FAYETTEVILLE — Lee Mayberry strolled into his 10:45 a.m. class several minutes early on the first day of the spring 2015 semester. He found a seat near the middle of the room and against the wall, where he bided his time before class began.
The class, African-American History to 1877, is taught by Misti Nicole Harper, who started calling roll, zipping through the roster one name after another.
… McKenna Krajeck… Rachel Majors… Orva Mayberry Jr… Kwamesha Moore… Hannah Ness…
She slowed down only to peek up and make sure the students were in class, but quickly moved on to the next name. Had she taken the time to study the faces, she would have seen the man in his mid 40s with graying facial hair.
Mayberry didn’t stop her to tell her that he goes by his middle name, Lee, but even if he had, chances are that name wouldn’t have slowed her down any more than Orva.
That’s the way he likes it. The 44-year-old former Arkansas basketball star enjoys the anonymity. He can glide through campus and blend in with the 26,000 students at the university he helped guide to the forefront of the college basketball world in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“I’m an old guy,” Mayberry said. “Their parents were probably here when I was playing.”
Now, more than two decades after being selected in the first round of the NBA Draft, Mayberry is back at Arkansas to complete the American Studies degree he never earned during his first stint with the Razorbacks.
An 18-credit hour course load this spring has allowed him to graduate Saturday, which will get him one step closer to his dream of coaching at the collegiate level.
The man that helped Lee Mayberry renew his journey toward a degree is another Razorback basketball legend: Scotty Thurman.
Now the UA’s Director of Student-Athlete Development, Thurman has aided fellow former Arkansas basketball players Ronnie Brewer, Isaiah Morris, Charles Thomas and Darrell Walker reenroll at Arkansas.
Mayberry was a challenge, though.
Why would he leave his hometown, where he had a job as a coach for the Tulsa 66ers, an NBA Development League Team? Why leave the place where his two oldest daughters played college basketball at Oral Roberts and Tulsa? Why pack his bags and travel two hours east to a place where he’ll have to balance the stress of studying for class with the demanding schedule of a college assistant coach?
Truth is, Mayberry was torn on his decision to come back to school.
As someone who knows the value of an education, Thurman – who finished his degree at Philander Smith College and received his master’s from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock after retiring from his professional career overseas – had to convince him it was worth it.
After poring over the NCAA rulebook, the man that made the 3-pointer to propel Arkansas to its only national championship found a loophole that swayed Mayberry.
NCAA bylaw 11.01.4 allowed Mayberry to be an undergraduate assistant as long as he had exhausted his eligibility and was a full-time student. He could travel with the team, work with players at practice and do almost everything a normal assistant coach could do. The only restriction was that he could not assist in recruiting.
To push him over the edge, Thurman reminded Mayberry that he had daughters and it would be hard to sell the idea of obtaining a college degree if he had not done it himself.
“I think when I said that to him, it turned on a little light,” Thurman said. “And what better place to come back? You finish up, you get a chance to work with the staff, you get a chance to be in Razorback gear every day and you get to hang out with the guys and maybe provide some words of wisdom.”
When Lee Mayberry decided to enroll at Arkansas in the fall of 2014, he had to uproot his entire family. Maya, the third of five Mayberry daughters, particularly hated the move. She was about to begin her sophomore year of high school and didn’t like any part of the transition.
However, on a cold, snowy February afternoon six months after her first day at Fayetteville High School, that was hard to tell. School had been cancelled and the Bulldogs’ game that night had been postponed, but the team was still practicing.
Maya filed out of the film room with her teammates and waited for the warm-up drills to begin. When an assistant coach divided the girls into two separate teams, one player complained that the other team was stacked with all of the good players. The comment prompted Maya – who was on the supposed bad team – to chirp, in third-person, “Y’all got Maya!”
That confidence carried over to the court, where it was evident she is Lee Mayberry’s daughter. In the first drill, her team had to shoot from various locations on the floor in a race against the other team. Although they lost, Maya was the only girl on her team that consistently made shots from every spot.
Her stroke is smooth. Unlike most high school girls, she has a true jump shot. Instead of firing shot puts from her chest, Maya jumps and releases the ball, letting it roll off her fingertips as she reaches into an imaginary cookie jar. It is clear that Lee has worked with her.
When Fayetteville started running some of its set plays, another aspect of her game became evident. Maya danced through the lane for layups and kicked out to teammates for open jumpers. It is that ball-handling skill that has made her stand out to Fayetteville head coach Vic Rimmer, who is in his third season at the helm of one of the state’s best girls’ basketball programs.
She doesn’t start because she is still learning Fayetteville’s system, but Maya does play solid minutes for the varsity team off the bench.
“I trust her handling the ball better than anybody on our team,” Rimmer said.
Of course, those skills – her jump shot and her ball handling – should not come as a surprise. All it takes is a quick search through the UA record book to see that her father ranks in the top three in points (1,940), steals (291) and assists (729) all-time.
Not only does Maya benefit from Lee genetically, she has also benefitted from having an extremely qualified AAU coach throughout her career. Maya has even popped in some game tape from her dad’s playing days and tried to model her game after him.
She is similar to Lee off the court, as well.
When she stepped away from the practice at Fayetteville High’s gym to talk to an onlooker, she gave timid, drawn-out responses, taking the time to choose the right word before saying it.
She wanted to get back to practice, but Maya was proud of her father for going back to school to finish his degree. Even though his position with the Razorbacks has forced Lee to miss several games – Arkansas usually plays on Tuesday nights and travels to away games on Fridays, the same days as high school basketball games – Maya understands that he will make it to every game he can and that doing what he is doing could lead to better jobs.
That maturity has also extended onto the court, where she doesn’t let her emotions effect her game. Being just a sophomore, that has stood out to Rimmer even more so than her ball handling.
“She handles adversity and excitement very well,” Rimmer said. “She doesn’t get too high or too low. That’s rare in a young kid.”
Rimmer grew up in Arkansas and graduated from Guy-Perkins High School the same year Lee Mayberry graduated from Tulsa Will Rogers High School. While he was attending the University of Central Arkansas, he remembers watching Mayberry, who had the same controlled persona on the court during his All-American career with the Razorbacks.
The calmness Mayberry had at Arkansas has rubbed off on Maya and it seemed to do the same with several Razorbacks while he was an undergraduate assistant during the season.
Rashad “Ky” Madden was a highly recruited prospect out of East Poinsett County High School, a small Class 3A school in Lepanto, Arkansas. He chose the Razorbacks over basketball powerhouses such as Florida, Kentucky and Memphis.
As the sixth-best point guard in the Class of 2011 according to Rivals, some thought he’d be a one-and-done – a player that plays one college season before bolting to the NBA.
During his freshman year, though, he struggled. The struggles continued through his sophomore season. Madden had an unimpressive 1.4 assist-to-turnover ratio and averaged only 5.4 points per game.
Although he emerged as a scorer last season (12.7 ppg), Madden still had problems at the point guard position.
With Mayberry’s arrival, however, Madden’s game vastly improved. Instead of just being a scorer, he focused on being a distributer, finishing the regular season with 4.8 assists per game, which ranked second in the Southeastern Conference.
That is no coincidence. Madden said that just being around and talking to Mayberry helped him mature and in turn caused him to be a better player his senior year.
With time running down and the Razorbacks trailing Ole Miss by one point on Feb. 14, Madden had the ball at the top of the key. He dribbled right and used a screen by Alandise Harris to drive into the lane. When he reached the right block, he pulled up, pump faked and instead of forcing a shot – as he had many times before and failed – he found an open Manuale Watkins on the opposite block.
The pass was perfect and Watkins made the game-winning shot with 6.4 seconds left to give Arkansas a 71-70 win.
Watkins was not the first or second option on the play, but when he flashed to the basket, Madden had the presence of mind hit him with a pass. It was a sign of Madden’s maturity.
“Last year, that might have been Ky trying to get in there, trying to score and make somebody foul him,” Arkansas head coach Mike Anderson said. “Well, he became a facilitator. He got in the lane and saw what the defense gave him.”
Mayberry was also instrumental to the development of newcomers Anton Beard, a freshman from North Little Rock, and Jabril Durham, a junior college transfer from DeSoto, Texas.
Both Beard and Durham are point guards, the position that many experts thought was holding Arkansas back from making a trip to the NCAA Tournament in previous seasons. While Madden’s turnaround partially filled that hole, the newcomers added depth, which is a necessity in Anderson’s “Fastest 40 Minutes in Basketball” system.
During SEC play, Beard blossomed into a starter and the Razorbacks’ sharpest 3-point shooter, while Durham became a dependable option off the bench when Beard got into foul trouble.
All three point guards were able to learn from the seven-year NBA veteran, who has an invaluable amount of knowledge about the game from his time with the Milwaukee Bucks and Vancouver Grizzlies.
“Having a guy like that, (the players) can tap into that,” Anderson said. “They can go and visit with him about certain things. He can work with them.”
Mayberry’s assistance made Anderson’s life easier, but Mayberry still had to deal with the challenges of being a full-time student, college assistant basketball coach, father and husband at the same time.
As Mayberry scribbles down notes from a PowerPoint, a technology that didn’t exist when he first came to the university, in his African-American history class, his mind is set on one thing: graduating.
Although he initially struggled with adjusting to college life at a university that is nearly twice the size as it was his first semester in the fall of 1988, Mayberry was able to settle in and make the honor roll his first semester back.
In order to make those good grades, he had to find time to do homework and study, which usually meant he did it at home around the same time his younger daughters were working on their schoolwork. It was hard for Mayberry, but studying at the same time as them had the welcomed side effect of motivating his girls.
“It’s like he’s a student just like we are,” said Mayberry’s 11th-grade daughter, Maya.
Mayberry’s motivation, on the other hand, is the light at the end of the tunnel. As an aspiring college coach, he wants – needs – a college degree. In a world that has seen coaches lose million-dollar contracts because they lied on their resume about a degree they didn’t have, Mayberry wants to do it the right way.
The African-American History lecture ends at 11:35 a.m. Mayberry packs his red Razorback backpack and slips out into the hallway, where he melts into the masses as just another student pursuing his dream.