Before Jaycee Horn was an NFL prospect, he was a small-town Mississippi hoops star
Mooreville High School boys basketball coach Jim Tally sifts through his iPhone in search of one particular clip.
He’s hunting for a grainy, out-of-focus highlight video from a 2015 game at Northeast Mississippi Community College, just 38 minutes up U.S. Highway 45 from the high school.
Tally finds the video and fires it off in a text message.
Within seconds of hitting play, a 5-foot-7, 140-ish pound Jaycee Horn appears. First he splashes home a 3-pointer from the right wing. A second triple follows from nearly the exact same spot, only this time it’s a step or two further behind the arc.
In one minute and 31 seconds of faded iPhone video, Horn — whose high school teammates described him as “shrimpy” at best and had just arrived in the Magnolia State from the Atlanta area — drained six 3-pointers en route to a Troopers victory.
“He was just kind of a basketball player while he was here,” Tally said. “And a pretty darn good one.”
On Thursday, Horn is slated to be among the first players off the board in the first round of the 2021 NFL Draft. In Mooreville, Mississippi they’ll celebrate their former undersized basketball star turned South Carolina Gamecock great as one of their own.
“When my mom told me we were moving (to Mooreville) I was hurt,” Horn told The State, “because I knew it was going to be a whole different atmosphere from Atlanta. But I think I kind of needed it.”
‘We really shouldn’t mess around with this kid’
When then-defensive coordinator Jimmy Young caught wind that four-time Pro Bowler Joe Horn’s son would attend Mooreville — a 3A school in the northern part of Mississippi with an estimated 460 total students in the school at the time — he lit up.
The Troopers’ athletic history was limited. Baseball is king around those parts. Football is enjoyed, but Mooreville has rarely had athletes capable of competing with the upper echelon of Mississippi’s mid-sized high schools.
Jaycee would change that, Young thought. At least until he caught a glimpse of him.
“I mean, Joe Horn was kind of a big deal,” Young explained. “So anyways, Jaycee comes in and we’re going back and forth and he gets here and he’s like 5-foot-7, 125 pounds. And it’s just, ‘Crap, this is just our luck.’ ”
Horn only briefly played football his freshman year at Mooreville. It was on the basketball courts and gyms scattered across the state where he turned heads.
Tally normally held varsity basketball tryouts in the spring so he could work with players over the offseason. The Horns arrived in the fall after the team had already been assembled.
Joe and Jaycee met with Tally upon their move to Mississippi, where Joe had taken a job coaching receivers at Northeast Mississippi Community College and Jaycee’s brother, Joe Jr., was playing collegiately. The trio agreed Jaycee would practice with the varsity team for a couple days and re-evaluate from there.
Stepping onto the floor for his first varsity practice, Horn drained a 3-pointer from well beyond the line on his first possession. He added another the next trip down the court. Then another. And another.
“I remember just the first time he brought it down the floor, he probably pulled up from 25 feet and he hit the bottom of the net,” teammate Bo Thomas recalled. “And we’re like, ‘OK, we really shouldn’t mess around with this kid.’ ”
After playing just one junior varsity game, Tally asked Horn to stick around for the varsity contest. Hoping to see his cousin play at a nearby high school, Jaycee wanted to say no. Joe made him stay.
Joe has always had a sense when to push Jaycee. It’s part of what makes the duo so close. Joe’s not a screamer or yeller by nature. Rather, he’s subtle in his jabbing of Jaycee. They’ve developed a simple measure of when Joe has thoughts mid-game throughout the years. “Chhh-Chhh” he whistles through his front teeth. Jaycee can always hear the sign.
“They told you all the tricks, man,” Jaycee quips when asked about the slight communique between father and son. “... He’s been doing that ever since I started playing sports and I don’t know why, but I can always hear it no matter where I’m at.”
Sitting on the Troopers’ bench not expecting much playing time, Jaycee heard Tally call for him to enter the game two minutes into regulation. From there Horn never left the floor.
He scored, as he remembers it, around 34 points. He became the starting varsity point guard the next day.
“By the time he was starting point guard,” said Santo Jamerson, who played basketball with Horn and still trades texts with him regularly, “man that dude just took over the team.”
Bringing a balance to the floor
Horn was generally quiet but fun-loving in his days at Mooreville.
Coaches said he was a lead-by-example type. Teammates endured some trash-talking from him on the court, but that was more borne out of Horn’s competitiveness than any kind of arrogance.
“No matter if you’re playing checkers, or playing football or basketball, he’s going out there not just to beat you, but he wants to dominate you,” said Ben Seay, a senior on Mooreville’s basketball team during Horn’s freshman year.
Off the court, Horn was playful and charismatic. Jamerson said the pair used to spend their down time watching rap battles and mimicking the lyrics. Jamerson insists he was the better rapper of the pair, but neither exactly had a future in music.
Horn was also a noted prankster. Thomas cautioned that if you weren’t too careful, Horn might soak your game socks in water before returning them to a locker.
“I kept an eye out for him,” Thomas said through a laugh, “because he was weaselly, man.”
Mooreville was never pegged as a state title contender heading into Horn’s freshman year and for good reason. The Troopers hadn’t made it to the state semifinals in Jackson since the 1990s and were coming off a 6-19 campaign the season before.
The 2015 season slogged to a similar start as the Troopers dropped seven of their first nine games. Then a switch flipped. Mooreville ripped off wins in 18 of its next 23 games and won 10 straight between Jan. 30 and March 2. The Troopers would later reach the Mississippi High School Activities Association 3A Final Four for the first time in nearly two decades.
“(Jaycee) always acted like he’d been there before,” said Mitchell Tharp, Horn’s varsity basketball teammate and JV quarterback. “Even ninth grade, starting for varsity, going to state — it was a big deal at the school — but he always came prepared.”
During a 10-point win over Tishomingo County in December of his sophomore season, Horn, as he so often did, proved a calming presence.
One year earlier, a football game between the two schools erupted into a benches-clearing brawl that resulted in a slew of suspensions. The night Horn and the Troopers took the basketball floor, Tishomingo County fans donned boxing gloves and WWE-style championship belts in the student section, and a poster threatened “Round 2.”
No one remembers Horn’s exact scoring output that evening, but it was enough to silence the crowd. Then a baby-faced sophomore, he carried Mooreville out of the gym with a win, while a police escort physically helped the team out of the building.
“I don’t know how many points he had,” Thomas said, “but they did not want anything to do with Jaycee Horn that night.”
On times past, present and future
Horn and his family moved from the Mooreville area back to Georgia after Jaycee’s sophomore year.
At Alpharetta High School, he evolved into a four-star football prospect and was rated the No. 209 player in the 2018 class, according to the 247Sports Composite. A three-year career at South Carolina saw him earn second team All-Southeastern Conference honors as a junior and rank second among SEC cornerbacks on pass rushing downs in 2020, according to Pro Football Focus.
In Horn’s two seasons at Mooreville, the boys basketball team won 37 games. The Troopers have only notched double-digit victories twice since 2016 and haven’t finished above .500 even once over that same span.
Between his sophomore and junior year, Horn sprouted to around 5-foot-10. A couple more inches have since followed.
Horn went back to visit his friends and coaches at Mooreville in the spring of 2019. Tally said he barely recognized Horn — now a 6-foot-1, 205-pound NFL prospect.
“I’ll tell you what, he didn’t look anything like he looks now,” Tally joked. “He was just a baby when he left here.”
During South Carolina’s on-campus NFL pro day in late March, Horn ran a 4.39 40-yard dash, flooring his former coaches and teammates in Mississippi. The pro scouts in attendance were equally impressed.
ESPN Insider Mel Kiper Jr. in March rated Horn the No. 18 prospect in this year’s NFL Draft. It’s widely expected he’ll be selected in the first 15 picks of Thursday’s first round, which would make him just the third Gamecock defensive back since 2000 to be selected that early.
To Young’s knowledge, Mooreville has never put a baseball player in the big leagues. Tally says Horn could’ve been an elite Division I basketball player had he kept with it. This week, though, those in the map dot town three states and 485 miles from Columbia will celebrate Horn like a native son whenever NFL commissioner Roger Goodell reads his name.
Tally’s grainy video compilation might make it into a few more inboxes as well.
“I hated to see him go,” Tally said. “Because I can only imagine how good he would have been once he filled into his body.”
This story was originally published April 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
