The Northwood Chargers couldn’t believe it.
Their assistant coach was name-dropping NBA players as if he’d played alongside them. Steph Curry this, Draymond Green that. It simply wasn’t possible.
Northwood head coach Matthew Brown could only smile – and feel old. The seven-footer teaching schemes to his players is a legend both in Brown’s native Indiana and in North Carolina: Tyler Zeller.
This is Zeller’s third season working with the Chargers’ boys’ basketball team. The arrangement started by pure coincidence: a family friend from Zeller’s days in Indiana introduced him to Northwood athletic director Cameron Vernon, who then introduced him to Brown.
“It started off with him coming over maybe once a week,” Brown told Chapelboro. “Then he started getting really, really involved. Going into last year, during our playoff run, he was on the bench the whole time. He’s at our practices now, almost every day. It’s just been a true blessing.”
Brown now describes Zeller as the team’s offensive coordinator, regularly drawing up plays in huddles. Zeller himself was more modest, telling Chapelboro he’s “somewhere between a consultant and an assistant.” Zeller said after years of constant traveling in pro basketball, he was ready to settle down in Pittsboro and take on a lighter workload.
“I’m trying to be home more and be with my family,” Zeller said. “I’ve got three little ones. I usually don’t go to the away games, so I don’t have to travel and get home really late. I can get them to bed, which I wasn’t able to do my last couple years playing.”
Going almost straight from a playing career to being a coach (sorry, “consultant”) has given Zeller a quality of “been there, done that” which resonates with younger players dreaming of the league. After all, Zeller was named Indiana’s Mr. Basketball in high school, earned the ACC Player of the Year in college and taken in the first round of the NBA Draft.
Boston Celtics center Tyler Zeller (44) talks to a teammate during the first quarter of a basketball game in Boston, Monday, Oct. 6, 2014. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Not that the current batch of Chargers would know anything about that. The team’s current senior class would have been – brace yourselves – seven years old when Zeller graduated from Carolina. No wonder they didn’t know who we was.
One particular Northwood player – one who likely needed no introduction to Zeller – seems destined for bigger things. But before he can get to the pros, he’s stopping in Chapel Hill. Senior forward Drake Powell has turned himself into a consensus five-star recruit and one of the top prospects in the country. The son of UNC alumni, he committed to the Tar Heels in September of 2022, and has only gotten better since.
During Powell’s recruitment, when he received offers from schools like NC State, Wake Forest and Tennessee, Zeller had every opportunity to give the budding star a push in the light blue direction. But Zeller said he focused on the job at hand: molding Powell into the best player he could be – no matter where he ended up.
“I didn’t feel like that was my place,” Zeller said. “The Carolina coaches did a great job of recruiting him and convincing him to go to Carolina. I felt like my job was to coach him and prepare him for that, not influencing his decision to go where I wanted him to go. It was his decision, and I wanted to respect that.”
Now, with Powell committed, signed and ready to take Chapel Hill by storm next season, Zeller is in a unique position. The former Tar Heel standout can both coach the Northwood version of Powell and prepare him for what’s waiting in the Smith Center.
Brown said he’s seeing the benefits of this play out in real time.
“[Drake’s] obviously a fantastic player right now, but Coach Zeller [is] giving him more insights of what a high-major Division 1 would do,” said Brown, “or even what an NBA player needs to start looking at. And it just elevates his game.”
With Zeller’s guidance, Powell has improved his scoring output every season at Northwood, going from 11 points per game as a freshman to 16 as a sophomore and 18 as a junior. In the first few games of his senior season, Powell is averaging more than 20 points per game, as well as posting career-best marks in rebounds, assists and steals.
It’s successes like that which have Brown convinced a more permanent coaching role, at Northwood or elsewhere, is in Zeller’s future. For Zeller’s part, he said coaching is a possibility – as soon as his kids are a little older.
“I love to coach. I love being around basketball,” Zeller said. “Having a role where I can be around the game, hopefully help kids grow and become better players, is definitely something I would be interested in.”
Until then, Zeller is playing in UNC alumni games at the Smith Center, doing radio work with Jones Angell on the Tar Heel Sports Network and doing his “consultant” work at Northwood… all before bedtime.
Featured image via Todd Melet
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