As GG Jackson joins South Carolina, Lamont Paris is ready to work with the top recruit

Lamont Paris sat on his chair, watching yet another summer-league basketball game whiz by in front of him. It was July 23, but it could have been any day of the month. For a college basketball coach, July blurs together in a series of forgotten rental car colors and hotel room numbers, one location bleeding into the next, connected only by the familiar patterns of Marriott hotel carpeting.

On this particular day, Paris was idling at the Peach Jam, sitting among a string of his peers in a gym stuffed with recruits, parents, coaches and reporters. That is to say, not an ideal place to keep a basketball secret. But Paris fancies himself a pretty good actor, jokes that maybe in another life he might have been one. “I got a pretty good poker face,’’ the South Carolina coach says. “I definitely do.’’ So when his phone pinged with an incoming text message, Paris read the words, quietly got up and casually walked out to his car. He fired up the air conditioning to combat the sweltering South Carolina heat and texted his assistants, who were in other gyms on-site, to come meet him. “And then I did a nice little dance in my car,’’ he says.

A few hours later, everyone found out what Paris already knew: GG Jackson, the top recruit in the Class of 2023, was not only committing to South Carolina after decommitting from North Carolina, he was reclassifying and would join the Gamecocks this year. His would have been a seismic announcement for the South Carolina program regardless of situation. The school had never before attracted a top-ranked basketball recruit, and better, Jackson hails from Columbia. South Carolina kept him home. But compounding the importance of the news is the fact that this is also Paris’ first year. The former Chattanooga coach arrived after Frank Martin got canned after 10 years, the latest in a string of coaches convinced they could make South Carolina something it has never been — a consistent presence in men’s college basketball. The Gamecocks haven’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 2017, though that year they went to the Final Four.

Landing Jackson doesn’t immediately change the entire trajectory of the program (people thought the same in 2014, when Martin landed P.J. Dozier) but it is a huge first step for a coach who, just months ago, figured the Jackson chapter was closed for South Carolina. “I came. I tried hard but once he made his commitment, I texted him and wished him luck, and told him he was still a son of the city, and I’d always be pulling for him,” Paris says. “I meant that genuinely, but I went about my business after that, honestly. I had a team to put together. And then … ’’

And then, well that’s really the essence of it right there. Seven little letters that changed everything. It is, of course, one thing to be the person in charge of “and then,” the player who opts to change his mind and change his course. It is quite another to be on the receiving end, to be the beneficiary of the switcheroo.

Basketball is a small world. People talk, and plenty whisper. A few months after Paris opted to back off and refocus, he started to hear what he calls “rumblings,” rumors that maybe Jackson wasn’t so sure about his commitment to North Carolina. South Carolina had been on Jackson’s original short list, but then Martin got axed and two months later, he opted for UNC and Hubert Davis. So it’s not like the rumors were without merit. Columbia, Paris points out, is a pretty small city, and word travels pretty fast. When it’s about the best player in the state and the state university, it travels at warp speed. “But you always hear stuff,’’ Paris says. “So I didn’t want to get my hopes up. It was more like, where there’s smoke, is there fire? I left it alone. I wasn’t going to get involved until I knew it was real.’’ The smoke spread for a few weeks, getting so hot that one day a fellow SEC head coach texted Paris with congratulations. “Looks like GG just fell into your lap,’’ he wrote. “I was like, what are you talking about?” Paris says.

The coach got the official word like everyone else did — when Jackson used his Twitter account to announce he was decommitting from North Carolina, a near blasphemous decision on its own. No one had turned on their heel from the Heels since J.R. Smith in 2003, and that was to go straight to the NBA.

Paris naturally saw his entry point. Though he was late to the game, he had made a connection with Jackson and his parents, felt like the family understood him and understood his vision for Jackson. But he also knew that Jackson was about to be inundated, besieged by angry North Carolina fans as well as eager suitors. “Every school in the literal country was going to try and get involved, as well as Overtime Elite, the G League,’’ he says. “No shortage of suitors.’’ Recruiting is tricky not just because it depends on the whims of teenagers, but coaches have to navigate just how hard to show their crushes they love them. Some kids crave attention; others don’t. Some see constant messaging as sure signs that a coach’s interest is legit; others view it as nagging.

In his five years as a head coach at Chattanooga and his 12 as an assistant at Wisconsin and Akron before that, Paris always leaned more toward a less is more approach, joking with recruits that he hoped that, as teenagers, they had more entertaining things to do than field text messages from him all day. “You need to make sure you’re relevant, make sure they know you love them, but you also don’t want them looking at their phone thinking, ‘That guy is calling again?’” he says. “I knew with GG, things were coming at him 100 miles an hour. You need to respect that. I thought our connection was genuine. I just relied on that.’’

Paris sounds cool and calm about it now, after the fact, but in the throes of it, he was well aware of how critical this particular recruitment would be for him, and for his program. There is the message it sends about him and South Carolina’s push into basketball relevance; there is the hope that other recruits will look at his decision and consider the Gamecocks, too. Mostly, though, Paris looks at Jackson as his cornerstone, the first block on how he wants to construct his team. There are two ways to start anew these days — the old-fashioned way, by recruiting young guys and developing them, or hitting the portal like a binge Amazon Prime shopper. Paris would like to set a foundation with freshmen, hitting the portal only to fill needs rather than an entire roster. Landing Jackson, a player he believes at just 17 is more than college ready, would allow him to set his plan in action.

From 2005 to 2010, Paris was an assistant for Keith Dambrot at Akron. Dambrot once rebooted his own career as a high school coach at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School, where a kid by the name of LeBron James played for two years. When Dambrot moved on to Akron, LeBron, the son of Akron and then with the Cleveland Cavaliers, came around a lot for open gyms. Paris got to see the young LeBron up close, and though he says at least five times while making the analogy that he is by no means saying Jackson is LeBron, he does see a comparison. “Some guys can handle the ball better than him. Somebody can shoot the ball better than him. Or block shots or rebound better. But how many kids his age do all of those things at the level he does at his size?” he says. “The best thing about LeBron is he impacts the game in so many ways. That’s what GG does. He can impact every part of the game.’’

This is why when, later on that fateful July 23 day, after Jackson made his announcement official, Paris and his staff, “had a couple of cold ones. Recruiting is hard, and that was a big win for us. You gotta rejoice.’’

Cade Cunningham (Oklahoma State)

Anthony Edwards (Georgia)

Michael Porter Jr. (Missouri)

Ben Simmons (LSU)

They all made non-traditional choices, too, decisions that were postured as possible program rebirths. Between them, the four schools won one NCAA Tournament with their generational players. Three of the coaches — Tom Crean, Cuonzo Martin and Johnny Jones — have been fired from their schools. Oklahoma State finished .500 last season, the season after Cunningham left. Since Porter moved on, Missouri has made one NCAA Tournament, losing in the first round. And though LSU has had success, it’s all asterisked by the stain of Will Wade.

Paris is not naive. He knows that one player alone cannot make a program. “You need a player to bring up the ball, and someone to pass it,’’ he says. “It is a team game.’’ Plus the pratfalls and pitfalls for any highly ranked player are enormous; the burden is even heavier at places that consider said player their savior. Add in that Jackson is a reclassified 17-year-old and the odds are stacked even higher. Ask Emoni Bates how that goes. For all the attention paid to hot recruits, college basketball remains an old man’s game.

There is nothing anyone can do to temper the enthusiasm of South Carolina fans, nor would Paris want to. They are rightfully giddy and eager about the suddenly far rosier outlook for their team, and that enthusiasm can only bolster the Gamecocks. Who would want to throw cold water on excitement at a place that averaged near half capacity a year ago?

But as optimistic as he is about Jackson’s potential and as anxious as he is to fit him into his game planning, Paris first and foremost wants to make sure that the onus does not fall squarely on Jackson’s powerful — but still 17-year-old — shoulders. It is, he argues the difference of opportunity versus responsibility. Jackson will have an unlimited amount of the former, but the latter will be tempered. “You throw someone in there and say, ‘If you don’t score 25, we’re not winning,’ I’m not sure that works for everybody,’’ he says. He has seen some players embrace that role wholeheartedly, and others crushed by the burden. Which will Jackson be? That’s to be determined. In high school, he had no problem shouldering the workload — he averaged 22 points and 10 boards at Ridge View, earning South Carolina Gatorade Player of the Year — but it’s a little different against, say, Kentucky instead of Spring Valley High. “He’s 6-9, 215 pounds. He’s supposed to be old, so people think he’s able to handle this,’’ he says. “When someone says something negative, or fans are booing him, when he has six points instead of 20, he’s supposed to be able to handle this,’’ Paris says. Instead, the coach is reminded daily that Jackson is very much 17. He gets giddy about goofy things that older college players long since have gotten over — a pair of sweet sneakers in the locker room, or seeing a player he’s long since admired up close for the first time.

Paris believes Jackson’s combination of already established basketball IQ and willingness to learn — he apologized in a pickup game to his teammates for missing a shot recently — makes him an incredibly rare talent; a player handed a silver plate, but willing to act like he’s being served on Chinette. But he also knows that nothing is guaranteed, that the learning curve for even the most gifted players can be initially steep, that the college basketball season is long and filled with hills and valleys, and that the added responsibilities of the NIL era mean even more people will be tugging at Jackson than normal. “Whose talking to him? Who is that? You have to get in that protection mode,’’ he says. “He’s close to home, but his parents aren’t around all the time. That’s my job.’’

Make no mistake. It is a job Paris is quite happy to have. Martin needed three years to have a winning season. Darrin Horn won 21 games in his first year at South Carolina and never topped .500 after. Dave Odom made the NCAA Tournament in his first season, and never got back. Eddie Fogler toiled for four seasons before making the bracket. Jackson does not guarantee Paris anything.

But he sure makes his job a lot easier. Plenty of coaches, after all, went to Peach Jam. Not all of them got the chance to dance on the way out.

(Photos: Courtesy of South Carolina Athletics)