Long and winding road for Towns
Former Harvard star to make Madness debut with Ohio State
When Seth Towns returns to the locker room and checks his phone after he makes his NCAA Tournament debut with Ohio State on Friday, he’ll probably have hundreds of texts waiting for him.
Most of them, likely, will come from some of his former Harvard basketball teammates.
Specifically, Towns will read through a Harvardbased group text thread. It’s made up of five of his closest friends he made in Cambridge: his former teammates and classmates Bryce Aiken, Christian Juzang and Robert Baker, and their friends Angel and K.C.
That group will be watching Towns play in the tournament and providing live commentary of the game in the text thread, which has become commonplace whenever someone in the group has had a big game over the last year since they departed and graduated from Harvard last spring.
“That’ll definitely be going on Friday, for sure,” Juzang said. “You’ll see a lot of exclamation points with Towns in front of it. It’s like Reddit. I wish we could broadcast it in the bottom right corner of whatever (channel) the game is being broadcast on.”
There’s reason for that much excitement after everything Towns and his classmates have gone through together. In 2016, they made up a Top 10 nationally-ranked recruiting class for Harvard.
Big things were expected. But they never made the NCAA Tournament together.
Though they won two Ivy League regular-season titles, the Crimson fell in three consecutive conference tournaments, including two heartbreaking championship game losses. And then last season, just as they were set to host the conference tournament as seniors, it was canceled due to COVID-19, a sudden and crushing end to their dream.
For Towns, it was even harder. After being named the Ivy League Player of the Year in 2018, he injured his left knee in that season’s championship game. He wound up missing two full seasons, never getting the knee healthy enough to return, which was devastating.
But with two seasons of eligibility remaining, Towns wanted to continue his career after graduating from Harvard.
He committed to hometown Ohio State as a grad transfer and finally returned to the court in December.
Now, three years after the knee injury, the 6-foot-7 forward will take the court for the second-seeded Buckeyes on Friday afternoon, a dream finally realized.
“It means so much,”
Towns said.
And even more because of his journey at Harvard. Towns isn’t just going to the tournament as a member of Ohio State. He feels like he’s bringing Harvard with him.
“It feels like me going to the tournament is kind of like representative of all of that as well,” Towns said. “It’s what every kid dreams of, right? It means a ton.”
It means a lot, too, to his Harvard teammates and coaches, who will be fully supporting him from afar. When Aiken, who played as a grad transfer at Seton Hall this season, found out he wasn’t making the tournament last weekend, he had an emphatic message for Towns.
“He texted me like, ‘Go win it. Go (expletive) win it,’” Towns said.
Juzang now lives in Vietnam, where he just played a season in the Vietnam Basketball Association. Though the Ohio State game will start at 2 a.m. Saturday in Vietnam, he won’t be missing it. He’s been staying up at unfathomable hours all year to watch Towns, Aiken, and his brother Johnny at UCLA, and that won’t change now.
“If there’s one guy that you want to see win the most, it’s Seth Towns,” Juzang said. “It just warms my heart. I’m so excited. I’ll be watching every single game. … I’ll be staying up for it just to see him live out this dream that we were trying to accomplish for four years. It’s bigger than this one-year run. It’s an accumulation. …
“It makes it feel like I’m there, to get to see him out there. It’s dope. I’m sure our whole class feels that way.”
Towns has kept in touch with his former coach Tommy Amaker, too. The Harvard coach has texted Towns periodically to tell him he watched one of his games, and even jokingly make some comments about his game.
“Sometimes he gets mad, like a good kind of mad,” Towns said. “I’m now doing the stuff that he was trying to bark at me in my head when I was a sophomore and a freshman. He’s like, ‘I see you chasing rebounds now.’ … He’s still coaching me from afar. …
“It hurts not to have been able to play four years for him. He was such a great coach. I loved him. It meant so much being able to put on a jersey and represent him as much as it did for the university and everything else. I’m so thankful for that relationship.” The feeling is mutual. “So proud of Seth!!” Amaker said via email. “He deserves all of this and more. We all have watched and followed him — cheering from a distance.”
Towns hasn’t just returned, he could be an X-factor for Ohio State as it eyes a national title run. Though his knee still isn’t 100 percent healthy, it’s held up well. He played 28 minutes off the bench in Sunday’s Big Ten title game as he’s seen his role increase throughout the season.
However much he plays, Towns’ Harvard family will be watching and cheering, in Cambridge and around the world. The road has been long and hard to get to this stage, but at the end, rewarding.
“Seth’s one of those guys — on the court, in the locker room, whatever — he was the face of Harvard basketball, and so obviously it could’ve been anybody, but the fact that it was him, it almost feels like it’s written,” Juzang said. “For him to kind of go represent us and that four-year journey and to finally get over the hump and be there, I feel like we definitely all feel like there’s a piece of us there, and a piece of just pushing him and cheering him on.
“We’ll definitely be there in spirit. We’re all scattered around the world now, but when Seth plays on Friday, we’ll all be in Indy. We’ll all be there with him, so I think that’s really, really cool and hopefully he knows that.”