Seymore Succeeding On And Off Court

Article By Adam Lucas

Sasha Seymore recently won one of the most prestigious post-graduate scholarships in America, the George J. Mitchell Scholarship, which will support his graduate study in Northern Ireland next September. Yet he fully realizes the reaction he receives from telling people about that honor tends to pale in comparison to telling them his other big news from the fall: making the Carolina varsity basketball team.

Seymore played two years of junior varsity basketball for the Tar Heels. He considered himself more of a soccer player when he arrived in Chapel Hill from New Bern High, but basketball was a way to stay in shape. After his first year of JV hoops, then-coach Jerod Haase sat down with Seymour. “You’re big enough to play on the varsity,” Haase told him. “You have the grades to play on the varsity. You have the right attitude. You don’t really have the basketball skill set yet, but making the varsity can be a realistic goal for you if you want it to be.”

“When I walked out of that room,” Seymore says, “I wanted to be on the varsity basketball team.”

And when Sasha Seymore wants something to happen, it tends to happen. He’s a Morehead-Cain Scholar who is majoring in economics and global studies. After his freshman year, he teamed with three friends to help start Kicking Across Carolina, and the trio proceeded to dribble soccer balls all the way across the state of North Carolina—Asheville to Morehead City—to demonstrate the power of sports to unite. He’s visited South Africa (“Where do you go to school?” a native asked him. “The University of North Carolina,” Seymore replied. “Oh, Michael Jordan!” was the response). 

He played two years of JV basketball, played club basketball as a junior (the varsity team had no spots open last year) and was one of two players selected for the varsity squad this year.

Despite all the extracurricular activities, he’s made A’s in every class he’s taken at Carolina except for two (he made A-‘s in those). And now he’s a Mitchell Scholar, which means next September he’ll spend a year in Belfast studying at Queens University. Seymore interviewed for the scholarship in Washington, D.C. in November and was notified later that same weekend that he is one of 12 recipients nationwide.

“From the standpoint of telling other people, making the North Carolina basketball team was a much bigger deal and other people got much more excited,” he says. “And for me, walking on the floor with the Carolina basketball team was a lifetime dream. It’s an incredible experience.

“It’s not like I’ve wanted the Mitchell Scholarship my entire life. But it does draw on all areas of my life, and a lot of areas on which I place a lot of value. People may not understand it quite as much, but it’s an accumulation of a long period of effort.”

Seymore’s studies in Belfast will focus on using sports as a method of conflict resolution. He’s done extensive research in that field, including the honors thesis he’s currently working on that evaluates sports as a method of conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine.

One of the organizations he’ll work with in Northern Ireland is Peace Players International, a group that uses basketball to bridge the gap between Protestants and Catholics. The group is a past recipient of ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Award, the same honor given to Dean Smith.

“In some of these interviews, a common question is what three people you’d want to sit down and talk with,” Seymore says. “One of mine is always Dean Smith. I actually reference him in my thesis because of what he did with Charles Scott.”

Smith would undoubtedly be incredibly proud to know that one of his Tar Heels has worldly ideas about the importance of sports.

“The big central theme about sports in general is humanism,” Seymore says. “All their lives people involved in these conflicts grow up thinking the other side is not human. One of the biggest issues with Northern Ireland, and the reason they are still so divided, is they have a segregated school system, with Protestants in one school and Catholics in the other. Children from ages four to 18 can go that entire time never talking to the other side.

“But if you put them on the same sports team, they can realize the other side cares about the same things they care about. Through sports, you can say something words can’t. You can channel that emotion into something good and start to break down barriers. That’s the power of sports. Is it enough to say we’re going to base the reconciliation of Northern Ireland entirely around sports? Maybe not. But it’s a powerful tool.”