One on One with Isaiah Hicks

Article by Turner Walston 

Chapel Hill, NC--After playing out of position a year ago, Isaiah Hicks is finally comfortable at power forward. Last weekend, he earned the coaches’ defensive award for the fourth time this season for his efforts against Kentucky.

TW: You seem to be a more confident player this season. Can you feel that on the court early in the season?

IH: Yeah, because it’s making me more assertive, more aggressive, just more of an impact on the team now. Just coming out and playing hard has its results.

TW: You were over-thinking last year. This time around, are you more confident in what you’re doing?

IH: Yeah. I learned a lot throughout the whole year: postseason practice, weightlifting, pickups . . . Now, I’m just applying everything I learned from that year and now it’s showing, getting the ball to the basket and just going up hard, just doing stuff that I probably would have struggled with last year because I would just get the ball and hesitate, or slow myself down, thinking too much.

TW: It seems like you are getting the ball in a better position to score, and you know better what to do. Last year, you might get the ball out at the three-point line and have almost too many options.

IH: That’s the easiest way to put it, basically. I would end up like a deer in the headlights. That’s how it would seem.

TW: Early in the year, you’re seeing a lot of time with the second unit. What are you asked to do as a group?

IH: We always talk about coming out with energy, something to help the starters. Everybody wants somebody to come out with energy and lift the team up when they need it, so everybody can feed off of it. Not just me, but Nate, Theo, Joel, anybody can bring and that’s something we try to do.

TW: You have played nine games, and it’s been more than two months since Late Night with Roy. Does it seem like it’s been that long?

IH: It seems like Late Night was a year ago. It feels like we just got to the Bahamas. Everything’s going slow, and I like that because last year it seemed like everything was coming super fast, and I didn’t know what to do. Now, it’s just slowed down, and I like that so much better. 

TW: Coach Williams loves the quote about how it’s amazing what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit. Does that apply to this team?

IH: I think we are at our best when that applies to us. When nobody cares about credit, people will be out there getting rebounds and not worrying about anything. We’ll be working hard, not caring what the outcome is. That quote just says a lot about a team, period, not just us. If any team follows it, the sky’s the limit for that team, because everybody will be going all out for the team instead of themselves.

TW: Is this team on the track to peaking at the right time?

IH: As Coach always says, he wants the perfect game, every game. I would say we are on track right now because we still have the rebounding problem, and it’s something that us bigs, we’ve got to get right.

TW: You have a brutal early portion of the schedule, even before conference play begins. Do you like that, or would you prefer to take things easier?

IH: It’s always good to see where you are, to see what you’ve got to work on, because at the end of the day, when it comes tournament time, it’s down to one win, one loss. So, it’s always good to see where you’re at early, so you know you can build upon it.

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.”