ST. LOUIS — Giddy Potts had never played organized basketball, but his natural scoring ability was a reason for excitement.

After moving from Decatur to Athens, Alabama, in the seventh grade, Potts’ reputation grew with every made jumper on the pickup courts. But when he tried out for the Athens (Alabama) High School basketball team, varsity head coach Stace Tedford put him on the freshman squad. The small town — with one public high school and an obsession with its basketball team — was outraged, with some suggesting he be fired. Tedford said Potts’ mother, Tina, “hated” him. Potts had very similar feelings.

But Tedford didn’t give in and laid out two conditions for Potts to make varsity: He had to learn how to defend, and he had to stay out of trouble.

“He had to buy in, and he did. He was mad that whole freshman year, we kind of went back and forth and he finally bought in on defense,” Tedford said on Saturday. “Then he changed, he finally changed, and by the time he was a senior he was instilling that work ethic in our younger guys.”

For Potts — whose given name is Nathanial but is called Giddy because his mom was laughing while giving birth to him — that wasn’t the first obstacle, or the last. He’s the leading scorer (15.1 points per game) on 15th-seeded Middle Tennessee State (25-9, 13-5 Conference USA), which upset Michigan State on Friday and will face 10th-seeded Syracuse (20-13, 9-9 Atlantic Coast) at 6:10 p.m. in the Scottrade Center on Sunday. He’s also the country’s best 3-point shooter at 50.3 percent as a sophomore, and his road to this Tournament makes him both captivating and composed for the next step of the Blue Raiders’ Cinderella run.

Potts’ father left his family when he was a child, leaving Potts as the man of a single-parent home. He then had to work on and off the court to play for Tedford, score 32 points during his senior season to even get Middle Tennessee State’s attention, and then had to lose a lot of weight when he got on campus. This season alone, he missed four games due to academic issues and three more with a concussion right before the postseason.

Only eight 15 seeds have ever advanced past the Round of 64. Only one, Florida Golf Coast in 2013, had advanced to the Sweet 16. History isn’t predicting MTSU and Potts to beat the Orange, but Potts is used to betting on himself.

“I remember my high school told me that an Auburn coach said that Auburn wasn’t recruiting me because I was too short,” said Potts, who’s 6-foot-2 and a husky 220 pounds for his height. “That really put a chip on my shoulder coming out of high school and I just went to work after that, and now I’m in this spot.”

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When Potts started at Athens High School, he was approached in the hallway by a senior trying to pick a fight. Instead of freezing up, like a lot of freshmen would, Potts chased the senior down the hallway and remembers saying, “I’m going to beat your ass.” The altercation got him suspended from school and labeled as a talented basketball player who needed to grow up.

While he was suspended, Tedford visited Potts at home and posed a very simple question.

“Do you really want to play basketball?” Potts remembered Tedford asking him, and he also remembers nodding yes.

“If you want to play basketball you can’t be doing things like that,” Tedford said, and that was when Potts the ninth grade scorer started slowly becoming an unlikely star at the center of an unlikely Tournament run.

On the freshman team he doggedly defended the ball, trying to prove he could stop guards on the varsity level. When he wasn’t playing in games, he was honing his jump shot at a local Boys and Girls Club. He estimates that he was taking 1,000 shots a day — before school, during school, sometimes late into the night.

Athens became a state title contender with him as its leader, and his high school career boiled into one game: Athens versus Wenonah in the Sweet 16 of the 5-A Alabama state tournament. Wenonah had won three straight state championship and its best player, Justin Coleman, had signed to play at Alabama. Athens had Potts, who had only been offered by a few small schools, and a lot people telling them they had no chance.

Potts scored 32 points in a 76-72 Athens win. Middle Tennessee State started calling. One week later he committed on the phone while his mother cried next to him. Tedford says that that game changed Potts’ entire life.

“I was getting text messages all day Friday after they beat Michigan State saying, ‘Coach, this is just like Giddy’s senior year against Wenonah,” Tedford said. “The belief factor of that kid back here in North Alabama is out of this world, everybody believes in him.”

On Friday, Tedford gathered the current Athens team in the high school’s gym to watch Potts and MTSU take on the Spartans. Athens also ended the school day an hour and a half early, and many of its 900 or so students came to the viewing party. They pulled down a projector screen, set up chairs and hoped that the local project could jump over one more hurdle. Make his open jumpers and play good defense. Shock the nation like they knew he could.

After Giddy made a mid-range jumper to put the Blue Raiders up five with a minute left in the game, the gym exploded in applause. But Tedford was even happier with a play that came 37 seconds later, when Potts rotated on defense and blocked a Brynn Forbes 3-point attempt. The gym didn’t get as loud for that, but Tedford smiled from his chair and thought about how far Potts had come.

Giddy doing more than just scoring. Giddy defending the perimeter. Giddy buying in.

“I just thought, ‘There you go, he’s playing defense,’” Tedford said. “And that’s how they beat Michigan State. That’s how he got to where he is, even if the shooting is what people see first.”

Now he’s Syracuse’s problem, a capable 2-3 zone buster who can open up the inside for his teammates. It’s fitting that a team that no one saw coming is being led by a player that no one, outside of blue-collar Athens, Alabama, gave much attention to at first. And if Middle Tennessee State has any chance of playing past Sunday and building on the history it’s already made, Potts will need to defy the odds one more time.

“And he’s as good a shooter as I’ve seen,” SU head coach Jim Boeheim said on Saturday. “… You really think it’s a mistake if he misses. Something happened. Because even the tough shots he takes almost go in.”

Published on March 19, 2016 at 7:11 pm

Contact Jesse: jcdoug01@syr.edu | @dougherty_jesse