As House settlement spells end for UNC JV basketball, alumni exIt’s the time of year, at the end of every summer for 52 years, when the call would go out — in dorms, at Woolen Gym, and in more recent decades on North Carolina’s website.
Interested in playing junior varsity basketball?
Any full-time male student could try out and become a part of the basketball program, albeit a tiny one, and the luminary careers of many future celebrity North Carolina walk-ons started that way.
When classes start Monday, there will be no word to spread. When September rolls around, there will be no meeting to attend. When basketball season arrives, there will be no tryouts, because for the first time in five decades, there will be no junior varsity team.press regret
The roster limits in the House settlement with the NCAA, the earthshaking conclusion of the landmark lawsuit that opened the door to pay players directly, inadvertently killed it.
“It sounds like this is the end of it,” said Roy Williams, who coached the JV team under Dean Smith long before he became head coach at Kansas and then UNC. “It’s a sad, sad day for me.”
When freshmen became eligible in the fall of 1972, spelling the end of freshmen teams — a year earlier, North Carolina’s freshmen beat David Thompson and N.C. State in front of a sell-out crowd — Smith chose to keep the idea alive as a junior-varsity program, with freshmen and sophomores forming a competitive, self-replenishing pool of future varsity walk-ons. Later, players could extend their JV careers as juniors and seniors … but they still had to try out every fall.
The JV program Smith started two generations ago, an enduring quirk of North Carolina basketball, played its last game on February 22 at the Smith Center. The players knew it at the time. They doused head coach Marcus Paige with water in the locker room afterward, the final wreath-laying as one of the traditions that made UNC basketball UNC basketball died a quiet death.
“It wasn’t really any type of sadness or anything super-sentimental like that,” said Isaiah Joyner, a sophomore on the final team. “We were really just enjoying it, our last time playing together, our last time at the end of a fantastic season. It was more we were just having a lot of fun. It was the last time all of us would play together or play for Marcus, but it was more like a celebration.”
The university says the terms of the House settlement preclude the continuation of the JV program, because the mandated men’s basketball roster limit of 15 applies to all programs, varsity or junior varsity or otherwise. The concern, not stated publicly by the NCAA, is that other schools could start JV programs specifically to hide players and circumvent the roster cap.
It is of no consideration that North Carolina’s JV team is a beloved anachronism, lingering from the program’s most glorious and memorable period into a very different era of college athletics.
“The House settlement, whoever put the numbers together, basketball is 15 and that’s it,” UNC basketball spokesman Steve Kirschner said. “It does not account for some on varsity and some on JV. You have a cap of 15, period.”
A program that once created a path by which any would-be men’s basketball player on campus could one day play for North Carolina, for real, however slim the chance may be, has become the victim of unintended consequences.
UNC JV a source of ‘great pride’
Over the years, the JV program launched a thousand careers, in basketball and otherwise, by allowing players who loved the sport but weren’t ACC-caliber talents to immerse themselves in one of college basketball’s most famous programs, to occupy the distant orbit of some of the sport’s legendary coaches.
Fletcher Gregory grew up in tiny Weldon, in Halifax County, dreaming of playing for Smith. His high-school coach encouraged him to play Division III basketball, but he insisted on going to Chapel Hill. Gregory made the JV team as a sophomore in 1975, then spent his final two years in college as a statistician for Smith. Along the way, he changed his major from economics to education and landed a job as a high-school head coach immediately after graduation, at Virginia Episcopal in Lynchburg.
Later, he was a graduate assistant at Penn State, the longtime coach at Forsyth Country Day and an assistant coach at Wofford before Dick Harter, his head coach at Penn State, made him a part of his first Charlotte Hornets staff in 1988. What became a 15-year coaching journey started on North Carolina’s JV team, playing for Eddie Fogler.
“Dean Smith was a role model for me the way he handled himself, and to be a part of the Dean Smith Carolina program was the best place a young basketball mind and basketball player could be,” Gregory said. “I just wanted to learn as much basketball as I could and I was fortunate enough to be able to play at the JV level. I had no shot, zero shot, at playing at the varsity level.
“For me it was just the experience of being in the middle of one of the best college basketball programs that existed at the time, soaking it all up, just trying to be a sponge. I started working the camps, summers, all that stuff. It was just a dream come true. People that know me know I played JV. They ask me about it sometimes. It’s something I hold with great pride.”
For the love of the game … and Dean Smith
Gregory was far from alone. While North Carolina basketball at large served as a springboard to the NBA, playing in the ACC on national television, the junior-varsity program played a hodgepodge of junior colleges and Division II and Division III schools while serving a springboard for doctors, lawyers, politicians, financiers, high-school coaches, CEOs — and even a Hollywood stunt man.
“JV was an education. It was hope,” that stunt man, Sean Kelly, said. He just published a book about his experiences in the movies, A Different Take, and played on the JV team in 1976 and 1977 as a self-described “5-9 power forward.”
“You were still part of playing organized basketball. You were representing North Carolina, and anyone that played JV basketball just loved the school. That was the priority. We all loved Dean. We all just wanted to contribute.”
United by their love of the game and love of the team, they were able to see themselves contributing to the success of the larger program, whether they eventually made the varsity team as a walk-on or not — and some of the walk-ons, especially late in the Williams era, became famous in their own right (Blue Steel! Biscuit Boys!) as they were often the ones pushing the score into triple digits to secure free food for the students
The JV alums at the end of the bench often became instant celebrities during the postseason. Dewey Burke advanced from the JV team to become one of Williams’ beloved “tough little nuts” in 2007. Jackson Watkins, who appeared in seven games for the varsity team in 2022 and 2023 after rising from the JV squad, is even writing a book about his experience: Dream On.
