Mother of Villanova hero reflects on life-changing shot

Felicia Jenkins couldn’t help herself. She was coach Jenkins again.

“What I assessed was that nobody dropped their head,” she said. “We called timeout, ready to get in the huddle. As a coach, that’s what you want to see.”

She wasn’t coaching, well, not really. She was like any of the other 74,339 people crammed into Houston’s NRG Stadium, watching Villanova and North Carolina.

With the national championship on the line, Tar Heels senior Marcus Paige tied the game with a jumper that had no business going in. The Wildcats called timeout with 4.7 seconds left.

Coaching basketball is what Jenkins was born to do, and she’d honed it at Eau Claire High before advancing to Claflin University, Benedict and Jackson State. She knew exactly what Villanova should and would do.

But she was waging a fierce battle with the other side of her personality. Mom was watching that game, too, and Mom didn’t want to coach her son, she wanted to cheer for him.

Wildcats junior forward Kris Jenkins had a knack for making clutch 3-pointers. Hadn’t he made that same shot thousands of times in summer one-on-ones? Hadn’t they gone to him in the Big East final, where he couldn’t get set and it rimmed out and Seton Hall won by two?

Coach Jenkins thought it’d be a good idea to get the ball to Kris.

Mom Jenkins knew there was no way her boy would miss.

Ryan Arcidiacono went left, then cut right, screening UNC’s Isaiah Hicks as he dished underhand to the trailing Kris.

Felicia watched her son catch, square his feet and release at the top, just like she’d taught him. She was in her old defensive mode, bent over, arms spread, hollering, “Don’t move!”

For the first time, she watched the ball. She watched Kris shoot in that old-school form, land and crouch, mimicking her stance in the stands, and knew that life would never be the same.

“When he caught – one, two, clean look – I was waiting for it to go in,” she said three months after her son joined Lorenzo Charles and Christian Laettner as NCAA Tournament poster boys. “I was like, ‘There’s no way possible he would have missed that shot twice.’”

A mother’s sacrifice

For the first time in a long time, Felicia wasn’t coaching basketball. She’d play pickup with her daughters, Kaiya and Kelci Jenkins, but she wasn’t on the sideline.

“As a mother, you’ve still got to get home after working a 10-hour shift,” she said. “Certain things don’t change. As a mom, you just do what you’ve got to do to provide.”

So Felicia did, working at Amazon distribution in West Columbia, helping her girls and watching her son play whenever possible. Usually, that was DVDs of games sent from Villanova, and she’d exult in Kris’ successes as much as she critiqued.

You’ve heard by now the unusual circumstances of Kris’ upbringing. The Jenkins’ youngest child, infant Kori, was fighting for her life against DiGeorge syndrome. As the family made trips from Columbia to Baltimore for medical care, they wanted Kris, just becoming a teenage talent, to have a distraction from his sister’s condition, and somewhere he could show off his skills.

They found the Britt family, which had a son Kris’ age (Nate Jr.) and a father (Nate Sr.) who coached the renowned D.C. Assault AAU team. A summer stay with the Britts turned into a permanent residence after Kori died at 11 months, Felicia split with her husband and Kris, while not necessarily acting up, wasn’t the same kid he’d been.

“Sometimes you just need some help,” Nate Britt Sr. said. “She never had her head down, she was always very proud of what her intentions were. The overall vision I had for my kids, and what Felicia wanted for Kris, coincided. We thought it was the right thing to do.”

Coaching at Benedict, Felicia was going to be on the road a lot. Trying to raise her daughters and overcome Kori’s death, she asked the Britts to become Kris’ permanent guardians. They accepted, and eight years later, Kris took the floor for the national championship game with brother Nate Jr. on the Tar Heels’ bench.

Secondhand play-by-play

Villanova breezed past UNC Asheville, Iowa and Miami to the Elite Eight. Felicia watched when she could, but always talked to Kris before and after games.

With the Wildcats playing Kansas for a berth in the Final Four, Felicia deeply wanted to watch. But she had to work and couldn’t have her cell phone during the shift.

“She told me I had to give her play-by-play,” Felicia’s sister, Bridgitte Binns, said. “All by text. Tell her how Kris is doing. What’s the score, who’s leading, what play that Kris just made.”

Binns is at the game. She has a fully charged phone she won’t let her children touch. Felicia is at Amazon, hoping.

“I saw the beginning of the game, the first two minutes,” she said. “I saw we were doing fairly well on the defensive side. If I can see that they’re going to play that Villanova basketball on defense, I get confident.”

Felicia reluctantly left the break room and started her shift. As she labored, “Coach J” took over – in her head, she can imagine what’s going on.

There’s Kris catching and shooting, and Ryan making baskets and Josh Hart rebounding. “We’re not perfect,” Felicia says, “but we’re winning. In my mind, we never got down.”

She goes on break, reaches for her phone and there are over 100 messages from Bridgitte. Of course they’re in descending order, so the first one that pops up is:

“Are you ready to go the Final Four?”

“I took off running, everybody looked at me like I was crazy,” Felicia said. “‘I’m going to Houston!’”

Her managers knew Kris played for Villanova. Most of her co-workers did not.

They found out that day.

Watching the ball

There they are at the Final Four, 25 rows off the court, crammed in together – the Britts, Felicia, Bridgitte, all watching an epic game. Nova pulls away before Paige remembers who he is, and with Michael Jordan cheering him on, makes a shot to tie the game with less than five seconds to play.

“After the UNC guy made the shot, we all sighed,” Bridgitte said. “But we all rallied, ‘We’ve got time.’ We can’t go to overtime, we’ve got too many fouls, we’ve got to do this. We’re just ready.”

“We always talked about footwork,” Nate Sr. said. “If you’ve got good footwork, you’ve always got a chance. When Kris got the ball, my brother was sitting beside me, and I told him, ‘If Kris crosses halfcourt, game over, Villanova.’ My brother, who went to UNC law school, said, ‘Man, you’re crazy, this is going to overtime.’”

“This is the first time in my career that I’ve ever watched the ball,” Felicia said. “Normally, I watch away from the ball, because every coach knows you’re open away from the ball. The moment Arch penetrates, then he veers off and looks over his shoulder, and I think, ‘We’re going to have time for this,’ and then I saw who he was flipping the ball to.”

That kid with the No. 2 on the back of his dark blue jersey, the one she’d held and nursed and coached and taught the benefit of having a great long-range shot, caught the pass.

In a flash

It’s over and NRG is half-screaming, half-stunned while Kris rises from his crouch with both arms in the air and is swarmed by his teammates. Felicia jumps higher than she ever could during her playing days, falling through the back of her chair, only to be helped up for another leap and fall.

“I stood up and put both hands up, because I just knew it was good,” Nate Sr. said. “And I was on the Carolina side!”

“I kept yelling, ‘What did he just do?,’” Felicia said. “Then they all said, ‘Your son just hit the game-winning shot!’”

Mom took over as coach appeared for a brief I-told-you-so (“I’d have run the exact same play Villanova ran”), and then it was, “Find Kris.”

Bridgitte looked for her sister, who was right beside her, and she’s gone.

“She’s always been good at track and basketball, but that was the fastest I’d ever seen her move,” Binns said. “I look up and she was up on the Jumbotron.”

Felicia’s down on the floor as they’re barricading it for the championship ceremony and a security guard is telling her to get back, get back, but it’s her son who just made the shot of a lifetime for the championship, you see, and she won’t be held back. A slight slap to the guard’s hand, and Kris finds her right then, and the two are reunited as Felicia hurdles the press table.

“She was right next to me, then she was gone,” Bridgitte said. “And then she’s hugging Kris.”

Back to reality

Life had to go back to normal eventually, although it isn’t the normal it was before. Felicia got to talk to her son after he and his teammates visited the White House, and she’s preparing for a move to New Jersey – back in the high school coaching ranks, a position offered before the fateful shot.

Her daughters will finally get to play for her, and she can work the high school schedule so she can see most of Kris’ home games.

“I get a chance to spend more time with them,” she said. “They can develop into better basketball players. When I told them about the move, I wanted to make sure they were OK, because they have bounced around and I put my career first.”

Kris’ face has been plastered on every website in America since the shot went in, but Felicia’s has been there, too. Everybody wrote the story of Kris’ unique family, and now that he’s not just a strong player with a chance at a pro career, but The Kid Who Nailed That Shot, he’s legendary.

“It’s getting to the point they want my autograph. I tell them my autograph is not worth much,” Felicia said. “It’s been fun. The most humbling experience I’ve ever been a part of.”

Everybody wants an interview. Everybody wants to know the second-by-second breakdown of what happened that night.

She hasn’t changed. She’s still the same person she was, although her son is now a Twitter trender for every future NCAA Tournament.

“Felicia’s still Felicia,” Bridgitte said. “She’s passionate about basketball, passionate about her children.”

“Life is tough at times,” Nate Sr. said. “You like to see the work that you put in, the fruits of your labors, so to speak. So yeah, considerably so, her life has changed. All of our lives have changed.”

Carey Rich is the mayor of Columbia basketball and remembers the dynamic, driven Felicia at Eau Claire. He’s seen the same, yet new woman since the shot.

“The one thing that I’ve enjoyed about her since Kris won the national championship … she hasn’t shied away from her story,” Rich said. “She’s brought attention to that part of her life and maybe helped out other mothers who might have had to make the same decision.

“That’s difficult to talk about, to share, because society’s so judgmental. All they see is, ‘You gave up your son.’ But that she has never backed down from it shows what kind of person she is, and now she can help out others.”

Kris turned down the NBA for his senior year. He’ll have his family at most of his home games, and he knows that a hug like the one in Houston is always waiting, win or lose, afterward.

Yes, life has changed.

Not for the worse.

“It has been the most exciting ride I’ve ever been a part of. Everybody knows where you were, what you were doing,” Felicia said. “We just knew that he was going to turn out good. We knew maybe it wasn’t normal, but it was in the best interest of that kid at that time.”

Coach, her once and future job, chimed in.

“That’s why we trained for every shot.”

This story was originally published July 16, 2016 at 9:44 PM with the headline "Mother of Villanova hero reflects on life-changing shot."