The Big Dance ‘Summer Camp’

TAMPA — Twelve minutes after Texas Tech escaped Akron in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Friday afternoon, Jack Francis sat in the Red Raiders’ locker room. Next to him, Tech teammate Christian Anderson took questions from 14 media members, many crowding in front of Francis to get a view of Anderson. Before Anderson recited his first PR-polished message, Francis called through the scrum. 

“Catch this, bro!” the senior former walk-on mused, handing his phone to Anderson. While Tech played in Tampa, Kentucky and Santa Clara exchanged 3-pointers in the final three seconds of their game in St. Louis, sending it to overtime. “I played that kid (SC’s Allen Graves) in high school,” Anderson added through a giggling smile. Before texting his mom, who naturally congratulated him on his own win, Francis had taken to ESPN, and then subsequently X. 

“We all grow up watching the tournament, sitting in the back of classes with our phones in our laps,” he said. “I ain’t going to stop watching it because I’m in it.

“But, man, it’s an interesting thing.”

The first weekend of the NCAA Tournament is practically a ceremonial holiday in middle schools and high schools – same goes for more businesses than a few CEOs would care to admit. Kids sneak screens into classrooms and workers litter break rooms just to catch games that run wall-to-wall from noon to after midnight. CBS even debuted the “Boss Button,” which provided workers the preventative measure of switching its live stream to an Excel sheet with one click. College basketball players are no different. Their childhood dreams were shaped by those afternoons sprinting in from school to the 3 p.m. slate and plastering themselves to a couch they wouldn’t leave again until AAU practices. And when they reach the NCAA Tournament — dreams fulfilled — their intrigue is unchanged.

So in the tourney’s first-weekend bubbles, a sort of “summer camp,” as Anderson puts it, takes shape. Yes, these games come with career-defining — mind you, life-defining — results. But eight teams arrive in eight different host cities, crossing paths continuously and none of them want to look away from the action any more than the fans do. The result is a joyous concoction of pure basketball love. 

“It is surreal, like we all watched these games wanting to get here. We played each other in high school and AAU, wanting to get here. And now we’re here, playing all our guys again,” said Anderson, the Red Raiders’ star sophomore guard from Atlanta. “You never want it to end.”

In the bowels of Benchmark International Arena, teams pass one another between practices and shootarounds throughout the four-day event. Some have no interest in mingling. “I know these guys, but we aren’t like that,” Alabama guard Labaron Philon said. Others can’t help themselves. “I’m going up to everybody, joking around,” Philon’s locker-mate, Houston Mallette said. That tracks: Philon was here, starring a year ago; Mallette transferred in from Pepperdine, where he never made the NCAA Tournament, and this is the graduate student’s last hoorah. He wants to soak in every bit of it. “I would lay on my living room floor watching these games waiting for my mom to tell me to go to bed. Yeah, I love this,” he said through a smile. He’s even wearing custom Bear Bryant-themed kicks, which he’s regularly fielded questions from other players about this week. For those for whom this is the end of their college basketball lives, especially, this weekend becomes a reminder to be present. 

During the media sessions, held the day before each round, players gather in their locker rooms to field questions. Each room, though, is fitted with a TV, so interviews inevitably dissolve into a watch party. “That’s crazy!” Florida’s Xaivian Lee shouted, jumping up and down as No. 12 seed High Point upset No. 5 Wisconsin on Thursday. “Man’s like Jack Gohlke!” a teammate — possibly, freshman CJ Ingram — tossed in, comparing HPU’s shot-chucker Chase Johnston to Oakland’s 2024 March folk hero. “He’s a priest!” another added. Johnston, whose Panthers lost to Arkansas in the second round, is an aspiring minister. That’s March Madness, at its finest: pulling some from obscurity into the spotlight. Tampa might have its own brewing in Texas Tech’s Jaylen Petty, for that matter, after he scored 24 against Akron. His experience, he said, was “actually a dream.”

What multiple players admitted, though, is that while they spend every minute watching other games — in locker rooms, on their phones, via projectors in hotel meeting rooms, on restaurant TVs, you name it — it's surreal to know they exist within the same timeline. Their actions now directly shape the world they grew up watching. Their eyes stay glued to the screen, but, man, do their minds wander into some varying third-person multiverses. “Getting to play in this tournament is wild,” Akron’s Amani Lyles said on Thursday. He couldn’t wait to catch some of the night session, after all this boring media stuff wrapped. “Watching these games, and then thinking about how we could play any of these teams in the next two weeks … it’s just crazy.”

In certain moments, that can become dangerous. With every game serving as the literal determinant of each squad’s season, coaches have to find a way to manage player’s brackets, screens and giddiness, trying to keep an even approach to every game. In a way, it becomes another test in determining a national champion: mental fortitude.

“These guys have all dreamed of being here, so you want them to experience it,” Florida associate head coach Carlin Hartman said. “You just need to balance.”

He was reached while with TV remote in hand, watching the Michigan State-Louisville game Saturday afternoon. Some coaches, including Texas Tech’s Grant McCasland, maintain a statutory presence, but are just as geeked. “We all watched these games forever. That’s why you get into this,” he said. 

Yet, buried within the mystique of this summer camp are consequences. In the locker room hallway of Benchmark, Anderson and Lyles embraced between media sessions on Thursday ahead of their first-round meeting. After the Red Raiders beat the Zips 91-71, the pair met again briefly outside their locker rooms, Anderson seemingly praising Lyles’ 26-point effort. The consolation was sweet, but it doesn’t dull the sting of a dream colliding with reality’s sharp teeth. Six teams leave each first-weekend site with a season that has slipped through their fingers. The seniors like Mallette experience the harshest tremors. “This is it, so every game means so much,” he says. 

“You don’t want it to end.”

Heard that before? Well, one of Anderson and Mallette will leave Tampa reeling late Sunday night. After all, this is a finite arena. Such can be the cost of a dream, which is how Anderson thinks one escapes reality, truly freeing their performance in this brief AAU-meets-Camp Nostalgia world. Back at Atlanta’s The Lovett School, he keenly remembers watching the first game of the Round of 64 — Thursday, March 16, 2023, he’ll recite — on a chromebook he was supposed to be using to write an AP Lang essay. After Furman guard JP Pegues drained a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to upset No. 4 seed Virginia, Anderson leaped, knocking over the laptop while earning a roomful of stares. He can’t remember if he got detention or he just came back at the end of the day to apologize to his teacher — either way, he says, it was well worth it. A confident man, he figured he’d be in Pegues’ shoes one day. But that same joy translates directly to what he’s thinking when he takes the court against Alabama on Sunday. 

“You dream of being here,” he mused, “so why not act like it's a dream. Like, this is insane. I want to enjoy it.”

And maybe in that sparkling world, nothing ever ends.