46 SLAMONLINE.COMH
E SCROLLED
through his phone and
made it a priority to
get screenshots of as
many of them as
possible—tweet after tweet. He wanted a
record of all the doubts that existed
regarding him and his game. His phone
soon was inundated with photos of social
media posts—some by complete
strangers, others by people he knew
really well—that predicted how long it
would take for him to have a shot at
becoming an NBA player.
They all said it’d be at least a few years
before the League would come calling for
him. And the mock drafts agreed.
Yet, here is Coby White, inside a gym
in Thousand Oaks, CA, just one year
after he began collecting those same
screenshots. There are still three weeks
to go before the NBA Draft, but he
wastes no time reminding you just how
inaccurate and flat-out wrong all those
predictions were.
“It’s a great feeling because I used all
that as motivation. Even people from my
city that I knew, I was cool with—you
have them on Twitter and personally I
know them, talk to them a lot and I see
them around the city—they’d say, Ye a h,
give Coby two or three years and he’ll be
in the League. And Give him two years
and he’ll grow and he’ll get better. I
screenshot all that,” he recalls. “I just like
to have it because on draft night—I’m not
petty, but I’d want to send the picture tothem like, Remember when you said I
was...But I ain’t petty. I [just] used it
throughout the season [for motivation],
but now I had to clear storage on my
phone. I had to get some apps. I be flying
a lot so I had to download movies. I
deleted a lot of them but throughout the
season I did [look at them].”
At the same time, he does understand
where the doubts stemmed from. A
one-and-done guard out of UNC? When
was the last time that happened?
When White arrived at Chapel Hill last
fall, he was well aware of the stats. Only
three hoopers had ever stepped foot on
campus and become one-and-done
players during head coach Roy Williams’
16 years with the Tar Heels: Marvin
Williams, Brandan Wright and Tony
Bradley. None of them were guards.
The likes of Ty Lawson, Raymond
Felton, Kendall Marshall, Marcus Paige
and Joel Berry all came before him. All
guards that came in as McDonald’s
All-Americans but ended up staying
multiple years at UNC.
Coby knew that history seemed to
back those very same tweets he
screenshotted coming into his freshman
year. Yet he paid no attention to what the
odds said.
“I think everybody was so fixated on
saying, North Carolina holds people
back, especially point guards or Coach
Williams doesn’t let them play. This and
that. I think that because they were so
fixated and feeding on that, [they said],He’s going to be there multiple years,”
says White in retrospect.
“I know how great of a basketball
player Marcus Paige was. Kendall
Marshall, Joel Berry, Ty Lawson. I know
how great they were and they stayed
multiple years. So you can’t help but to
think coming in that maybe it is a thing
that point guards go through. I think I
helped change that and I think I helped
set the road for it. I stayed me. I did what I
did throughout high school. I didn’t
change anything. Stayed in the gym all
the time...And it got me where I’m at.”
He arrived on campus as a top-25
recruit who had just finished his prep
career with over 3,500 points and North
Carolina Mr. Basketball honors. Nonethe-
less, the starting position—or even just
playing time in general—was never
promised. But White, who committed
to UNC when he was a high school sopho-
more, quickly earned it and ended up
passing Michael Jordan on the Tar Heels’
all-time freshman scoring list by the end
of the season. He was also named
second-team All-ACC. He took the Tar
Heels to the Sweet 16 with a 29-7 overall
record and finished his freshman
campaign averaging 16.1 points, 4.1
assists and 3.5 rebounds.
As impressive as becoming the first
guard to successfully do a one-and-done
year under Roy Williams at UNC is, it
doesn’t come close to the biggest
obstacle he found himself having to
overcome heading into college.Until Coby White, no UNC guard had ever been one-and-done
under coach Roy Williams. And if for some reason you still doubt him,
just wait and see what he’s about to do in Chicago.DOUBT
NEVER IN
WORDS FRANKLYN CALLE // PORTRAITS ATIBA JEFFERSON