Never In Doubt

Until Coby White, no UNC guard had ever been one-and-done under coach Roy Williams. And if for some reason you still doubt him, just wait and see what he’s about to do in Chicago.

- Franklyn Calle

He scrolled through his phone and made it a priority to get screenshots of as many of them as possible—tweet after tweet. He wanted a record of all the doubts that existed regarding him and his game. His phone soon was inundated with photos of social media posts—some by complete strangers, others by people he knew really well—that predicted how long it would take for him to have a shot at becoming an NBA player.

They all said it’d be at least a few years before the League would come calling for him. And the mock drafts agreed.

Yet, here is Coby White, inside a gym in Thousand Oaks, CA, just one year after he began collecting those same screenshots. There are still three weeks to go before the NBA Draft, but he wastes no time reminding you just how inaccurate and flat-out wrong all those predictions were.

“It’s a great feeling because I used all that as motivation. Even people from my city that I knew, I was cool with—you have them on Twitter and personally I know them, talk to them a lot and I see them around the city—they’d say, Yeah, give Coby two or three years and he’ll be in the League. And Give him two years and he’ll grow and he’ll get better. I screenshot all that,” he recalls. “I just like to have it because on draft night—I’m not petty, but I’d want to send the picture to them like, Remember when you said I was...But I ain’t petty. I [just] used it throughout the season [for motivation], but now I had to clear storage on my phone. I had to get some apps. I be flying a lot so I had to download movies. I deleted a lot of them but throughout the season I did [look at them].”

At the same time, he does understand where the doubts stemmed from. A one-and-done guard out of UNC? When was the last time that happened?