Bryce Walker played a postgrad year at New Hampton School, and from my experience covering postgrad basketball, there’s two reasons guys go the PG route.
One, grades.
Not an issue for Walker. He was a 4.0 student at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School (Olney, Md.).
Two: you’re borderline D1, and you’re willing to gamble a year of prep school to see if you can drum up scholarship interest.
The dream seemed to maybe end for Walker after his 2020-2021 year at New Hampton, but the consolation prize was admission to the University of Virginia.
Walker went to walk-on tryouts at UVA last year, coach Tony Bennett said, and did enough there to have Bennett add him to the program as a practice player.
From there, to Tuesday night, when Walker, in uniform, got his first career college action, three minutes at the end of Virginia’s 80-51 win over North Carolina A&T.
Walker wasn’t made available to reporters after the game, but Bennett did get a question on the walk-on in his postgame presser.
The story goes that Desmond Roberts, a walk-on from St. Anne’s-Belfield, decided last week that he wanted to redshirt his freshman year.
That opened up the opportunity for Walker to get some minutes at the end of games.
“Just embodies the right stuff,” was how Bennett described Walker, who said Walker “had goosebumps” when the coach told him he was going to suit up.
“At the end, I said, Go get a bucket at the end, so that’s my fault, I shouldn’t have said that, he airballed it,” Bennett said.
“He played hard and did a good job,” Bennett said. “You know, I’m just sitting there, and I’m like, those are things that you never get tired of seeing, just the smile and the joy of his teammates and him. You know, that’s something maybe he didn’t know if it would happen, but there it was, so good for him.”
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Chris Graham
