Jae’Lyn Withers puts on redemptive show for UNC basketball in his Charlotte hometown

Three months and a day ago, on the same Charlotte court in front of an equally Tar Heel blue crowd, Jae’Lyn Withers saw foul trouble limit his minutes against No. 7 Oklahoma and mute his opportunity for a triumphant homecoming.

He got a second try Thursday, though.

And he made it count.

The 6-foot-9, 215 graduate student out of Charlotte put together the redemptive performance he — and his No. 1-seeded North Carolina teammates — were searching for on Thursday evening, recording 10 rebounds and a season-high 16 points on 5-of-7 shooting en route to his team’s 90-62 win over Wagner. The Spectrum Center crowd saw Withers’ second double-double on the year and his second-most amount of minutes on the season, and he did it at the start of a March Madness run that’ll only get increasingly more difficult.

All of it — the redemption, the fact that this is his first tournament appearance, more — is what made Thursday so fulfilling for the one-time North Mecklenburg High School standout.

“It’s extremely rewarding,” Withers told reporters postgame. “Obviously having a double-double in front of all those fans and my family, and contributing to the win is great. It’s obviously my first time in the tournament, so do that in my first game is surreal.”

He added: “The last outing that we had here when we played Oklahoma, kind of got into foul trouble and ended up not really having the best playing time, I guess. So I think I kind of wanted to make a statement this game.”

So he did, and he did so early.

“He did set the tone,” UNC head coach Hubert Davis said. “I felt like in the first half at times, we were out of character from the standpoint of we weren’t finishing the defensive possession with a rebound. When we did, we always talk about making the easy play, limiting turnovers — I think we had six in the first half and they were all unforced.

“But Jae Wit, his energy and effort on both ends of the floor really ignited us and got us the lead going into halftime. He came off the bench and his production was real.”

It was real to everyone out there, from his family and all 18,223 fans in the stands, to his teammates. The play that stuck out to Armando Bacot was the lob from Elliot Cadeau that Withers flushed away in the second half — snapping the Tar Heels out of their first-game-of-March-Madness malaise like a bugle at summer camp does.

It’s true that Thursday meant a lot to a bunch of Tar Heels. RJ Davis passed Lennie Rosenbluth to become the fifth all-time leading scorer in North Carolina history. Bacot did the same, only for second all-time, passing Phil Ford. Bacot, the indelible fifth-year senior, notched his sixth consecutive 15-rebound contest in an NCAA Tournament game.

But it was Withers — the Huntersville kid who finished his career at Cleveland Heights High School in Ohio and ventured off to Louisville for three years only to come back to NC as a Tar Heel — who stole enough scenes here in there in Thursday’s show to make UNC deniers wonder: Could this team — with a third frontcourt mate alongside Bacot and Harrison Ingram — be the real deal?

Bacot watched the Michigan State game that preceded the UNC game Thursday. He said it was “alarming” how unfazed the Spartans’ frontcourt seemed against Mississippi State, a group he called “one of the most physical teams in the country.” Withers could help with that, he said.

”He’s been waiting for his opportunity, and today he showed up big for us,” Bacot said. “And just his athleticism and his talent is something we need, especially going into these later rounds because we’re playing a lot bigger, more athletic guys — and he’s a big athletic guy.”

A few weeks ago, probably the most well-known North Meck High star at the moment (and Duke commit) Isaiah Evans won a state championship. In his postgame press conference, he explained what it meant to play so well in front of the community that saw him grow up, that raised him.

Withers got the chance to do the same thing Thursday. And he did it.

This story was originally published March 22, 2024 at 5:30 AM.