Darrion Trammell had no college offers. He just sent San Diego State to the Final Four
The Seattle transfer has become the Aztecs' closer, helping them beat Alabama and Creighton last weekend while winning South Region MVP. Darrion Trammell, the 5-foot-10 point guard nobody wanted out of high school or prep school or junior college, sent San Diego State to the Final Four. He accepted the Most Outstanding Player award for the 2023 NCAA Tournament's South Region and helped teammates slap a sticker on the oversized bracket to make it official: The Aztecs are two wins away from a national championship. On Sunday afternoon, as the team danced and posed for pictures they’ll show future grandchildren, someone reached up toward the stage and handed Trammells a cell phone. His father, Damien, a chef who could not get enough time off work to travel across the country and watch in person as his son plunged daggers into both Alabama and Creighton in the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight. When Sunday’s decisive free throw dropped with 1.2 seconds left, “I felt like the whole building was shaking.” Damien said he had to hold his own tears back.
Published : one year ago by Kyle Tucker in Sports
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The 5-foot-10 point guard nobody wanted out of high school or prep school or junior college had just swished the winning free throw to send San Diego State to its first Final Four. He’d wept into a CBS camera, breaking down at the thought of his long, winding journey and all the audacious self-belief required to get from there to here, and “the people back home” that this was meant to inspire. Darrion Trammell had bounded up onto a hastily assembled stage on the court and accepted the Most Outstanding Player award for the 2023 NCAA Tournament’s South Region. He’d helped teammates slap a sticker on the oversized bracket to make it official: The Aztecs are two wins away from a national championship.
In the midst of this madness, with confetti still raining down from the KFC Yum! Center rafters on Sunday afternoon, as the team danced and howled and posed for pictures they’ll show future grandchildren, someone reached up toward the stage and handed Trammell a cell phone. “Oh my God, these kids and their technology,” his mother, Diema Adams-Parham, shouted from a few feet away. “Who is on that phone?” she asked, laughing incredulously. It was one of those people back home, one of the 80-some folks who’d gathered at the Marin City (Calif.) Recreation Center to watch their hero become a hero of March Madness.
It was Trammell’s father, Damien, a chef who could not get enough time off work to travel across the country and watch in person as his son plunged daggers into both Alabama and Creighton in the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight. The best he could do was phone a family friend who was there and hope for an answer.
“I usually wait for him to call me, but I couldn’t wait this time,” Damien said. “I was just letting him know how proud I was of him and that I’ll be meeting him in Houston. I might get fired, but I’ll be there for that one. There’s no keeping me away now. I told him I wasn’t going to make it unless he got to the Final Four, and he did that for me. He dragged all of us there, his team and his town, because my whole neighborhood is coming. They’re going to know Darrion’s people are there when we roll into Houston. People are talking about loading up buses and vans.”
It was hard for Trammell to hear his father on the phone Sunday, what with the wild celebration happening around him and the fact Damien had screamed himself hoarse with all the people back home in Marin City, population 3,000, about five miles north of San Francisco. Once Darrion figured out whom he was talking to, though, he shouted: “Hey, we’re not done!” The folks back home had watched the game on four TVs inside the very same rec center where he’d learned to hoop as a kid, the gym he used to break into — “a friend of a friend of a friend got us a key,” his father said — for late-night workouts as a teenager.
When Sunday’s decisive free throw dropped with 1.2 seconds left, “I felt like the whole building was shaking,” Damien said. “I don’t know if they have a roof left. Watching him cry, I had to hold my own tears back. Well, I tried anyway. When you think about what he just did, starting out where he started, it’s very special and very emotional. I always told him it’s different paths for different people and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t get where you’re going. You might just have to go your own way, and he did.”
That guy who dropped 21 points on No. 1 overall seed Alabama? The one who attempted the game-winning floater and then nailed the most important, pressure-packed free throw in San Diego State history against Creighton? He had zero scholarship offers out of Saint Ignatius High, zero offers after a year at Golden State Prep and just one Division I offer — from struggling Seattle University — after averaging 4.4 steals and 4.1 assists for a City College of San Francisco team that went 30-0. Coaches just couldn’t see past his stature, which is somewhere almost certainly south of the listed 5-foot-10.
Trammell has multiple tattoos about wanting more. On his right biceps: SMALL CITY, BIG DREAMS. On the inside of his wrist: DWMTM. That second one stands for “dreams worth more than money.” What happened Sunday was indeed priceless. But Trammell admits not even he could’ve dreamed quite this big. It’s why the world saw him sobbing in the afterglow Sunday.
“My journey, it all came out,” he said. “It was all overflowing emotions. This is just crazy. I wouldn’t have thought I would be here.”
Before he was here, he was there, in a once-proud Seattle program, which Elgin Baylor led to the 1958 national championship game but had fallen on extremely hard times. It hadn’t been to an NCAA Tournament since 1969, in part because it left Division I altogether in 1980 and wandered in the wilderness of NAIA, Division III and Division II until returning to D1 in 2008. The Redhawks won 14 games the year before Trammell arrived. They won 12 games his first season, despite his 20.5 points per game. Right before his second season, coach Jim Hayford resigned amid reports that he used racial slurs around his team and created a hostile environment for the players. Under new head coach Chris Victor, Trammell averaged 17.3 points last season and led Seattle to a 23-win season and share of the Western Athletic Conference title.
“And still got overlooked because of his size,” San Diego State assistant JayDee Luster said. But the Aztecs noticed. They’d done pretty well with another undersized transfer point guard from the Pacific Northwest, Malachi Flynn, who led them to a 30-2 season in 2020. “We value heart over height,” Luster said. “Darrion can do so much on the floor. He’s a pest defensively. He picks up full-court. He makes big shots, timely shots — which you saw this weekend — can pass and shoot, really do it all, but people were too focused on his size. We know better. We talked to a lot of people in that league (WAC), and they all said when he gets going, there ain’t nothing you can do with him. They said it was a no-brainer in terms of his fit and our style of play.”
Not just style, which for the Aztecs is predicated on 40 minutes of hellacious defense and toughness, but also substance. There was a shared ethos. “He is who we are,” Luster said.
“I knew it was an underdog, chip-on-the-shoulder culture,” Trammell said. “It wasn’t about coming to a team where I was gonna be the guy or everything runs through me. It was just about coming to a place where I know I can fit and be surrounded by like-minded guys.”
San Diego State had a perfect situation for him to drop into. Incredibly, there were still four holdovers from the 30-win team that lost its shot to make a run in the 2020 Tournament because of COVID-19. With a core of those guys — Adam Seiko, Keshad Johnson, Nathan Mensah and Aguek Arop — and two other major contributors (Matt Bradley and Lamont Butler) from last year’s team that lost a first-round heartbreaker in overtime against Creighton, the Aztecs pitched Trammell as the missing piece. That sounded pretty great to a guy nobody wanted for so long.
“He was our first stop in the portal. We went to see him in Seattle, and the rest was history. We told him, ‘We’ve got a chance to go to the Final Four, and we think you can help us get there,’ ” Luster said. “We told him that straight up, from the first time we talked to him. And now we’re here experiencing it. He actually got us to the Final Four. Unbelievable. There was nobody else we’d want taking that free throw either. He made that shot well before he took that shot. With all the adversity he has stared down dead in the face and overcome, I knew he was going to make that shot.”
Trammell said he shoots about 100 free throws every day and got up close to a 1,000 in the week before his clincher in the Elite Eight. He has made 82 percent of his free throws in college. So of course he missed the first one Sunday, ratcheting up the stress level exponentially. He tried to let all that out with one big exhale. “Just take an extra breath and think of where I came from,” Trammell said. “Can’t let your confidence waver or you don’t stand a chance.” While his stepfather in the stands bit down on a towel he’d swiped from the hotel, his mother remained as cool as could be. She was steadied by the same unflappable belief in her son that he has in himself.
“I’ve seen him in those moments before. This was just on a bigger stage. But I knew he would knock down at least one. With this much on the line, he’s not going to lose,” Adams-Parham said. “That’s what he came here for. They believed in him and they trusted in him and he delivered.”
When San Diego State plucked its little lion from the portal, most assumed it was to inject instant offense into a defensively-minded team that so often struggles to score. Trammell had poured in more than 1,000 points and made more than 100 3-pointers in two seasons at Seattle. He’d scored 25-plus in a game 15 times there. But that’s not what Aztecs coach Brian Dutcher wanted from him.
Dutcher was sold on a guy who had 255 steals in the previous three seasons, between junior college and Seattle. And after watching his team meltdown at the end of regulation in last season’s tournament exit, Dutcher wanted a steady hand in crunch time. He wanted a closer.
“Closing out games is the big thing in March, and that’s something we talked about when I was getting recruited, coming in and being a guy who could ultimately affect winning and closing out games. I feel like I’ve done that,” said Trammell, whose minutes, shots and points are all way down this season from those gaudy Seattle stats. “Everything is bigger than me. I came here to win. I knew the culture here was defense. Me and Dutch and the coaching staff talked about that before I got here, that I’m gonna have to guard. It’s really hard to fake that in this system, and I really love it, so it’s just about giving whatever my team needs.”
He hasn’t produced a single 25-point game at San Diego State. Entering the NCAA Tournament, he had just three 20-point nights for the Aztecs. He averaged just 9.8 points this season and took about nine shots per game compared to 14 last year at Seattle. He had the only two scoreless games of his career — maybe his life — and heard some grumbling from fans who wondered aloud: Wasn’t this kid supposed to be a scorer?
About that. Yep, he still can.
How’s this for getting buckets? Against mighty Alabama, the favorite to win this whole thing, with its four McDonald’s All-Americans and arguably the best player in the country, the zero-star recruit dropped 21 points on 9-of-16 shooting, hit three 3s, grabbed five boards, swiped two steals and had just one turnover in 30 minutes. When the Crimson Tide went up by nine with 11:40 to go and most observers assumed any threat of an upset had been snuffed out, Trammell went to work. In a timeout, he told his team to calm down because, “It’s March.” He didn’t elaborate and he didn’t need to. They understood. That was code for, “We’re about to do something crazy.”
Over the next two minutes, Trammell splashed a 3-pointer, snatched a steal and laid it in, then buried another 3 — a one-man 8-0 run, which extended to 16-2 run for the Aztecs, and Alabama never recovered.
“You kind of tap into his swag,” forward Nathan Mensah said. “We all jumped into that ship with him like, hey, we’re going to ride this wave with you. I just said, ‘I’m going to follow this guy and he’s going to get us there.’ ”
“That was his leadership taking over,” forward Keshad Johnson said. “Changed the whole momentum of the game, brought us back up. We both come from the Bay Area, so I know what he stands on. I know what he stands for. He’s a gritty individual, heart over height and heart over hype. I tell him every day, ‘You belong here. Make people remember you.’ I think he’s got that covered now. He just proved he’s built for this moment. He belongs.”
When the dream weekend was complete, after Trammell’s free throw against Creighton sealed the deal, his mother found him in the confetti storm and squeezed him tight. She screamed jubilantly in his ear, “You did it! You did it! You did it!” They cried on each other. He cried on CBS. He choked back tears up on that stage.
“He’s so emotional,” Adams-Parham said. “Everything is coming out. This is where he always wanted to be, and he’s finally here, and now he’s ready to go even farther.”
Yes, she’d seen him do things like this before, be the late-game hero, but it was mostly in grassroots games when he was a teenager. Back when no matter what dazzling thing he did, college coaches just weren’t interested. He’s a 23-year-old man now, having taken a road rarely traveled to this latest chance to deliver for his team, and this one sent a team to the Final Four. It proved that Trammell’s DWMTM tattoo is true.
“This moment right here is worth more than money, worth more than anything,” his mom said. “To go for your dream and get it, that’s everything.”
It was almost too perfect that, in the exact moment of culmination on Sunday, that phone call came from back home. From the Marin City Rec Center. From dad.
“All the blood, sweat and tears, that’s where it all started,” Trammell said. “It’s crazy how I started and how I’m here now. I couldn’t even hold it in. I’m crying all on TV. It’s just a blessing to be here. I had to share that moment with him.”
Topics: Academia, California, San Diego