Story by: Chapel Fowler
Photos by: Will Melfi
DURHAM — Nelson White had worked for years to get here.
He started his high school basketball career as a freshman benchwarmer. Over the next three seasons at Voyager Academy, he blossomed into a starting point guard and team captain who, as a senior, helped the Vikings win the 2016 NCHSAA 1A state championship.
Then he played two seasons at Lenoir Community College, where he earned an associate’s degree and averaged 12 points, seven rebounds and four assists as a sophomore.
When his coach there asked him where he’d like to play next, White said N.C. A&T. The HBCU had his desired major — construction management — and it was “close enough but far enough” from his Durham home. The program was improving quickly under then-coach Jay Joyner, too.
“All right, cool, I’ll just call my people,” White recalled the coach telling him. “I know the whole coaching staff over there.”
He was proactive that spring and summer. He asked for contact information. He sent email after email and never heard back. At his orientation, he handwrote a letter explaining his situation and stuck it between the closed doors of the basketball offices.
And on the first day of classes, two falls ago in Greensboro, White showed up at the office again and introduced himself to an assistant and a manager, eager to claim the spot promised to him on the Aggies’ roster: “My coach was supposed to be talking to y’all. I’m Nelson.”
“But they had never heard of me,” he said.
Already an enrolled student at this point, White didn’t give up. He stopped by daily for the next two weeks, asking for any role in the program, on or off the court, to get his foot in the door. No dice.
Just like that, his basketball dream — propped up on the roster spot he’d been assured he had — was again on delay.
That’s where the North Carolina Coyotes came in.
‘You’ve got responsibilities’
Unlike baseball — which boasts an expansive and well organized “farm team” pyramid under MLB — basketball has no such structure. There’s the NBA, then its developmental arm, the G League.
Everything else is unsanctioned.
Teams such as the Fort Wayne Bubba Ballers, the Arlington Dream Chasers, the West Memphis Raining 3s, the Southern Illinois Pharaohs and the Rochester RazorSharks play in associations of competing grandeur: The Universal Basketball Association, The Maximum Basketball League, The Premier Basketball League, The Basketball League.
But often, they’re leagues in name only. Teams may not adhere to consistent rules. Officiating can be shoddy. Teams will cancel games randomly or, sometimes, not show up at all. And they come and go. Wikipedia lists about as many defunct franchises as it does active.
Chris Thomas experienced this firsthand when his Fort Mill, South Carolina, team rented a van for $89 and drove two hours to Greensboro only to find a locked-up gym. Their opponents, the Carolina Cheetahs of the American Basketball Association, swore they were on their way. They never showed.
“I made up my mind then I was never going to deal with any more minor-league basketball,” Thomas said.
Instead, the longtime coach made his own.
In the summer of 2014, Thomas created the East Coast Basketball League (ECBL), which has steadily grown ever since. Around the same time, Robert Espinosa was frustrated with the ABA, too.
After three years of basketball at Shaw University and an overseas stint, he returned to the Triangle and founded the North Carolina Coyotes in 2013 with his father, Reynaldo. The Durham-based Coyotes joined the ABA, but Espinosa, like Thomas, said the league had “no accountability.”
On top of that, the Espinosas created the Coyotes as a platform. They wanted to help other prospects find the college and overseas opportunities that Robert and his younger brother, Eladio, did. But how do you market basketball players without consistent basketball?
Enter Thomas’ ECBL. In 2016, the Coyotes joined the league, which doesn’t pay its players so it can help college hopefuls and veterans alike without running afoul with NCAA rules.
The league now boasts 19 teams across two conferences and four divisions — and plenty of oversight, too, through a five-person board of directors that includes Thomas, the founder and president.
Teams are subject to fines of $50 to $75 for various violations: if they don’t have a medic at their games or money ready to pay their referees, for example. Canceling games, a cardinal sin, can lead to teams forfeiting the rest of their season.
The league’s goal, alongside community outreach, has always been to facilitate college and pro careers through quality basketball. In an effort to catch more scouts’ eyes, it requires teams to film every game and post it to YouTube within 48 hours, along with full statistics in a box-score format.
“You’ve got responsibilities,” Thomas said. “And if you want to be a part of the league, you’ve got to do what everybody else is doing.”
‘The craft we love’
At a first glance, the Coyotes’ roster looks pretty piecemeal.
During a normal week, you can find Raheem Oshodi at a financial tech company, J’Mell Walters at an environmental science research facility and Espinosa at the Durham City Hall audit services department.
Avante “Tae” Poindexter might be brainstorming the clothing brand he wants to launch, or meeting a client in the gym for a personal training session. White might be immersed in a Durham Tech online class, or busy with a shift at one of his two jobs at a calls center and Adam & Eve.
Some players are in their 30s with children. Some are teenagers with college eligibility. Some are settled. Some are ready to uproot to wherever the heck an opportunity arises. There’s roster turnover annually.
But on the weekends, they’re a team. Turns out a pure, unadulterated love for basketball is a pretty unifying concept. Even if it’s for different reasons.
“You should come here with goals,” Espinosa said.
Oshodi, a former N.C. Central player, credits the Coyotes for launching his overseas career a decade ago. That exposure led him to pro gigs in Peru, Venezuela and Chile. Always a realist, he didn’t see overseas basketball as a “viable career path” and kept U.S. residency throughout his travels.
He’s been back in Raleigh since 2012 and always clears his weekends for basketball. It’s an easy way to exercise and keep up with friends, sure, but he has a stated endgame: to win that elusive ECBL title.
“It definitely is an opportunity for those older guys, especially those who haven’t been on winning teams, because we’ve really won at every (other) level,” Oshodi said. “We have the team to do it.”
Walters has similar motivations. He came up in Kinston — a Basketball Town U.S.A if there ever was one — and won a whole lot of games the local high school. His college career was the opposite.
N.C. Central was making the transition from Division II to Division I and played as an independent school without a conference, traveling constantly to face top teams around the country and losing. A lot. In two of Walters’ seasons, the Eagles were a combined 8-53.
That change was “very, very demoralizing,” he said. So he took a job in Virginia and stepped away from basketball for two years. No problem. But the sport he described as his “first love” came calling again, when he moved back to North Carolina, and he was fully invested. Again.
He now speaks glowingly of the Coyotes and a chance to play consistently in front of his daughters, ages 15 and 6. The latter is extra special because Walters was raised by a single mother.
“Something so small like that is so big to me,” he said. “That’s everything to me, how my girls see me when I’m doing what I love to do. And that’s playing basketball.”
Espinosa, who’s been with the team since the beginning, plays power forward and serves as CEO and a quasi-general manager. Emmanuel Hart, a 27-year-old faculty supervisor in Durham’s parks and recreation department, serves as head coach. Guards Marqui Bunn, Mykiel Faulkner and Aaron Dawson are among the other long-timers.
Add in four college-age players — White, Poindexter, James Moore and Dequan Hines — and you have a quasi-professional locker room: one where rookies can mingle with and learn from veterans. Poindexter insists plenty of Coyotes “could be a coach somewhere else.”
“The older guys, they always have some type of feedback,” said White, who joined the team last fall. “They’re constructive with their criticism. That’s on and off the court. I learn a lot about life, how to carry myself off the court, and, of course, the craft we love.”
‘Whatever needs to be done’
Espinosa dubbed 2020 a “rebuilding year” for the Coyotes, who in the past three seasons have finished at or near the top of their conference. Still, weekends at Voyager Academy are plenty entertaining.
Off the court, the team has harnessed the power of community. At their Feb. 15 season opener, the bleachers were full of family, friends and elementary schoolers from the nearby Bull City Youth League. A local musician sang the national anthem, Saint Augustine’s cheerleaders did the halftime show and volunteers sold Gatorade, Lay’s chips and T-shirts at a concession stand.
On the court, the Coyotes play a run-and-gun style heavy on fast breaks, 3-pointers and quick possessions. They average 110 points and are among four ECBL teams who jack up at least 40 threes a game. (For reference, only two NBA teams take that many.)
They do run plays and offensive sets. But, more often than not, they’re clearing out for whoever has the hot hand, which leads to even more crowd-pleasing crossovers, hesitation dribbles and step-back jumpers. And the Coyotes, who went 2-2 before the ECBL postponed the rest of its season due to the coronavirus, have plenty of scorers.
Seven players, mostly veterans, are averaging at least 10 points: Corey Evans, Espinosa, Dawson, Faulkner, Bunn and Moore (a forward with eligibility who last played at Cape Fear Community College).
But the team’s other three college guys are not. They’ve played infrequently and scored four points combined. White has appeared in two games, logging two points, an assist, a block and a turnover.
After a win early this month, though, he was still all smiles and eager to break down the game as he greeted family, dapped up departing teammates and dribbled a ball with his 1-year-old nephew.
“I don’t see much of the floor,” he later said, “but the guys know what I do, what I put in in practice. It’s just waiting for the call to come down from the coaches. We’ll see what happens when I touch the court.”
His cousin, who plays professionally overseas, taught him that progress in the sport can be a “slow grind.” That you have to glean the positives, no matter how small, and stay true to your mission.
For White, 22, that means often watching from the bench, carpooling to random middle and high school gyms on weekends to catch games and taking two buses to practice when his car was in the shop. Still, it’s a foot in the door — the chance he was asking for in the A&T offices and didn’t get.
He has a backup plan: a master’s degree in business administration. But as White sees it now, he’s still young, still capable and still as obsessed with the sport as he was the day his parents bought him his first mini-hoop, as a toddler.
So why not stick with the Coyotes and keep chasing that dream of big-time basketball, far away as it might seem? If it comes down to travel, he wants to see the world anyway.
“This is still the game I love,” he said, “so I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”
