Winthrop’s Chandler Vaudrin made rare move from D2 to D1. You’ll soon hear his name
Nowadays, he began, point guards are supposed to be these unguardable players, who score 25 points a game and can shoot from halfcourt. I mean, literally. Steph Curry. Damian Lillard. Kyrie. ...
When they see a 6-foot-7 point guard, they’re probably going to think he’s slower. Can he stay with and switch off to a point guard and defend? Can he switch off to a two-guard and defend? When they see me, they see not a lot of 3-point attempts, even though my percentage is higher than a lot of people. They’re going to see he doesn’t take a lot of shots, and my rebuttal is that I take the good ones and I pass and ...
Listening to Chandler Vaudrin talk about basketball is a bit like watching him play it. He’s calm. Sure of himself. Acutely aware. He speaks in a way that’s so honest it surprises you — in a way that offers a glimpse into how he navigates his strange circumstance as a mid-major star many fans have heard of but none really know.
The Winthrop point guard is too good to be called an underdog, surely. He’s also too overlooked not to be.
“Unranked out of high school, you’ve heard it,” Vaudrin told The Herald in a phone call last week. “D-2, you’ve heard it. Come from Walsh (University). So, like, I feel like my thing is kind of going under the radar and unknown. Obviously my time will come when I do get that publicity. And at the end of the day, it is a team game. There’s five of us out there, it’s not just me. And I feel like as a team we’re not getting the publicity that we should get.
“But that’s OK because, you know, when we start winning games in the NCAA tournament, they can’t not know who we are. You know what I mean?”
At some point in the first weekend of the 2021 NCAA tournament, you’ll hear Vaudrin’s name. You’ll hear about his size. His passing creativity. You’ll hear that the redshirt senior leads the nation in triple-doubles and that he’s the Big South Player of the Year. You’ll hear that 12-seeded Winthrop (23-1), which will play 5-seeded Villanova (16-6) on Friday at 9:59 p.m., has witnessed one of its most impressive seasons in program history this year, and that Vaudrin — who transferred from a Division II school in northeast Ohio, just 12 minutes away from his childhood home — is a big reason why.
Plenty of athletes have had to leave home and truly bet on themselves to learn how good they could be.
Plenty have felt slighted and sought vindication. It’s what spins this competitive world round, particularly in places like the Big South, where attention arrives with caution.
Plenty have even risen to D1 stardom from the D2 ranks, though not as many as you might think.
But Vaudrin’s rise seems to reflect more than that.
If only people could see.
‘I need to talk to you’
The way Laurie Vaudrin remembers it, she was sitting in a chair in her living room when she heard her son, Chandler, on the steps.
“I can read these boys like a book,” Laurie said, notes of a Midwestern twang in her voice bringing her words to life. She’s a mother of two boys and a first-grade teacher at a local school in Uniontown, Ohio. “I knew something was wrong.”
Consider Chandler, then 19, in this moment. It was the spring of 2018, just after his sophomore season at Walsh University. He was on a full scholarship. He was coming off a remarkable season, one where he shot 56% from the field and averaged nearly a triple-double. And he was doing it all at home: Walsh is a 12-minute drive from the house Chandler grew up in, close enough that his parents and some of his extended family regularly watched him play.
And yet, something wasn’t right.
Basketball had always been a family thing with Chandler:
▪ First on the Little Tykes hoop on the trampoline in the backyard, and then in a neighborhood driveway, Chandler’s older brother of three years, Chaese, taught him how to shoot. (Chandler, who’s really right-handed, started shooting left-handed because that’s how Chaese did it. Attribute that to Chandler being a student of the game, or to his self-diagnosed stubbornness, he doesn’t care: He just insists it’s turned him into a more ambidextrous ball handler.)
▪ His father, Bryan, shared his love for UNC basketball — and his love for the nerdy parts of the game itself — with his kids in front of the basement TV. Chandler adopted the love of Kendall Marshall outlet passes and of Tar Heel secondary offenses from Bryan. It inspires how he plays the game with a flare within the offense’s structure and a confidence that you can only know when you see it.
It influences how he sees the game today, too: “I feel like I turn the ball over sometimes because I try to make a play that, like, no one else saw (besides me),” Vaudrin said, chuckling at the idea. “I’ll be like, ‘Yo, why didn’t you screen and cut backdoor and then slip? You’d be wide open!’”
▪ And his mother, Laurie, would grade Chandler’s performances after each game, A through F. She didn’t play much basketball growing up, but every time she’d watch her sons play, she’d see a bit of her husband in them, who was “a stud basketball player” in his own high school days, she said. Plus, she’s a teacher. She’d grade Chandler hard — as hard as his Division I basketball dreams demanded — checking that his hands were active on defense and that he wouldn’t pass up (too many) open shots and that he was polite to the residing referees.
Needless to say, it was a family thing when Chandler was recruited to Walsh.
And it was always a family thing, too, while he was there.
“My first year, after that summer I sat down with my family,” Chandler said. “I was almost at the point where I wasn’t having that much fun. And I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to play basketball anymore. … I mean, for one, I was still immature. I was, what, 19 at that point? I was just upset and thought that I deserved to go D1, and I was looking at other people’s plates, and (saying) ‘this kid has this’ and ‘this kid has that’ and ‘he’s here’ and ‘I’m better than him’ and ‘why didn’t I get that?’ Blah blah blah blah blah. And that’s just a horrible way to look at life. ...
“What’s gotten me to this point, which is good and bad, is that I’m just really stubborn. I won’t give up. I won’t quit. I won’t stop. But at the same time, it hurt me in a sense because I was stubborn in a bad way.”
By the time Chandler stepped in his living room, on that April 2018 day, Laurie’s intuition was confirmed. Something was up.
“He goes, ‘I need to talk to you,’” Laurie said. She remembers her son then getting “down, literally, on one knee in front of my chair. Bryan was still at work and he wasn’t home. And he was like, ‘Mom, I wanna leave Walsh.’”
And after the initial shock wore off, she asked a simple question without a simple answer: “Do you have a plan?”
Growing at Winthrop
Winthrop was Vaudrin’s only visit. He had others lined up, schools that messaged him after he announced his entrance into the transfer portal on Twitter, but the search stopped after descending on Rock Hill. It stopped in Charlotte, really, Vaudrin said — when the Winthrop coaching staff picked his family up from Charlotte Douglas International and head coach Pat Kelsey tossed Chandler a basketball while the potential transfer was waiting in the airport’s baggage claim.
“If you come here,” Kelsey said, the basketball in Chandler’s hands, “it’s your team now.”
Vaudrin said he didn’t know that the Eagles regularly recruited from the D2 ranks. He also didn’t know that said D2 transfers would not only regularly rise to relevance there but thrive, just like the undersized guards and the so-called positionless big men would. But at a certain point, Vaudrin couldn’t not see it. Last season, Kelsey had three former Division II players in his locker room: two starters, Vaudrin and 2020 Big South tournament MVP Hunter Hale, and one player who’d redshirt and later become a vital offensive piece for the Eagles, Adonis Arms.
And let’s be clear: This is not common. According to an NCAA report, only 11 of the 768 college basketball players who transferred in 2017 moved from Division II to Division I. Nearly 200 “transferred down.”
“The only reason why I’d known of Winthrop is because of the NCAA tournament, and I’d put them in my bracket before,” Vaudrin said. “Truthfully, I didn’t even know where it was or who they had.”
Vaudrin redshirted the 2018-19 season, and people who know him well say it was the best thing for his game and his personal development.
The numbers speak to his game: The redshirt senior is now averaging 12.2 points, 6.9 assists and 7.2 rebounds a contest. That’s good for best in the Big South in assists, third-best in rebounds and 12th-best in points — all while being a part of Winthrop’s 11-man rotation. (To that point, all but two other point leaders ahead of him averaged more minutes than him.)
Others speak on the rest.
“He’s an unbelievably driven kid, tough-minded, competitive and really grew during his redshirt year,” Kelsey said on The Field of 68 network last week. “He’ll be the first to tell you that he thought that he had a lot of the answers. He was humbled in a lot of ways and owned it.”
Said Bryan Vaudrin (Chandler’s dad): “Winthrop has changed Chandler in so many ways, more so than basketball. I mean, the accolades and his hard work, we’re so thankful for that, but his whole life is just different now than it was then. And Winthrop is a big part of that.”
Said redshirt sophomore and finisher of many Vaudrin assists, DJ Burns: “Chandler is a phenomenal person. And when people go through things in life, it’s easy for them to feel bad for themselves, and to want to blame it on someone else. And to just give up. And I can honestly say that Chandler Vaudrin is not someone who is going to give up. If you’re looking for Chan to give up, you might as well give up yourself.”
Winthrop has ‘more to accomplish’
It’s now just days before the NCAA tournament begins. Consider Vaudrin’s circumstance once more.
He’s 23, his Division I dreams accomplished and the achievement of his NCAA tournament goals inevitable. So much of his career up until now has been working while others assume he’d just wait — wait for a D1 dream offer, one that would’ve never come without leaving home; wait a year to start his career at Winthrop, one that wouldn’t be as decorated as it is today if he hadn’t changed and worked in his redshirt year; wait a year, with others, for his deserved shot in the NCAA tournament, and have the expectations for himself freeze with the times.
All along, Vaudrin’s rise wasn’t unseen or unheralded to him, even if it was to everyone else. And that has in large part defined who he is and what he does next, he said.
“I think I was more excited last year about going to the NCAA tournament than this year in the sense of, we’re here to advance, not just to have fun,” Vaudrin said. “So the excitement is a little different. It’s more drive. We have more to accomplish.”
No. 12 seed Winthrop will play No. 5 Villanova on Friday night on the biggest stage there is in college basketball. The Wildcats (16-6), once a preseason top-five team, are battling attrition at the guard position: Senior Collin Gillespie suffered a season-ending injury earlier this month, and another key guard, Justin Moore, is battling a severe ankle sprain.
The Eagles only have won once in the NCAA tournament ever. But this hasn’t been a regular year, where Winthrop is gracious to merely be a part of March Madness — and that’s largely because this team isn’t led by a regular point guard, who fits a regular expectation of the position and who has a regular story.
Vaudrin has worked too hard when no one was watching to merely be grateful when everyone starts to.
“I mean, we’re 23-1, and there are still ignorant enough people out there to not think we’re good enough to be ranked, or who think we’re not good enough to beat some of these big-time teams. What comes with that, with being a leader of the team, is they still don’t know who I am,” Vaudrin said.
“On a personal level, it’s just motivation. I’ve gone through it my entire life. I’m probably going to get it more throughout my basketball career. Whatever the next step is in my journey, I’m sure I’ll be doubted and there will be people who don’t know who I am at that point, but I’ll just continue to prove them wrong.”
Like he’s always needed to. Like he always has.
March Madness: Watch Winthrop vs. Villanova
Who: No. 5 Villanova (16-6) vs. No. 12 Winthrop (23-1)
Region: South
Game location: Farmers Coliseum in Indianapolis
When: 9:59 p.m. Friday
TV: TNT
This story was originally published March 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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