 2015 at 7:58 PM with the headline "UNC JV players get chance to live the dream."