Villanova’s Caleb Daniels came home for the Final Four, to the city and school that shaped him | Mike Sielski

NEW ORLEANS — Three miles from the Superdome, 30 minutes before Caleb Daniels and the rest of the Villanova Wildcats were scheduled to begin practice Thursday morning, Tyrone Payne straddled the doorway of his classroom, one foot in the room, one foot in the hallway. Payne has taught math at St. Augustine High School here for more than 40 years and was administering an exam, and as he paused to tell a quick Daniels story, his eyes flitted back to his students. It was an open-book test, but still. “Technology,” he said. At St. Augustine, any use of a cellphone at all, let alone to cheat on an exam, is punishable by Saturday detention, suspension, or expulsion.

So, the story: Payne was Daniels’ ninth-grade geometry teacher, and Payne was a stickler, subtracting a point here and there if a student’s work wasn’t flawless. “Caleb wanted those points,” he said, “and he’d battle. ‘Why did you take one off?’ He was that kid who was a perfectionist.” So much so that Daniels, a standout on St. Augustine’s basketball team as a freshman, skipped a game so Payne could tutor him. The extra work pushed Daniels’ grade in the class to a B-plus.

“It wasn’t an A, but I did the best that I could,” Daniels said. “I probably wasn’t the smartest in my class, but I put the time in and worked, and that’s what mattered.”

Daniels, a 6-foot-4 senior guard, has been and will be a focal point ahead of Villanova’s matchup against Kansas in the Final Four, such an obvious story that, in a press release Wednesday, the NCAA’s media-relations team called him a “HOMETOWN HERO” and encouraged reporters to interview and/or write about him.

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Basketball-wise, he’s practically a sixth starter for the Wildcats, averaging 10.2 points a game and making 38% of his three-point attempts this season, and he promises to be an even more important figure Saturday night, the player most responsible for making up for the absence of junior guard Justin Moore, who tore an Achilles tendon last week.

But at St. Augustine, nobody mentions any of his games, any eye-popping scoring performances, anything basketball-related. The student he was — the valedictorian of the St. Augustine Class of 2017, “the student you wanted in class,” theology teacher Derrick Pannell said — stands out more to the school’s teachers and administrators. And Daniels in turn credits its history and culture for shaping him, as much as any institution, as an athlete and a person. Ironically, he didn’t want to go there at first. There were other schools closer to home that he preferred. But his parents, Roland and Connie, insisted that he attend St. Augustine.

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“My mother was thinking, ‘Go be part of a brotherhood that’s going to teach you life lessons and discipline that you’re going to need throughout life that other schools won’t teach you,’” he said. “I didn’t see that when she first told me that. But now that I’ve been through it, I still carry those life disciplines with me today that are helping me now.”

Founded in 1951 as a Catholic, all-Black, all-male alternative to the public-school system of Southern segregation, its enrollment now roughly 600, St. Augustine claims among its notable alumni the actor Carl Weathers, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, former New York Giants general manager Jerry Reese, and a basketball star who predated Daniels at Villanova by a quarter century: Kerry Kittles. “Kerry was cool, soft-spoken, just like the rest of us,” said C. Maxille Moultrie, one of Kittles’ classmates and now a teacher at St. Augustine.

Kittles was the star of the Purple Knights’ 1992 state-championship team, and as a senior, Daniels came close to matching his achievements, leading St. Augustine to a 26-6 record and the state semifinals, scoring 19 points and grabbing 12 rebounds a game — the team’s excellence a point of pride in a city where, according to census records, nearly a quarter of its residents live in poverty. But the school is regarded as a refuge within the Seventh Ward for reasons that go beyond its basketball program and its educational mission.

The threat of destructive weather is never far from anyone’s thoughts and fears here — an apprehension that everyone learns to accept as an intrinsic part of life until power poles start toppling and the family photo album has been swept away. Tornadoes knifed through the region just last week. Hurricane Ida’s arrival in August led to repairs at St. Augustine that led to an accidental electrical fire that damaged the school’s gymnasium. The restoration is continuing. The gym remains closed. The school’s hall of fame wall in the lobby is studded with 60 pegs that are empty of the plaques that are supposed to be hanging from them.

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During and after Hurricane Katrina made land in August 2005, residents of St. Augustine’s surrounding neighborhoods scurried to the school’s second floor for shelter as water from the storm and the overflowing gulf flooded their homes and streets. Derrick Pennell, who teaches theology at St. Augustine, said that “some alumni, as they were coming back into the city, actually stopped here first to check on the school first before they went to their houses.” The Daniels family lived 5 ½ miles south of St. Augustine. The winds ripped off part of their roof and paneling and padding from one side of their house, and they relocated to Beaumont, Texas, for a year. “We didn’t get affected as bad as other people did,” said Daniels, who was 6 when the storm hit.

Entering St. Augustine as an eighth-grader, Daniels had the benefit of having two older brothers, R.J. and Marcel, who had attended the school. He had a sense of what was ahead. St. Augustine distributes to its students and their parents a 51-page handbook detailing its rigorous disciplinary practices, standards, and penalties. The hair on a student’s head, for instance, can be no longer than an inch. A trimmed mustache is allowed, but all other kinds of facial hair, including beards and sideburns, are banned, and if Darren Dixon, St. Augustine’s disciplinarian, determines that a student’s 5-o’clock shadow violates the policy, it will cost the young man $5 to have Dixon shave his face for him.

“Most of the parents are in agreement with it,” Dixon said. “When you go to a school that has rules, you have to follow those rules. I have a son who graduated here last year. Now he wants dreadlocks. That’s fine. But while you’re at this school, you’re going to get your hair cut.”

Until 2011, the school delivered a harsher form of discipline than even a dull razor blade: paddling. St. Augustine was reportedly the last high school in the United States to administer corporal punishment to its students, finally abandoning it at the order of Gregory Aymond, the Archbishop of New Orleans. The change sparked protests from students, alumni, and parents who argued that, in a region rife with crime and violence, the practice was necessary and valuable and that banning it violated the right of Black people to raise and educate their children according to their own cultural norms. “Thank God I didn’t go through the paddling phase,” Daniels said. But his brothers did.

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“Yeah, they were disciplined a couple of times,” he said. “My parents thought it was necessary. They thought it was appropriate. Obviously, they asked each parent if they were OK with your son being paddled and being disciplined in that matter. This is the first lesson that I learned going to St. Aug: Your actions don’t just affect you. They affect everyone around you, and that’s how life is when you get a family, when you’re on a basketball team. We were all brothers and part of a community, but if one person goes through something or does something bad, the whole class has to suffer, which, honestly, was great to learn.”

In the moment, though, Daniels rued the collective punishment that remains standard procedure at St. Augustine. A student showed up without a tie? That’s a $10 fine. The student didn’t have the money? Now he and his classmates might have Saturday cafeteria cleanup duty, which meant every plate, every bowl, every piece of silverware would have to be washed, dried, and color-coordinated. “It wasn’t just rinse-and-go,” Daniels said. “We spent more time cleaning than eating.”

In light of Daniels’ high school experience, the demands of balancing his studies and his athletic career at Villanova would have seemed a slab of cake in comparison. He spent two years at Tulane before the university fired coach Mike Dunleavy after Daniels’ sophomore season. Dunleavy, whose son Baker was an assistant under Jay Wright for seven years, then advised Daniels to take a look at Villanova and Wright to take a look at Daniels. When Daniels encountered Collin Gillespie for the first time, the two played four fierce games of one-on-one, Daniels rolling to a victory in the first, Gillespie sweeping the next three, their friendship cemented immediately, the two of them proving mirror images of each other. Gillespie was the Big East’s Scholar-Athlete of the Year; Daniels carries a 3.85 grade-point average. “He’s fit in like a kid who started here from Day 1,” Wright said.

Except Daniels’ time at Villanova has been anything but easy. He contracted COVID twice, then was diagnosed with myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle — a condition that not only sidelined him for a full summer but left him scared that he might never play basketball again.

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Only now, as the season nears its end, are his strength and conditioning back to their fullest. Only now, when his team needs him most. “Even when he was coming back from injuries and stuff, you didn’t see him frustrated,” Wright said. “It’s incredible. It’s why he’s in the position he is in now, and as I said, he’s playing the best basketball of his career.” Caleb Daniels once skipped a game for all the right reasons. Everything he did then and has done since says that if Villanova can count on anyone to show up Saturday night against Kansas, on the biggest stage in the sport, it’s him.