How Seth Trimble used teammates’ challenge to fuel career night in Louisville win

Seth Trimble has a big whiteboard in his room. It’s here that he writes his preseason goals around September, a practice started ahead of his junior year. He keeps the board there in plain sight so, as he put it, “whenever I need to look at it, I look at it again.”

Even with the reminders, Trimble sometimes needs another push — a nudge from teammates, a challenge from coaches.

Over the past few games, he’s received both. Specifically, they’ve urged the senior guard to be more aggressive. To attack off the dribble. To look for his own shot before deferring. On Monday night, it was evident Trimble had been listening. After the final horn sounded, fellow senior guard Elijah Davis walked up to Trimble and held up three fingers on one hand and a zero with the other. Thirty.

Behind Trimble’s career-high 30 points, No. 18 North Carolina outlasted No. 24 Louisville, 77-74, in a tense matchup Monday night at the Smith Center. The Tar Heels (22-6, 10-5 ACC) used a decisive second-half run and just enough late execution to defeat the Cardinals (20-8, 9-6 ACC) and earn a sixth Quad 1 win on the season — this one without the help of star freshman Caleb Wilson, who is still sidelined with a fractured hand.

Trimble’s offensive production was obvious — 11-for-16 shooting, seven made free throws, four rebounds and four assists — but the matter of getting there? Not so much.

“Most of the season has just come naturally, but I thought these last few games, I’ve been in a place where I’ve just found myself not being aggressive,” Trimble said. “And I’m not really too sure where it’s come from, but I’ve noticed it. My teammates have noticed it, coaches have noticed it. I was on myself just about being as aggressive as possible, especially with the way Louisville played. I feel like, I could have made a lot of opportunities, which I did today.”

After scoring 19 points in a win over Pitt on Feb. 14, Trimble recorded just four points on a 1-of-9 shooting performance in UNC’s blowout loss at N.C. State the following week. The Feb. 17 defeat prompted a firm message from Wilson in the locker room that night: “we gotta be better.”

The push came from everywhere, Trimble said. Teammates Zayden High, Kyan Evans, Derek Dixon and Henri Veesaar echoed it in the locker room. Coaches reinforced too, asking Trimble to come off ball screens looking to score and let the defense dictate the next read.

“After the N.C. State game, (after) the Syracuse first half, I told myself I had enough,” Trimble said. “Coaches got on me. I finally just went to go play and be a leader. Being a leader isn’t always going to be from speaking and leading with my voice. A lot of times it can come from play. So I feel like the last three halves, it has come from play.”

That shift seemed to crystallize at halftime in Syracuse.

Dixon said the team — even the freshmen like him — told Trimble how much they needed him. They urged him to be aggressive. Veesaar added it’s one of many “hard talks” the two have had throughout the season — accountability that goes both ways.

UNC coach Hubert Davis, too, delivered a direct message to his senior captain: it doesn’t work without him.

“He can impact winning in so many different ways,” Davis said. “And I just challenged him to do it and to do it consistently. He really stepped up in the second half against Syracuse and for us tonight.”

Trimble recorded 13 second-half points and helped spark a crucial 8-0 run to pull away from the Orange on Saturday.

Then, two nights after a quiet opening half at Syracuse in which Trimble attempted just one shot, he attacked Louisville from the tip. He repeatedly turned ball screens downhill, finishing through contact, slipping passes to cutters and forcing the Cardinals to collapse. Trimble scored 16 points before halftime, making seven of his first 10 shots as North Carolina shot 61% and carried a 39-38 lead into the break.

But the sequence that best captured his night came early in the second half. Trimble jumped a passing lane, sprinted ahead and finished with a breakaway dunk to thunderous applause from the home crowd.

What was going through his head during the sequence?

“What I want to do,” Trimble said. “Either a back-scratcher. Or a little one-hand tomahawk. I did a back-scratcher last game. I didn’t want a windmill or anything. It was too close of a game. If I would have missed it, that probably would have been a turning point.”

But it was a turning point for the Tar Heels, capping a 17-2 run that flipped the game. North Carolina turned a 10-point deficit into a 16-point lead, controlling pace and forcing Louisville into tougher shots, ultimately holding the Cardinals under 40%.

Even still, the game never stayed comfortable. Louisville cut the margin to one possession in the final minute as missed free throws and turnovers reopened the door. Trimble acknowledged his part in the late wobble — a pair of giveaways and the team, as a whole, “letting off the gas” — but delivered when it counted, sinking two free throws with 12.3 seconds left to push the lead to five.

After the win, Davis said Trimble was the difference against a Louisville defense built on length and versatility.

“Seth was huge for us tonight on both ends of the floor,” Davis said. “He had the responsibility of guarding Brown, and what a responsibility that is. He’s a fantastic player. Against their defense — they’re long, they’re athletic, very versatile — you have to find ways to be able to break down their defense and be able to consistently score. And Seth was our guy coming off ball screens. The thing that I loved about him was he was thinking, ‘Attack.’”

And all it took was a little reminder.

This story was originally published February 24, 2026 at 6:05 AM.