Villanova star learns to trust
Reynolds finally hits comfort zone
Every so often, when Villanova's on the road, a chant will seep from some careless soul and spread through whatever arena the Wildcats find themselves in.
Coach Jay Wright can hear it from Villanova's bench.
His junior guard, Scottie Reynolds, can likely hear it on the court.
"Scottie doesn't know."
"Scottie doesn't know."
"Scottie doesn't know."
"It never bothers him," Wright said. "He never says anything about it. He's amazing."
That's partly because it's not true. Not as true as the people taunting Reynolds would like it to be.
Truth is, as soon as he turned 19 and was able to go to the Alabama adoption agency to look for the files on his birth mother, he did.
The files were there, Reynolds said, but they weren't updated. His was a closed adoption. He had to hire someone to figure out where she is and who she is.
That search left him with all the information he needed.
"She was 18," he said. "She was taking care of her grandmother, going to school, working. She just had me. My birth dad left. She never saw him again. So she gave me up."
It also left him with a means of getting in touch with her whenever he's ready. He said last March he'd do it after last year's NCAA Tournament. Now, with Villanova about to face Pittsburgh tonight with a berth in the Final Four at stake, he's still saying it.
"I haven't contacted her directly," he said. "I know how to contact her if I need to . . . She's got some things going on. I've had things going on."
He's never seen her. "I know her," he said. "She doesn't know me."
The first time Jay Wright saw Reynolds, Wright thought he was somebody else. It was luck, Reynolds said, that sent him to Philadelphia.
Wright got a call from a 703 area code - northern Virginia - late in the 2005-06 school year. The basketball coach at Herndon (Va.) High, Gary Hall, had a question.
"Do you know who Scottie Reynolds is?" He didn't.
The only time Wright had seen Reynolds was when he went to look at Boo Williams's AAU team at the
"I went to see Chris Wright play," Wright said. "Scottie was on the team and he was playing, and I thought that was Chris Wright because he was so young.
"I was thinking, I love this kid."
Chris Wright, now at Georgetown, wasn't even starting.
"I called our assistant and said, 'Why are you recruiting guys coming off the bench?' "
Someone told Wright the player he was fawning over was Reynolds. Then they told him what he really needed to know: "He's going to Oklahoma."
That was the plan.
Kelvin Sampson made Reynolds fall in love with Norman. Reynolds gave Oklahoma a commitment in March 2005, but according to the
"I feel like I've known this kid my whole life," Sampson told the paper in 2006. "I feel like I've already coached him."
He never did.
Within weeks of making that statement, Sampson announced he would be leaving Oklahoma to replace Indiana head coach Mike Davis.
Reynolds was one of five Oklahoma recruits with letters of intent who watched their futures dissolve.
More piercing, though, was that Reynolds trusted Sampson completely. He trusted Sampson because Hall, whom Reynolds had known since he was 10, trusted Sampson. Reynolds picked Oklahoma, Wright said, because there was the potential for a similar relationship.
"Virginia kid? Oklahoma? There's no connection," Wright said. "It's just that his coach liked Kelvin Sampson. His coach introduced him to Kelvin Sampson. He liked the relationship and wanted to go have a relationship with the head coach."
Oklahoma let Reynolds out of his commitment, and that's when Hall called Wright. Wright didn't have a scholarship, but Kyle Lowry's decision to jump to the NBA opened one up.
"They called us back and said he's available, he likes Villanova, and we got him," Wright said.
Wright would say he was handed a
"When we got to him, he was crushed about that whole situation," he said. "He really wasn't trusting of anybody."
Villanova has a recruit coming in next year, a 6-foot point guard named Malik Wayans. Wright said the trust level he's built with Wayans and the one he's built with Reynolds are about even, but it took him three years to forge that relationship with Reynolds.
There was no wooing period with Reynolds. Their first interactions were harsh. By his own admission, Wright isn't the easiest coach to play for as a freshman.
"And that's his first type of relationship with me," Wright said.
What made it worse was feeling like a foreigner. Villanova had a lot of New Yorkers on the roster when Reynolds came in. New Yorkers talk a certain way, act a certain way.
"You don't know anybody," Reynolds said. "You're by yourself. You're very antisocial. You just want to go home at any given time. Everybody's making fun of how I talk.
"It was a tough transition."
There was also the part of him that always wanted to be included.
"I always wanted to be part of it," he said. "There were times when everybody was jumping around during drills and I wasn't part of it. I was part of it but didn't understand what was going into it."
It led to fights. The only interaction he had with current teammate Antonio Pena, a Brooklyn kid, was at an NBA camp at Virginia Commonwealth University. That was all the time Pena needed to know that he didn't like Reynolds.
"I just went out there and played my game, and he didn't like my game because I was scoring," Reynolds said. "He was like 'Yo, pass me the ball.' I was just running past him and he'd be at halfcourt and I'd score. He'd be like, 'Pass me the ball,' and I'd be like, 'Run the floor.' We just didn't get along."
On the court, Reynolds was averaging 14.8 points per game as a freshman, 15.9 as a sophomore, and had people telling him he could make the jump to the NBA. But by that point, he was closing people off.
"I felt like I had to rely on myself, because when everything went down I was the only one there," he said. "It was just me and my high school coach. Having nobody that I really knew on the team, I didn't really have anyone really to talk to. I just stayed in my dorm room and waited for the next day to come, waited for the next day to get on the court. It was tough."
At some point it had to change. At some point Reynolds had to trust someone. And Wright wasn't surprised that when that point came, he was the one Reynolds looked to.
"This is something you always look for in recruiting," Wright said. "He had a great relationship with his high school coach. When you recruit somebody and he tells you, 'The guy I'm listening to is my high school coach,' you think right away, 'OK, this guy's got a lot of people in his ear and he's choosing his coach.' That's a guy you want."
Part of it was maturing. Reynolds admits he came to Villanova as a 19-year-old with his hand over his ears. In three years, Wright has filled the void Sampson left.
"You're 18, you're 20 years old you think you know everything," Reynolds said. "He's been through so many teams before. He's seen it all. I think just buying into what he says, and not always agreeing with it but knowing that at the end of the day, that's going to make everybody successful, I think that went a long way."
With maturity comes acceptance. He and Pena are best friends now. He's now leading those drills he felt left out of.
"Now I'm starting it," he said. "I'm finishing it. Any person that comes in here after me I can tell them my situation and they can look at me and see how it turns out in the end."
Linking with his birth mother is a process that will come together in time. His adopted parents, Rick and Pam Reynolds, never made him feel like less than one of their own children, which in turn never made him feel like his path in life was any worse than anyone else's.
"I think every person has their own story," Reynolds said. "Mine has been a journey of a whole lot of different things all rolled in one. It hasn't all been bad. It hasn't all been terrible. I'm actually thankful for the situation I've been put in."
