Its all upside: Seth Trimble ready to bring the bounce as North Carolinas point guard of

MENOMONEE FALLS, Wisc. — Not even 10 steps off the far edge of the Trimble family’s back patio is a full-size, regulation basketball court, complete with square glass blackboards and pristinely painted hoops. Trimble Court, if you will.

It’s more convenient in the summer than now, on a Monday evening in early January, when winter has set in on this Milwaukee suburb (and several inches of snow with it) — but still, for Seth Trimble, essential. It has become his basketball laboratory: the place to practice thunderous tomahawks and WTF-inducing windmills behind the scenes. Out here on warmer days, in the secrecy of his own space, there’s no on-court experiment too ambitious for Trimble — a four-star point guard headed to North Carolina this summer — to try. And while that includes a fair share of 3-pointers and pull-ups, it as much as anything is a takeoff strip for Trimble and his 43-plus inch vertical. (He last measured it days before the onset of the pandemic in spring 2020, so safe to say it’s only grown since then.)

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Trimble first successfully dunked a ball as a 5-foot-10 eighth-grader. By the following year, after his freshman season at Menomonee Falls High School, Trimble wasn’t just capable of dunking in-game; he was doing the sort of gravity-defying feats that foretell something — someone — special to come. Sprouting to 6-foot-3 in the seasons since, while packing muscle onto his now-190 pound frame, only made his dunks, and his overall game, that much more dangerous.

“There was this one day where I felt, like, new,” Trimble says. “I tried something out and I was like, ‘Woah, where did this come from?’ It was like all my genes just randomly hit me one day. I woke up and, man, there it was.”

Ever since? Trimble has, both literally and across the larger basketball landscape, kept going up and up and up. Maybe that should’ve been expected from the jump (no pun intended), considering Trimble’s generous athletic lineage. His grandfather, Jean-Pierre Tokoto, was a longtime professional soccer player, even suiting up for legendary Paris Saint-Germain and the 1982 Cameroonian World Cup team; his older brother, J.P. Tokoto, played three seasons for Roy Williams in Chapel Hill before embarking on a (still-ongoing) professional career overseas. Those genes that hit Trimble as a 14-year-old? Talent and explosiveness were woven right into them, interlocked in his family’s DNA. “If we’re talking jumping,” J.P. Tokoto says, “then Seth’s up there. Little bro’s got bounce.”

Coming from Tokoto, arguably the Tar Heels’ best dunker of the last decade, that should excite UNC fans immeasurably. This season’s Tar Heels are languishing on the NCAA Tournament bubble at 13-6, following Wednesday’s sluggish 58-47 home win over Boston College. But Trimble, who is ranked No. 32 on the 247Sports Composite, offers hope for the future as the highest-rated recruit in coach Hubert Davis’ first full class.

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For a program transitioning to a new era, one that proudly touts the point guards it has produced — and it’s a long list of them lately, from Ty Lawson to Coby White to Cole Anthony — Trimble represents a future building block while also harkening back to the best of North Carolina’s past. The Tar Heels have always been best with a heady lead guard as capable of pushing the ball in transition as he is his teammates’ buttons. Regardless of any additional roster movement this offseason, Trimble emphatically checks both boxes. And while he still has another few months before he enrolls, as well as the rest of his high school senior season, he’s already watching (and cheering on) UNC from afar.

“I’m going to be ready by the time I get on campus,” Trimble says. “To be able to step on that court and wear ‘North Carolina’ with pride every day, being able to represent that school, just means a ton to me.”

Inside the Menomonee Falls High cafeteria, with long rows of lunch tables lined up parallel to the school’s well-stocked trophy case, a debate has broken out. Two of Trimble’s oldest friends — Grant Martin and Devyn Orr — are attempting to answer one simple question:

What, exactly, is the nastiest thing you’ve ever seen Seth Trimble do on a basketball court?

After about 30 seconds of pondering, Orr comes up with an answer. “It has to be a dunk. Has to be. He catches a lot of bodies. He has the handles and he’ll sit some dudes down, but it’s gotta be one of his dunks.”

This apparently sparks something in Martin. You can almost see the imaginary light bulb go on above his noggin.

“Nah, I got it,” Martin says, already pulling out his phone for photographic evidence. “Remember that putback against Marquette (University High) last year? That was crazy.”

Then, without warning, the pair breaks into alternating play-by-play of one of the most fantastic feats their teenage eyes have ever seen. “It was close to the beginning of the game,” Martin says, “and I remember, that was the first game of the season …”

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“Somebody shot it from the corner, and it bounced up reeeeal high …”

“No WAY was somebody gonna put that back in …”

“Seth comes out of nowhere, and goes up and slammed it with the right hand …”

“It was crazy. Just crazy.”

By now, Martin is multiple scrolls deep into his phone’s photo archives. “I’ve got the video saved,” he says. “Hold up. I gotta show you this.” And, indeed, they’ve settled on a good choice. The putback dunk, a forewarner of Trimble’s terrific junior season — in which he averaged 23.3 points, 5.9 rebounds, and 3.5 assists per game — is quite nasty.

Trimble’s coach, Jason Hallenbeck, who previously was at Marquette University High before taking the job in September of Trimble’s sophomore year, remembers the play. Only, given his prior relationship with Marquette’s head coach, had a slightly different vantage point. “I remember he looked at me, and I looked at him, and I almost kinda giggled. He was just like, that’s not fair,” Hallenbeck recalls. “Just watching that, everyone on the sideline is thinking the same thing: not many people, at all, can do that. It was that special.”

Here’s the other thing about that posterization: It speaks volumes about Trimble’s progress as a player.

Principal Bob “Vito” Vitale, Menomonee Falls’ former football coach and a longtime basketball official, still remembers refereeing Trimble’s fifth-grade games. “He was very good at that age level, but he was short,” Vitale says. “Just a little guy.” Trimble maintained that smaller stature throughout his youth, so even as his love for basketball grew, he didn’t, really. His parents, Trevor and Laurence, say he always had straight-line speed as well as quickness, but he had to use that to overcome his relative height (and age, against older, more physically-matured players). It helped, naturally, that Trevor first began coaching Trimble in the second grade and continued to do so up through middle school, and that big brother J.P. was already dedicated to his craft by then. “We worked on skills, but I wanted to make it fun,” Trevor says. “So you had to be creative (to make them engaging), but we were doing real drills.” As such, Trimble learned early on how to finish with his weaker left hand, how to read the floor to find space for himself, and how to use his quickness to shoot gaps. But it was still in the name of fun, finding a way to continue doing so rather than a serious focus on his own future. “You know how it goes,” Trimble says. “I just always worried about having fun as a kid. It wasn’t as serious.”

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That shift didn’t come until the eighth grade, Trimble says, after he finally quit soccer (like his brother before him) to focus on basketball. Around that same time, he started on a more-intense weightlifting program with former Milwaukee Bucks assistant strength and conditioning coach Steve Becker, whom the family first met seeking out trainers for Tokoto. Trimble’s grassroots team only practiced twice a week, with games every other Sunday. “Those three or four days I had off, why not go better myself? So that mentality,” Trimble says, “started really early for me.”

Some of that, clearly, traces back to Trevor and Laurence, who would rebound with him on the court out back (weather-permitting). Some of it also, though, comes from Tokoto, who had gone through a similar process years earlier. Trimble was naturally around the game because of his older brother — he was a ballboy for Tokoto’s high school games, and frequently flew with his parents to Chapel Hill once Tokoto was playing for UNC — and got to see up-close the benefits of Tokoto’s added work. Also, because both brothers valued an intense relationship with each other, despite their 11-year age gap, they wanted to spend as much time together as possible. “I grew up pretty much an only child,” Tokoto says, “so there’s a huge sense of pride when it comes to my little brother.” Basically, Tokoto always invited Trimble along to his workouts, and Trimble said yes for two reasons:

One, he loved his brother. Two, his brother was really freakin’ good.

But it does Trimble a disservice, though, not to also credit him for developing that mindset on this own. About this, everyone close to him agrees. “About 95 percent is Seth. For real,” Tokoto affirms. “He asks questions. In my opinion, he doesn’t really need it … I may make a move and he’ll be like, hey J, show me that real quick. It’s not, ‘Damn, that was cool!’ He’s a competitor like me. So if you do something to him, he’s coming back at you.” Considering Davis’ professed non-negotiables of energy, effort, and toughness this season, that self-starting attitude will be well-received.

Trimble didn’t have the same height and bounciness that Tokoto enjoyed from an early age, so he was forced to develop his skills and his basketball IQ sooner. “He was always playing against not just older kids, but stronger, taller, faster ones,” Tokoto says. “So your knowledge of the game, your intelligence level, really starts to kick in because you’ve got to figure out ways to either score on this dude, or lock him down. Whatever it may be, you’ve got to find ways beyond physicality.” As a result, Tokoto says, Trimble is further along right now than he was as a high school senior — and Tokoto went on to become a second-round pick in the 2015 NBA Draft.

Think of it this way: For Tokoto, his athleticism and frame allowed him to succeed before he’d fully developed his skillset. For Trimble, it was the exact opposite. “Seth was a good player, but he wasn’t, like, standing out,” Orr says. “He wasn’t dynamic. He wasn’t what he is now. But then his body transformed.”

So when Trimble’s “genes kicked in” late in his freshman season? He already had a strong foundation of skills, from handling to shooting to crafty finishing. Combine that with some otherworldly jumping, and the added inches he grew in high school, and suddenly the ball of clay was rounding into form. High school teammate Evan Redding, who is 5-foot-11, remembers taking photos with Trimble before a homecoming dance one afternoon, and looking over at his longtime bud. They’d always been the same height … but now, he had to tilt his head up to see eye-to-eye with Trimble. “Dang,” Redding remembers thinking, “it’s over for me.”

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Funny. Because before long, you could say the same thing about anyone Trimble tipped off against.

In Trimble’s UNC commitment video, there’s a brief clip of him shooting free throws on Roy Williams Court as a young kid. It is, he says, as clear a memory he has of Chapel Hill from all those trips to North Carolina in his childhood. “All the games I really remember,” he adds, “were away games.” Going to Kentucky, for example, where Tokoto played against the Harrison twins; to the Bahamas, Hawaii, Greensboro (where the family adopted Buster, their adorable French Bulldog/Jack Russell Terrier mix, at the 2013 ACC Tournament) — and, of course, Cameron Indoor, eight miles down the road.

But those memories alone were never enough, as his own status grew, to make him want to go to North Carolina. Would it be nice to play at that level, one of the best and bluest bloods in the country? Of course. But just because older brother went there didn’t mean younger brother was going to follow in his footsteps. And as Hallenbeck can attest, Trimble had as many offers as anyone could ask for. “For me, he’s the type of kid where everyone in the country should’ve been calling me,” Hallenbeck says. “Because there’s no risk and there’s no downside. It’s all upside, and he’s already a really good player.”

At one point, Trimble seriously thought he might end up at Michigan. Juwan Howard was as prepared and thorough in his recruiting pitch as anyone, the family agrees, and Trimble’s official visit to Michigan came right before his trip to UNC. “(Seth’s siblings) and I, we were in love with Michigan and Coach Howard,” Laurence says, “The facilities were great. You felt like you were visiting with family.” But that, she admits, was before she and Trevor had the chance to meet Davis’ entire staff, which Davis reworked when he was promoted to head coach after Roy Williams retired in April. Plus, she says, “stepping back there felt like coming home.”

But en route from Michigan to UNC, as Trevor and Laurence debated the merits of both schools, Tokoto stepped in with a reminder for his folks: “Just get through the visits, and then let Seth decide. It’s not on you guys.” What was Trimble looking for? Well, not just a way to tap back into faint memories of old. He wanted a place he could immediately make an impact, but also where he could see himself spending the next four years of his life. Of course the practice facilities mattered, too, and the pedigree of the program, but the first two things topped his list.

“You have to see it all, and when I went to Carolina, everything checked the box for me,” Trimble says. “Being around that coaching staff, for me, was really the highlight of my visit. And being able to really experience that Carolina family again — I had forgotten, since I was a kid in elementary school at that time and didn’t really remember — but being able to really tell myself, ‘Wow, this is what it feels like,’ it was amazing.”

As is customary on North Carolina official visits, the entire staff takes the recruit and his family out to dinner at Ruth’s Chris. Trimble and his parents were impressed that, at dinner, every single staff member went around the table, taking turns explaining how they individually could help Trimble succeed. And while that stood out, so did something else Davis never even planned on: Brice Johnson, one of Tokoto’s old teammates, having dinner right across the restaurant. As soon as Johnson saw Tokoto, and a grown-up Trimble, he embraced them both.

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“I didn’t even know Brice was gonna be there,” Tokoto says. “But (Seth) got to see firsthand, you’re really coming into a family environment. Like, I still keep in touch with most of my teammates … Guys come back because they want to be back, because it’s that type of environment. I enjoyed my time at school, and I will always go back and show love — and really, that’s what you want to be a part of.”

Later on in the visit, Trimble and his family were headed to lunch at Sutton’s on Franklin Street — another typical stop on Tar Heel official visits — with a few members of the staff, but not Davis. And despite the family saying ahead of time they wouldn’t make any decisions in the moment, Trimble couldn’t help himself. So before he got out of the truck they’d all driven over in, parked on the side of Franklin, Trimble turned to director of operations Eric Hoots and asked a simple question:

“So… how do I tell Coach HD this is where I want to be?”

Everyone agreed to keep the secret from Davis, at least temporarily, to see his reaction at the same time. So later that day, in one of the family’s final meetings with Davis in private, North Carolina’s new head coach asked Trimble a handful of questions. Trimble asked him a few back. Davis left things with one final query: What exactly is it you’re looking for in a program?

“That’s when Seth said, ‘Coach, everything I’m looking for is right here — with you,’’ Trevor says. “Dude, it was like a Disney movie.”

There were screams, sighs, cheers: all of it. “HD literally screamed,” Laurence says, “like Jerry Maguire. Woo! And J.P. and HD were hugging for the longest time … It was beautiful. It was meant to be; it felt like that.”

Part of it, of course, was the history, the sense of family, the facilities, and the campus. Another large part was having a head coach who played the guard position in college and in the NBA at the highest level. “I knew the experience was there and the knowledge was there,” Trimble says. “Really, Hubert is one of a kind. Couldn’t pass up an opportunity like that.”

But the last part of it?

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North Carolina has always given the keys to the car to point guards and enabled them to succeed at the highest level. Trimble does most of the things well that the best Tar Heel lead guards historically have. He’s comfortable passing to teammates from anywhere on the floor, including dump-offs to bigs inside and kick-outs to shooters when defenses collapse on his drives. He’s comfortable attacking the rim — “I don’t care who’s in the lane,” he says, smirking, “I’m going up on you” — and finishing through contact. (For a basketball player, Trimble’s shoulders look more like a linebacker’s.) Defensively, Hallenbeck uses him to guard wings as tall as 6-foot-9, including former five-star recruit and current Milwaukee wing Patrick Baldwin Jr., whom Trimble shut down in their high-stakes matchup last season. His 3-point shot is emerging, after steady work on it the last two years, and his teammates say his mid-range pull-up is practically unguardable.

“I’m serious, it’s the hardest thing to guard,” Martin says. “He jumps so high you can’t even get close. You think you’re there until he jumps up, and then you’re not there — then you just pray to God he misses.”

Trimble says the biggest thing he’s still working on before getting to college this summer are, “off-the-dribble 3s, coming off ball screens, flying-into-the-shot 3s.” Basically, the last elements of his game that he still needs to master. Trimble says he relishes having deficiencies he can still work on. “My biggest thing is just being honest with myself. Like, hey, I can spend all this time in the gym doing what I’m good at, but is it really gonna benefit me in the long run?” So watching my film, I’m breaking everything down and really being honest with myself about what I need to improve on.”

That should be music to the ears of UNC fans everywhere. When they see Trimble’s game in person, it’ll be a treat for their eyes, too.

(Top photo: Courtesy Jon Lopez / Nike)

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