NCAA Basketball: Campbell’s Chris Clemons is doing things his way

Path to 3,000 points

“‘Chris! What’s your range?’” Millbrook boys varsity coach Christopher Davis recalls asking Chris, reminiscing on a particular practice with the high-school-aged Chris Clemons back in a February interview with ABC11.

Clemons, confused, didn’t know the answer nor the intent of the question.

Davis launched the ball over to Clemons: “North Carolina!”

So Clemons aligned himself to the three-point line, squared his hips to the rim, and fired up a triple. A normal three-pointer, a normal distance, a normal occasion. Nothing odd, not at first.

“Virginia!” Now, Clemons would step back. And step back again. And step back even further, waltzing his way between the arc and halfcourt line as his head coach would call out the names of state after state, testing the shooting range of the varsity team’s leading scorer and highlight-film mainstay.

These practice shots, as bizarre as they seem in a closed-gym setting, weren’t bizarre in-game. ‘Curry shots,’ as Clemons calls them, are ones he’s not afraid to take, no matter the circumstances or duress. After all, for Clemons, a shot is just a shot.

“I’m pretty much as confident as they get. Some of the shots I take are wild,” Clemons says of his aggressive, all-shots-are-makeable mentality. “I don’t think I’m ever going to miss a shot no matter what kinda shot it is. I always think I can do the unthinkable. That’s how I play.”

The unthinkable was, as Clemons so eloquently puts it, a routine aspect of his games. It’s hard to imagine a 5’9” point guard launching (and draining) contested three-pointers from 30-plus feet, or pinning shots to the backboard, or throwing down haymakers thanks to his 44-inch vertical, or crossing over defender after defender on his way to the basket.

It’s also quite unthinkable that, despite scoring 699 points as a senior, scoring double-digits in 45 of his final 46 high school games, and winning back-to-back Cap 8 Player of the Year awards, that this dynamic scoring guard would fail to see his name linked to a single recruiting board, see his name with three, two, or even one star attached to his resume. Points and trophies be damned, the national recruiting world wasn’t aware of the 5’9” inferno that was Millbrook’s Chris Clemons — or, if they did know, they simply refused to show interest.

“I guess they didn’t see something or they were waiting to see something,” Clemons says of the lack of recruiting interest through his first three years at Millbrook High School. “I don’t know what anybody’s thinking, man. There’s a lot of moving parts that go into your recruitment, it’s not always that schools don’t like you or want you … I don’t know exactly what they were looking at.”

The summer between his junior and senior seasons (2014) soon arrived, with nary a scholarship offer or even hint of interest — until Campbell’s Kevin McGeehan caught wind of a 5’9” point guard with immense scoring potential at a Myrtle Beach AAU tournament.

Previously serving as an assistant coach at Richmond, McGeehan was no stranger to the vertically-challenged point guard. From 2007 to 2015, the Richmond Spiders saw two sub-six-foot guards — Kevin Anderson (5’11”) and Kendall Anthony (5’8”) — come in and wreak havoc on the college landscape, with the two players nearing or surpassing the 2,000-point threshold and winning conference accolades in the process as one of the Atlantic-10’s better programs.

McGeehan, accordingly, was drawn immediately to the tantalizing prospect of bringing the undersized and overlooked point guard to Campbell University, a suffering program that he was hoping to revive and return to national relevancy.

Within five minutes of watching Clemons’ first game, McGeehan was sold. More than sold, really — within days he offered a scholarship, the first of three offers (the others coming from Gardner-Webb and UNC Greensboro) that the 5’9” guard would pick up that summer. Campbell’s coaching staff wasn’t finished with their pitch after making the initial offer, though. As a unit, the entire four-man staff attended all of Clemons’ games, letting it be known to the world that he was their number one priority and that they valued his potential as the program’s star player.

“The first thing that stands out to you about Chris is his confidence level,” says associate head coach Peter Thomas. “Whether he’s on defense, talking to his teammates, trying to score — he just exuded confidence. That’s kind of the first thing I noticed about him.

“We thought he could be really, really good. In fact, when we recruited him, coach McGeehan and myself … we both recruited him and told him that we thought he could score 2,000 points in his career.”

Clemons isn’t one to doubt himself or underestimate what he’s capable of on a basketball court, but as a high school student who had yet to even suit up at the college level, he saw 2,000 points as difficult goal to accomplish.

“I didn’t think that was possible, at the moment, because obviously 2,000 points is a lot of points,” recalls Clemons, skeptical of the lofty vision that Campbell had for him. “I mean it’s like, ‘whatever, whatever,’ but it turns out they were right. [I] surpassed all that.”

The decision to commit to Campbell wasn’t a difficult one for Clemons. The university was close to home, it offered him a chance to play his style, and it offered him a chance to be himself and be the face of a Division-I basketball team on a regular basis for four consecutive years, if he so chose to accept.

“I think being the first offer meant a lot to him, that’s one of the first things his dad told me was that he’s a very loyal kid,” coach Thomas said of Clemons’ commitment. “I think he was looking for somebody to believe in him and that’s probably something he’s had to fight his whole life being undersized, that he’s had to fight an uphill battle as far as what guys think he can accomplish.”