Steph Curry Visited JMU And Left Without a Scholarship Offer
I remember meeting with Steph on his visit to JMU. I respect him for sticking to his faith, family and work morals. https://t.co/l6RH03v8er
— Greg Werner (@VTStrength) July 1, 2017
Sports, like life, can be filled with plenty of “what if?” moments. We just discovered a big one for JMU basketball. The Steph in the quote above, refers to Steph Curry, the two time NBA MVP and two time NBA Champion with the Golden State Warriors. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.
The tweet is from Greg Warner, the current strength and conditioning coach for Kenny Brook’s Virginia Tech Hokies women’s basketball team. Greg worked as a strength and conditioning coach at JMU from 1992 to 2015. We did in fact confirm that Steph Curry visited JMU prior to committing to Davidson. Well, to be perfectly clear, we replied to Greg’s tweet with “Wait, Seth Curry visited JMU? Good gracious.” and he liked the tweet. We’re counting that as confirmation. We’re Rob and Todd, not Woodward and Bernstein.
Anyway, after flexing our investigative journalism muscles, we attempted to process this discovery. Everyone knows that Curry flew a little bit under the radar and only had one D1 offer coming out of high school. Plenty of schools regret that now. But the majority of them didn’t have Curry visit their campus and still pass on him. I mean, this appears to be a big &#%!@?! mistake for JMU basketball.
Curry entered college in 2006. Let’s get all the caveats out of the way. The players on JMU that time were all good Dukes, played hard, represented the school well, yada, yada, yada. But can you remember a single freshmen from JMU basketball that year? I can’t either, but I’m confident in saying that none of them have gone on to become one of the top 5 players in the friggin world. None of them averaged 34 points per game in the tournament while leading an underdog mid-major to the Elite 8. Arrgghhh. He could have done that at JMU. Instead, Dean Keener passed on him. And then lead the team to a 7-23 record Curry’s freshman year and got fired. Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve.
Crap!
It must have been a Homer Simpson, ’cause the pitcher just said “Doh!”
and his grandmother lives just down the road in Grottoes. That’s where his dad Del grew up and went to Fort Defiance High School. So it’s not out of the relm of possibility he would have taken the JMU offer if offered.
Dudes. You need to put up a new post so I don’t have to relive this depressing piece on JIM history ever time I log on.
JMU history
Yeah, apologies for the lack of new content, but I just got back from a few weeks in Europe with the family. Todd was traveling as well. We’ll be back on the horse soon!
this story was confirmed to me by a player from that JMU team. He said Steph actually scrimmaged with the team on his visit. He said that Steph was not particularly impressive in that scrimmage.
Not getting an offer from a 7-23 JMU team probably gave him the fire that made him the player he became. 🙂