NO HOOPS FOR HENRY
Pandemic brings Henry’s outstanding sophomore season to ‘disheartening’ halt
March missing its Madness
It’s a short, and very abrupt, roller-coaster ride from March Madness — the NCAA’S showpiece basketball tournament — to the quiet of Ja’shon Henry’s apartment bordering the Bradley University campus.
Henry, from Saskatoon, was supposed to be participating in March Madness this month with his Bradley Braves. Instead, he’s living in a near empty apartment block. He takes classes online. There’s no accessible hoop to shoot at.
He’s waiting out COVID-19, the best he can.
“Everywhere that’s public ... even our own private practice gym, and our private weight room, everything is closed,” Henry said Thursday from Peoria, Ill. “Our whole athletic building is closed right now, and that’s like everything around here. Everything is closed, other than the essentials — gas stations, grocery stores.”
He’s lucky enough that there’s a weight room in his building. He’s there every day to work out.
He focuses on academics. Every week, Henry and his teammates get a note from coaches — updates on what’s happening with the virus on campus, and in the state.
“I really wanted to play. All of us wanted to play,” said Henry, a second-year player who would have competed at his second NCAA championship tournament in as many seasons. “But we understand completely how serious the virus is. It’s killing people, and it spreads so fast.
“If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything, so it makes complete sense that a whole bunch of things got cancelled — not just our tournament, but conference tournaments and spring sports, in general. Everyone is going through it. The precautions had to be made, and everyone’s got to stay safe.”
But that doesn’t mean this thing isn’t breaking hearts. Henry was voted to the Missouri Valley Conference’s ‘Most Improved’ team a few weeks ago after averaging 9.5 points and six rebounds per game through his sophomore season, more than doubling his freshman output. He started 14 of 33 games, and celebrated with teammates when they advanced to March Madness by beating Valparaiso 8066 in the conference title match.
Henry hit seven of nine shots in that deciding game, netting 16 points and seven rebounds.
“It definitely hurt all of us,” he says. “At the beginning of the year, we wrote down on a whiteboard what we wanted to achieve this season. One of them was getting back to the NCAA tournament.
“Every day, we walked by that whiteboard and saw the goal. To have it stripped from you ... all the hard work we put in over the summer, and throughout the season, to get to March and have that taken
away from you is very disheartening. Especially for our seniors. They helped rebuild this program for the last four years, and left it in a really great place. I felt really bad for them, that they couldn’t go out on the biggest stage.
“It’s a tough situation, but it’s not just us. It’s every athlete that’s playing right now.”
Henry played high school basketball at Saskatoon St. Joseph until after Grade 11, then shifted to Notre Dame in Wilcox, where he spent Grade 12 and a postgrad season playing in the National Preparatory Association. That’s where he caught Bradley’s attention. Since signing on, he has qualified for the NCAA tournament in two straight seasons.
This past off-season, he worked on specific areas for improvement: Three-point shooting, his free throw percentage, and overall aggressiveness, both offensively and defensively.
Division 1 basketball, he notes, is more like a job than at any level he’s played. He tells the tale of getting picked up at the airport by coaches as a freshman, getting dropped off at his dorm, and told there’s a 7 a.m. lift in the morning — and don’t be late.
“I was ‘dang’ — it’s right off the bat, as soon as I stepped off the plane,” he says now. “It’s really a job, and you’ve got to love what you do. That’s the biggest thing. You have to love the game of basketball in order to play it at any level, and to pursue that dream. But this is definitely way different. The intensity every day at practice, what the coaches expect from me every day on and off the court, academically ...
“Even taking care of your body, they take very seriously, and we all take very seriously. It’s definitely a job, and you’ve got to love what you do.”
And he does. There are many places he would rather be right now — stadiums, gyms, locker rooms, as opposed to that empty apartment building. But in winning that conference title and qualifying for March Madness, he takes consolation in a memory he’ll hold dear in the years to come.
“It definitely helps,” said Henry, who has two seasons of eligibility remaining. “Not every team got to finish their season by cutting down the nets and holding up a trophy with their team. My last memory of this season is still holding up a trophy, cutting down the nets with my teammates, and celebrating that.
“My heart goes out to those other teams that didn’t even get to play in their conference tournament or advance, like we did, to the big dance.”