University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Game Time for Terry
May 18, 2005 | Men's Basketball
May 18, 2005
By Adam Lucas
When Reyshawn Terry needed to check his progress during his sophomore season, he didn't look at his points, rebounds, or assists. He looked at Carolina's daily practice plan.
Throughout his freshman season, Terry had consistently been on the blue team in practice, generally the domain of reserves who have to push the starters. But on occasion during his sophomore campaign, he looked at the bottom of the Heels' practice plan and found his name listed with the white--or starting--squad.
"Coach Williams talked to me during the season and told me moving to the white team in practice could be motivation for me," Terry said. "If I made the white, that meant I was really making progress. So that helped me stay motivated and made me keep working hard."
That's the type of subtle progress the Winston-Salem native has made during his Carolina career. His contributions have usually been pleasant bonuses, the extra coat of wax on the purring Tar Heel offensive machine.
Those days are over.
Terry scored 11 points in 11 minutes against Maryland as a sophomore and chipped in 4 points in 15 minutes in the road win at NC State. But those were his only double-digit minute appearances, and his sophomore minutes (4.5/game) crept up only slightly from his freshman average (4.2/game).
But the athletic wing player--Rashad McCants was the biggest Terry booster on the team and consistently claimed his teammate was "more athletic than Lebron James"--will have a realistic chance at a starting position during the 2005-06 season, and his 2.3 points per game average in 2005 makes him the second-leading returning scorer.
"I know I'm going to have to play a bigger role," Terry said. "I feel like people have seen my ability and know what I can do. You don't have to get a whole lot of playing time for people to know what kind of player you are."
Summer was an important time for Terry last year. He improved the mechanics on his shot, worked on his conditioning, and gathered some valuable advice from another Tar Heel late bloomer, Shammond Williams. One of the many alums who return to Chapel Hill for offseason workouts and pickup games, Williams became a mentor for Terry.
Many of Terry's key statistics went up as a sophomore. He nearly doubled his freshman assist total, decreased his turnovers, grabbed more rebounds, and made dramatic improvements in his field goal percentage (54.2% as a sophomore) and three-point percentage (60 percent as a sophomore). The progress was evident off the stat sheet as well. Terry looked less overwhelmed than he had a year earlier and in most cases made a better effort to play within the flow of the game. He credits many of those improvements to Williams.
"Shammond was one of the reasons I felt like I was able to make so much progress this year," Terry said. "He told me what I needed to do and told me the way he did it when he was here. That motivated me to follow in his footsteps."
Terry's unlikely to turn into a sharpshooting off guard in the true mold of his tutor, but he'll have a similar opportunity to go from seldom-used reserve to key contributor. He's staying in Chapel Hill for both sessions of summer school and hopes to add around five pounds of muscle to his lean frame. An offseason point of emphasis, as usual, will be his defense, the one phase of the game that has usually been the root cause of his failure to earn major minutes so far.
Those minutes should increase as a junior. It's his time to make a play for a starting role--and for something else he covets.
"I don't think I really have much respect in this league right now," Terry said. "That's my goal for next year. I want to earn my respect."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. He is the coauthor of the official book of the 2005 championship season, Led By Their Dreams, and his book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about Going Home Again, click here.
