By Annika Duneja
When UNC basketball player Evan Smith runs out onto the floor of the Dean Smith Center, he wears the number 32 across his back.
It’s a number that was worn by Tar Heel greats, under names like Naismith Hall of Famer Billy Cunningham, an NBA champion as both a player and a coach, and coveted high school recruits like Luke Maye and Rashad McCants.
But as the last-ever varsity walk-on from the now-defunct JV basketball team, Smith’s journey to Roy Williams Court wasn’t quite like theirs.
Bright beginnings
In high school, Smith was a star. Raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, he played for Mike Craft at Ardrey Kell High School.
During his sophomore year, he started getting interest from the big leagues. Schools like Tennessee, Ole Miss and South Carolina started reaching out.
He was first team all-state, two-time all-conference, and remains the all-time assist leader at his school. He was the kind of guy who wanted to skip prom to go to the gym – until his mom called Coach Craft and told Craft to tell Smith to go to the dance.
But, as it did for many players his age, everything changed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The schools he was speaking to went silent.
“Definitely in high school, I was not as, I don’t want to say I wasn’t grateful, but I wasn’t as mature as I am right now, so I kind of took it as a, I got worse thing in high school, or I’m not as good, or they don’t want me anymore,” he said.
In 2021, his junior year, Smith missed two crucial free throws at the state championship. His team eventually lost by four points.
His mom, Andrea Samuels, said she started to see him lose confidence in his ability to play at the highest levels. He was hesitant to reach out to the D1 coaches who knew him, thinking he wasn’t good enough.
“I thought he was good, but, again, I don’t know much about basketball,” she said. “I’m like, well, maybe he’s not good enough for D1. He’s saying he’s not good enough, so that must be the truth. Not knowing that that was not the truth.”
But while he might have lost his confidence, he didn’t lose his determination.
Smith kept playing, and while he picked up some D2 offers, he remained set on going D1.
The summer going into his senior year, he got his first D1 offer from Navy. Soon after, an offer from Army followed. In the end, those were his only two D1 offers.
After a little bit of research, Smith picked Army.
Round one of Division 1
The summer of 2022, his parents dropped him off for training camp at West Point.
“You say bye to your parents, they put us all in a room, and we sat there for five minutes, kind of not knowing what was going on,” Smith said. “And then all the drill sergeants and highly ranked people come in the room, and they rush us on the buses, and then they took us over to campus, and that’s when boot camp started. So all the things you see on TV, all the stereotypes are kind of true and more. They shaved my head that day.”
For the next six weeks, Smith went through military boot camp. In that period of time, he was allowed to play basketball only twice, for 45 minutes each.
The reality was that when Smith chose the school, he was thinking about basketball. But Army is a military academy.
Craft, his high school coach, stayed in contact with him and tried to convince him to stick it out for at least a year.
“I knew that if he could get through it, he would be set for life. And that’s what they told him. But I knew right away that it was the wrong decision when he did the six weeks of boot camp, and he said, ‘Coach, I haven’t played basketball in six weeks.’ That’s not Evan.”
And as his first semester went on, Smith found that all the military training left very little time for basketball.
He would send letters home to talk to his family. In those letters, his mom started noticing a shift.
“There was a breaking point because he sent home and told me, ‘I don’t even feel like playing basketball anymore. I’m not interested,’” Samuels said. “I was like, ‘Okay, come home, because you are tripping,’ because if Evan says that, something’s wrong with him.”
By October of his first semester at Army, Smith applied to be discharged and went home.
The gap year
Once he was out of the Army, Smith went right back to the gym and started looking for schools to go to next.
“I was reaching out to every coach possible,” he said. “It didn’t matter. I just wanted to play. I was reaching out to everybody and it was pretty quiet. And then in the summer, I started hearing back from some people.”
In the meantime, he took some classes at Central Piedmont Community College.
What he didn’t know was that taking those classes completely changed his NCAA eligibility.
By taking classes at a two-year college, he switched to being considered a 4-2-4 transfer, meaning that if he wanted to go play for a four-year school, he would have to first graduate from a junior college, something he only found out after talking with Craft, his former coach, about trying to play D1 again.
“I thought it was over, but deep down, I was like, it’s probably not, but I think he thought it might have been over, too, but he kept going to the gym,” Samuels said.
For a year, Smith stayed in the gym, looking at junior colleges. He spoke to coaches and tried to figure out a landing spot where he could play and get back to a level where he could be recruited again.
One coach, from Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas, first reached out to Smith on Twitter (now X). Then, he called.
“He gave me some hope because when he called, he was like, ‘I know you’re a good player and you’re young,’” Smith said. “And he thought it was very mature of me to leave, ’cause I knew what I wanted. And he said, ‘I really want you to come play for my team. I know there’s going to be rust because you haven’t played in a year.’ And that was the first time any coach who had reached out to me had said that, and because that’s kind of something that was weighing on me.”
In the end, Smith committed to Navarro. He headed to Texas to get back on the court.
The comeback
In his first semester at Navarro, Smith said he played “some of the worst basketball I’ve played in my career.”
It didn’t help that he was trying to graduate from a two-year program in one year, taking 23 credits that semester.
He struggled with confidence, and as a result, wasn’t playing as much. Between November and January, he made only one three-pointer.
Over winter break, he went home, hoping to have a reset and practice his game. On the first day home, he twisted his ankle.
“I really thought it was over then. But no, I took the time to heal, and then once I came back in January, I kind of went on a tear,” he said.
Over the course of the season, Smith helped lead Navarro to multiple wins over ranked teams in their conference. At the end of the year, Smith received all-league guard honors. Slowly but surely, the D2, and then D1, offers started coming in.
At the same time, Smith had been applying to multiple schools as a regular student, including UNC-Chapel Hill.
He had the D1 offers he wanted, but the schools were telling him to go back to junior college for another year so they could recruit him properly. Smith didn’t want to do that. He wanted to play at the highest level at that moment.
So when he was offered admission to UNC-CH, he took a risk.
“It was really a delusional decision. I had no plan, but I was like, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m going to Carolina,’” Smith said. “Great school, and I’m gonna just try and walk on. I’m gonna make it happen somehow, some way.”
His father Everol Smith, a former professional soccer player, gave him some advice.
“That was always my thing to him. It’s not about the scholarships or what’ll send you to school. But play because you love it, and you want to have fun doing it, and if it’s not fun, don’t do it,” Everol said. “But clearly, I mean, Evan would play in the park, he’d play in the road, he’d play anywhere, ’cause he loves the game. But he has this drive that he wants to play better and better, and play at higher and higher levels.”
The road to the Smith Center
When Smith got to campus, he said he only knew two things: where his classes were, and where the gym was.
He emailed the UNC basketball coaches. No one responded. A couple months into the year, he saw a flyer about the UNC JV basketball team.
The JV team had existed since 1972. It offered non-scholarship basketball players the opportunity to play for two years, followed by the chance to try out and walk on to the varsity team.
Smith had already missed the interest meeting but showed up to tryouts anyway. He still remembers the first time he walked into the Dean E. Smith Center.
“I couldn’t get over that,” he said. “That was my first time ever being in the Dean Dome. And I was just thinking about that, like the whole tryout, like, yeah, I was focused on playing well and stuff, but I would just catch myself just looking around. Like I was literally in awe.”
When Craft heard that Smith was going to try out for the JV team, he wanted to help. An acquaintance of assistant coach Jeff Lebo and team staff member Beau Maye, Craft reached out to them.
“I said, ‘Beau, you’ve got to take a look at Evan Smith. I said he is one of the best kids and one of the best players I’ve ever had,’” Craft said. “I said, ‘You just gotta give that kid a chance.’ And so, Coach Maye said, ‘Well, that means a lot coming from you. We’ll definitely look at him’.”
At tryouts, JV coach Marcus Paige already knew Smith’s name. He cryptically told Smith, “I do my research.”
Smith got the email that he made the team on Sept. 26, his birthday. The next thing he knew, he was competing in a Carolina jersey.
“I was like, I know I’m good enough, so I’m not going to put no pressure on myself. I’m just gonna go out and play my game. And that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t really force the issue. I just let everything come to me. Ended up having a great season, but we had a great group of guys and it was fun. Like, it was some of the funnest basketball I’ve played in my career.”
Without that pressure, Smith was able to grow as a player and show off his skills and hard work.
His JV teammate, Nick Vecchiarello, said Smith had an immediate impact on the team.
“He was kind of like our go-to guy from the jump, like when things would get tough, or the offense would break down, the ball would always just kind of find his hands late in the shot clock, and we just let him work out and get a bucket,” he said. “I played JV for three years, and playing with that, that was the first time that I ever saw anyone be able to do that.”
But by the end of the 2024-25 season, it became clear that Smith’s first year on the JV team would also be his last.
As a result of the NCAA vs. House settlement, varsity teams had new roster limits that prevented the varsity team from being able to take walk-ons, taking away the purpose of the JV team.
Now, Smith knew he had to get to the varsity team to keep playing. After the season, he stayed in contact with Paige, also an assistant coach on varsity. He texted Paige asking if there was an opportunity to move up. Paige told him he thought he’d be a good piece and said he would put in a good word for him.
But as weeks went by, he didn’t hear anything back. His mom told him to call Paige. He refused, she said, saying it might make Paige mad or that maybe he hadn’t called because he didn’t think Smith was good enough.
“Again, Ev was just being Ev, shy, and not wanting to bother people,” Samuels said. “I’m like, ‘Bother him. This is your future.’”
So Smith called. Paige didn’t pick up. But a few minutes later, Paige called back – and told him to come to summer practice with the varsity team.
Back at the top
When Smith walked into the varsity locker room for summer practice, he said he couldn’t believe he was in the same room as the other guys.
He was sitting next to Henri Veesar, someone he’d watched play in the NCAA Tournament on TV the year before. Then, Seth Trimble, the team’s captain, walked in, and said “What’s up, Ev?” as if Smith had already been his teammate for a season.
That first day of practice, Smith said he played well. Over the course of the summer, he continued, working to keep up with the team’s training and conditioning schedule, which was much more intense than he’d experienced on the JV team.
Two weeks before official practices started, then-head coach Hubert Davis brought Smith to the training room and told him he wanted Smith to officially play on his team.
“My head is kind of spinning,” he said. “I don’t necessarily believe what happened, but there was definitely a sense of relief because I’ve been working so hard and I’ve been dreaming about this for years, but there’s still just this sense of like, ‘Is this real?’ And I really didn’t get the time to soak it in and be proud of myself because I had other obligations that day, so I kind of just, I don’t want to say I brushed it off, but, you know, I had a job to do.”
The first person he saw after finding out was Craft, who he was working with at a basketball camp. Craft said he told him the news with a nonchalant, “Oh yeah, they’re going to let me on the team.”
“I said, ‘You don’t realize what you’ve just done,’” Craft said. “‘Like, you don’t realize that you’re gonna be playing for North Carolina. Like, you don’t realize Kenny Smith, James Worthy, you know, you’re putting on that uniform that they did,’ and the tradition, Dean Smith, I mean, I don’t think he knew it. I don’t think he saw the magnitude of it.”
On the team as a walk-on, Smith knew he wouldn’t get as many chances to play on the floor. But when he did get a chance, he made it count.
Smith got his moment Nov. 14, 2025, when he was subbed in for the last two minutes in a game against N.C. Central University.
“Elijah [Davis] found me on the left slot,” he said. “And honestly, when I caught it, I was like, it’s going up. So I just drove to the basket, got to my floater, which is a shot that I practiced all the time, and as soon as it left my hands, I knew it was good.”
He had scored his first points as a Division 1 basketball player.
“This season was everything I imagined and more,” Smith said. “But, you know, just being me and seeing myself being able to compete against these guys that I literally used to watch on TV a year ago, made me feel like there’s no reason why I couldn’t go out there and produce.”
One more year
At the end of the 2025-2026 season, uncertainty struck again.
In March, Hubert Davis was fired and replaced with former NBA coach Michael Malone. Smith didn’t know if Malone would keep him on the team.
A couple weeks later, Smith had a meeting with Malone. The new coach didn’t know much about Smith, so Smith told him about himself and his journey to get on the team. The assistant coaches were also there and vouched for Smith, talking about the energy he brought to practices.
Ultimately, Malone said he liked what he saw and heard and was willing to keep Smith on the team.
This time around, Smith says he’s ready for the uncertainty and looks forward to being coached by Malone.
He’s also enjoying the title of being the last remaining member of the JV program.
“I still rock my JV merch and keep up with all my teammates. I talk about [the JV team] all the time, so I’m definitely pursuing getting on the court and embracing this new role. But I definitely want the JV program to kind of live through me still.”
For the players and coaches around him who have watched him grow, his spot on the team is proof of something more than just talent.
“He really showed me how hard you do have to work because I thought, to me, hard work was different before Evan started working out with me,” said David Pena, Smith’s trainer and former AAU coach. “Because then I started to see what really hard work is. And how crazy you have to be to really love basketball and really get to where you want to be in basketball.”
For Smith, the reason he works so hard is simple.
“I mean, I’ve been through so much,” he said. “Why would I not give it my absolute all?”
