NSU star endures tough life lessons
Carter’s journey has had extreme highs and lows
NORFOLK — When his assistants first ran the idea by him, Robert Jones was having none of it.
The Norfolk State coach wasn’t put off by this prospective player’s two children or even by a serpentine path that might have seemed shady to some.
No, Jones wasn’t interested in Devante Carter because, well, it didn’t seem like he was good enough.
Carter, a 6-foot-3 guard from Newport News, had averaged all of 2.6 points per game as a sophomore at Odessa, a Texas junior college. As a freshman at Florida’s Chipola College, Carter had scored just 5.1 per contest.
When assistants C.J. Clemons and Jamal Brown pitched the notion of adding Carter to the Spartans’ roster before last season, Jones responded with a hard no.
“There’s no way that a kid who averaged three points a game — unless he’s 7-foot-5 — is going to do anything for us,” Jones recalls telling Clemons and Brown. “Credit to them for convincing me.”
Credit, indeed. Now a senior in his second season at NSU, Carter leads the Spartans and is fourth in the MEAC with 15.9 points per game.
As second-seeded NSU (14-7) opens the MEAC tournament tonight against third-seeded North Carolina Central at Scope, the Spartans will rely on Carter the way they have all season.
But before getting enamored with Carter’s name near the top of the MEAC scoring list, consider that it wasn’t long ago that he reached an altogether different kind of bottom.
Never mind that, suddenly a father, he had attended four schools in the previous four years and was looking for a fifth when he became a faint blip on the Spartans’ radar. Carter’s now 3-year-old twin boys were just a couple of months old when their dad spent a life-altering 10 days in the Newport News jail, a failed human and basketball player ruminating over his place in the world and considering giving up the game altogether.
But life changes, and so do people. The jail time — the result of a domestic dispute with his children’s mother — shook Carter enough to send him in a different direction.
“If I didn’t go to jail, I don’t know if I’d be hooping,” said Carter, who laughs easily and frequently, even at his own mistakes. “After I went to jail, I was like, ‘I’m going to see what this hooping does, see how far it takes me.’”
It’s already been quite a journey. Carter, 23, attended Woodside High in Newport News for three of his four prep years, spending his junior year at a Christian academy in Maryland.
Despite offers from Old Dominion, Kansas State and Southern Miss among others, Carter spent a postgraduate year at Florida’s Montverde Academy as he tried to get qualified academically. (The year he spent in Maryland, he said, was at a school that wasn’t NCAA-certified.)
By the time he finished at Montverde, Carter had drawn the attention of Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton, who encouraged him to enroll at nearby Chipola to stay close.
But Carter left Chipola before his season ended and returned to Newport News for the birth of his children, Devante and DeShaun. Months later, on a Sunday evening, he found himself being hauled away by the police after he and their mother, as he said, “got into it.”
“I feel like I was wrong,” Carter said of the incident, without getting specific. “I should’ve left. There’s a lot of things I should’ve probably did.”
In jail, Carter battled feelings of isolation. He talked to what few visitors he had through a glass partition. He wondered who his real friends were.
When he was granted pretrial release, after what seemed like interminable days and nights of immobility, the world felt different.
“I couldn’t work my legs,” Carter said. “I hadn’t ran in a week and a half, two weeks. Everything felt crazy because I’d been in square walls for so long.”
Carter took a job, the first of his life, at a rubber factory, where he worked Sunday through Friday on the graveyard shift. He’d steal a couple of hours of sleep after work each morning, find an open gym and spend afternoons with his kids before doing it all again the next day.
Eventually, Carter attended a showcase camp in Atlanta, where he got on Odessa’s radar. Seeking a fresh start, he went to Texas, where he was hardly a star.
Carter’s teammates at Odessa had no idea that he was serving two years’ probation at the time, part of the wages — along with 18 weeks of domestic violence classes — he paid to get a felony charge off his record.
After Carter’s sophomore year, Clemons, known in basketball circles as “The Mayor of the 757,” remembered him as a capable scorer for Woodside, where he’d averaged 13.9 points as a four-star recruit.
Besides, after a flurry of transfers left the program, NSU was in need of bodies.
When the well-connected Clemons approached Jones with the idea of signing Carter, Jones couldn’t get past his unspectacular JUCO stats.
“C., he’s only averaging 3.2 points a game,” Jones said. “What are we going to do with that?”
“What?” Clemons replied. “He’s got to be averaging more than that.”
Clemons had his reasons. He’d followed Carter since Carter was an eighth-grader playing AAU ball all the way through his days at Woodside.
With help from Brown, who had seen Carter play well in a JUCO game, Clemons began his sales pitch.
The ensuing conversation was enough for Jones to take a meeting with Carter. Jones laid out his expectations and told Carter that he wanted to get him back to being the player locals remembered.
“I just knew that he was a player that could be an all-conference-caliber guy with his talent,” Clemons said. “He just needed to have a clean slate and start fresh.”
Jones wasn’t put off by Carter’s past; he was more concerned with his present. A father of a 13-yearold boy, Jones knew both the ups and downs of young adulthood and the demands of fatherhood.
“I think that sometimes life happens and it comes at you fast,” Jones said. “Things just happen. It doesn’t make you a bad person because you had a situation with the law — if it’s a minor situation, I should say. I might’ve had more reservations about the kids than the actual situation with the law because I’m just worried about him having the time commitment.”
Carter, a pensive sociology major, has managed. This week, he was named second-team All-MEAC despite numbers that made him a candidate for Player of the Year.
Off the court, Carter’s teammates describe him as someone who speaks way more about his children than he does anything else. NSU’s players are aware of his story, and they see the life lessons it contains.
“Just try to stay the course,” said junior guard Joe Bryant, who starred for Lake Taylor High in Norfolk. “Don’t get down on yourself if you don’t get an opportunity right away. Just try to stay blessed. Love God and God will do the rest himself.”
Carter, who is described by Jones as “an emotional kid,” has done a better job of harnessing his emotions than he did last season, when he averaged 9.7 points per game. He’s matured into a trusted leader, often by example.
Only four players in the MEAC have played more than Carter’s 34.9 minutes per game, a sign that he’s continuing to try to make the most of his time.
“He’s one of those guys that he has the right approach and the mindset day in and day out, so he never comes in thinking or acting any way that he shouldn’t,” said senior forward J.J. Matthews, one of Carter’s closest friends on the team.
“He’s for us. He’s for all the guys.
“The best part of his game to me is his tenacity. He’s a dog. He has a motor for a guard.”
Some might argue that after two high schools, a prep school, three colleges, a pair of children and a few days and nights on life’s ground floor, Carter has a motor for anybody.
And he hopes that if there’s anything to be learned from his own happy ending, people will pay attention.
“To be honest with you, I think if I didn’t go to jail, who’s to say I’d be here right now?” Carter said. “I feel like me hitting rock-bottom and being in jail, it opened my eyes. That’s why I just chose to go a different way, a different path.
“I wouldn’t change nothing. I needed all that — the good, the bad. It’s all what makes me today. And I’m still trying to get better, still trying to grow, still just trying to learn.”
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Hideki Matsuyama made a 25-foot eagle putt on his final hole of the first round at The Players Championship and earned a spot in the record book as the ninth player to post a 63 at the TPC Sawgrass.
And then it was gone.
The opening round last year wasn’t complete because eight players failed to finish before dark. The entire tournament wasn’t complete because of the COVID-19 pandemic that wiped out the final three rounds at Sawgrass and the following three months in golf.
Now it’s about starting over. The defending champion is still Rory McIlroy, who won in 2019 and who began last year with a 72, leaving him nine shots behind. On Thursday, everyone is back to even.
“I think I feel a bit better about that than Hideki does,” McIlroy said. “If I felt for anyone last year because of all this, it was Hideki. That was obviously a hell of an opening round.”
So much has changed in a year since PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan held a news conference — media sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, no one wearing masks — to announce the tour was shutting down. That goes beyond the weekly testing for the coronavirus and masks required for what is now limited attendance outside the ropes.
McIlroy was No. 1 in the world at The Players last year and building momentum toward the Masters, his missing leg of the career Grand Slam. He had seven consecutive top-5 finishes around the world, including a World Golf Championship title.
He returns to Sawgrass at No. 11, out of the top 10 for the first time in three years. And after another pedestrian finish at the Arnold Palmer Invitational last week, he’s starting to search for answers.
“The good golf is in there, and I feel capable of going out and shooting good scores any week that I play on any golf course that I play,” he said. “But it’s the days where you don’t feel so good that you need to manage it and get around in a couple under par. That’s the challenge for me right now.”
The struggle isn’t his alone. Rickie Fowler has gone more than two years without winning and has dropped to No. 70 in the world, with no guarantee he will get in the WGC Match Play in two weeks or the Masters next month.
Justin Thomas hasn’t had a dream start to his year, starting with a barely audible anti-gay slur he muttered to himself at Kapalua that was heard by enough TV viewers that it led to one sponsor dropping him and another giving him a public reprimand. And then with a chance in Phoenix, he learned his grandfather — his dad’s father, a PGA professional — had died.
“I’m doing OK. I have definitely been better,” he said. “But at the same time, it’s a good opportunity for me to try to grow and learn and get stronger because of it. I think it’s kind of put a lot of things into perspective, and unfortunately for my golf, it’s taken a toll on that a little bit, and I haven’t been and I’m not playing as well as I’d like.”
On the upswing are a pair of first-time major champions, Bryson DeChambeau and Collin Morikawa, who approach the game in vastly different manners. Morikawa, the consummate iron player, was flawless at times in winning his first World Golf Championship two weeks ago. DeChambeau had another must-see week at Bay Hill by trying to drive a par 5 and winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
The Players marks a milestone on the PGA Tour as it relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the first of the cancellations that led to a dozen tournaments on the schedule that were not played.
It has been two years since McIlroy won. He has played 42 times around the world since then, yet he still feels like he has a title to defend this week.
“There’s been no one else’s name added to the trophy after mine, so I guess I still am,” McIlroy said. “Yeah, it’s hard when you’re so far removed from that win. It was two years ago, and a lot has happened since. I’ll still try to rekindle those feelings and memories from two years ago, and hopefully that gives me the spark that I need to get my game in shape.”