How DJ Burns, Rock Hill’s own and Winthrop’s key to making 2020 NCAA’s, came home
DJ Burns glanced at the ceiling and folded his arms in his lap.
He still had on his Winthrop whites. His jersey was untucked. Shoes unlaced. He’d stiffly walked into the Winthrop Coliseum’s intimate media room, a few steps away from where he’d just scored 17 points in 20 minutes in a breezy Eagle win against Big South opponent UNC Asheville, and had been answering questions about the game like he was reading off a script.
But Burns, for a moment on this February evening, seemed to be caught off guard. He looked up to the ceiling in thought when, in the middle of a line of questioning about his performance, a reporter asked him something strange.
“Do you think you came home at the right time?”
Burns is a Rock Hill native. His father and mother live in Rock Hill — his father, Dwight Sr., is the agent in charge of York County for South Carolina Probation, Parole and Pardon Services, and his mother, Takela, is an assistant principal at Dutchman Creek Middle School. He grew up hooping at the Clover Intermediate School’s courts and watching Winthrop basketball games. He attended York Preparatory Academy in high school, where he scored over 1,000 career points and notched over 1,000 rebounds in the three years he was there, before playing at Tennessee and soon after transferring to Winthrop.
Saying the redshirt freshman was “home” at Winthrop wasn’t sensational. But to posit that he’d arrived there at the right time, headlining a class of seven newcomers who had led the Eagles to 12 wins in a row at that point in the year, being a key to unlocking an NCAA Tournament berth for Winthrop for only the third time in the past decade — what did he think about that?
Did the journey he took to get there, leaving Rock Hill only to come back, prepare him for this particular season? Is this something he ever considers?
In Winthrop’s media room in that particular February postgame news conference, Burns hunched over the microphone and gave an honest answer.
“I mean, I do (consider it),” Burns said in his gentle voice. “But now that I’m here, and I’m kind of settled in now, I’m more focused on trying to win. Maybe after the season I’ll think about it, but for now, I’m focused on the next game …
“I think about it sometimes. But I try not to focus on it too much.”
Burns choosing Winthrop
Every decision Burns made on his path to Winthrop seems to have a purpose, in retrospect.
His recruitment started in middle school: He was 6-foot-2 in the sixth grade. By eighth grade, he was 6-7. By high school, the 6-9 lefty known for his touch around the rim was being courted by college basketball programs around the country. Winthrop was the first school to offer him a scholarship. South Carolina and Virginia followed. UNC’s Roy Williams visited York Prep’s gym to watch him play on occasion.
Burns ultimately chose Tennessee in June 2018.
“You know when you go to a place and you have the feeling, ‘This is where I want to be?’ ” he told The Herald in 2018. “Well, that’s the feeling I got.”
Burns’ first year as a Volunteer wasn’t what he envisioned, though. He entered the transfer portal after his freshman season.
He told The Herald that he didn’t want to expound on why he left Tennessee. But it’s clear his stint in Knoxville wasn’t a lost year: He arrived in Rock Hill 47 pounds lighter (at 260 pounds) than when he initially left. He redshirted, practicing with a team that spent four consecutive weeks as the No. 1 team in the country.
He learned what his priorities were, what he wanted from his college basketball experience. And it didn’t take long to find what he was looking for the second time around.
His official visit in the summer of 2019 at Winthrop was the only one he took.
“I am trying to make it at the next level,” Burns said before the 2019-20 season. “So I have to do what’s best for me.”
Winthrop choosing Burns
Per NCAA convention, basketball players who transfer from a Division I school to another Division I school are required to sit out a year. But Burns was able to play immediately.
While he said he wasn’t able to discuss Burns’ case specifically, Hank Harrawood, Winthrop’s deputy athletic director who runs the compliance office, said schools file relief waivers for this rule often. And they file them for a variety of reasons as outlined by the NCAA — from citing the previous institution’s “egregious behavior” toward an athlete, to a death of a family member, to financial hardship and more.
“You’re basically saying, ‘Here’s a piece of legislation. We either think you’re catching a situation or an athlete with this particular rule that you didn’t mean to catch, or there’s a fundamental sense of fairness you’re missing when you apply it to this athlete because of whatever reason,’ ” Harrawood said.
Regardless of how he made it back to Rock Hill, playing in a stadium he spent weekends in as a spectator growing up, Burns was happy in his station come August 2019.
After all, he was eligible to play. He was back in his hometown. He became the highest-rated high school recruit to ever be a part of the Winthrop basketball program (82nd on ESPN Top 100), and became only the second major-level college transfer head coach Pat Kelsey has taken in his eight-year tenure at Winthrop. (The other was Zach Price, who transferred from Missouri in 2014.)
Kelsey adored Burns, too.
In an interview with The Herald in January, Kelsey was explaining what he looked for in recruits. He tends to gravitate to the overlooked and undersized, the “chip-on-the-shoulder” players. His 2019-20 newcomers reflect that fact, he said — noting the fearless 5-9 point guard Russell Jones Jr.; the “tank-emptying,” skinny forward Chase Claxton; his two Division II transfers, Hunter Hale and Chandler Vaudrin; and more.
But Kelsey stopped himself mid-thought: “Well, right, there’s DJ,” he said. “But you gotta take DJ. Trust me.”
Burns’ redshirt freshman season
Heading into Winthrop’s first Big South tournament game on Thursday, Burns is averaging 12.2 points and 4.1 rebounds in just under 18 minutes per game. The big man recently was named the conference’s Freshman of the Year, the first Eagle to win that award since Tyrone Walker did in the 2000-01 season.
Burns has made himself uniquely valuable to the Eagles: He’s a conventional, back-to-the-basket big man among a slew of positionless players. He’s been able to adapt to a relentlessly fast-paced system, and the system has adapted to him, too. When he’s at his best, the offense runs through him — guards feed him the ball, and he either backs his defender down to set up a hook shot or finds a shooter spotting up on the 3-point line.
Kelsey called him “unstoppable” in Winthrop’s win over nationally ranked Saint Mary’s on the road.
Said senior Josh Ferguson with a big smile after a conference game in February: “I’m glad he came. I was the happiest player on the team when he came because it helps us out enormously. When we’re on the court at the same time, there’s nothing they can do because if they have one big, they definitely don’t have two that can guard us.”
Burns is still a freshman, though.
Sometimes, he’s noting that defenders overplay his left side and using that observation to drop-step into a dunk at Campbell. He’s dancing, finding the fun in a practice amid the three-game-a-week grind. He’s making the normally stone-faced Claxton smile. He’s waving a towel on the sideline.
He’s making himself so valuable to the team — both in basketball ways and team-character ways — that Kelsey can’t take him off the court.
Other times, Kelsey sits him — citing that he’s let a few missed shots affect his defense. One time, in Winthrop’s loss to Radford at home when Burns didn’t play in the second half after collecting a technical foul, Kelsey didn’t provide a reason for Burns’ playing time outside of “because I decided not to play him.” A few weeks later, in his team’s game against USC Upstate, Burns didn’t dress out because he didn’t live up to the “standards of the program” that week, Kelsey said.
(He played the game after that one, on Senior Day against High Point, and was praised postgame for his hustle after a loose ball on a particular play.)
“He’s a funny kid, man,” Kelsey said of Burns after Winthrop’s loss to Coastal Carolina in December, when Burns scored 18 points. “So talented. Such a good kid. So jovial. But it’s funny, you try to figure out the buttons to push … (Coastal Carolina’s Levi Cook) started giving DJ a little bit of an earful and bump and tag him and elbow him — and that’s like poking a bear, no pun intended. He’s a big dude.
“I just have to figure out how to poke that bear every day and get him like that all the time.”
Winthrop begins its trek for a Big South tournament championship on Thursday and will need three straight wins to lock down its spot in the 2020 NCAA Tournament.
Any loss could mean the end of Winthrop’s season from here on out.
The better Burns plays, the longer the Rock Hill native can delay answering the aforementioned question that caught him off guard earlier this month — “Did you come home at the right time?”
And the longer it takes to answer that question, the clearer said answer becomes.
This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 10:57 AM.
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