Before Drake Maye took the NFL by storm, he would ‘destroy everybody’ in basketball – The Athletic
The tail end of the high school football season overlaps with the start of prep basketball in North Carolina. So students who play both have to join the basketball team a little late.
As winter neared in late 2018, 16-year-old Drake Maye was still a new student at Myers Park High, five miles south of downtown Charlotte, N.C. He’d transferred to the school that fall, and as the quarterback of the football team, he had little time left for basketball.
When the football season finally ended, he showed up to basketball practice the next day. It was an intimidating setting for a student still new to the school, pulling up to the gym after the basketball team had already played a handful of games. The plan, naturally, was for Maye to spend some time on the bench. Learn the plays. Figure out how to fit in with his new teammates.
The next game on the schedule was against a big rival.
“And, man, did we struggle,” then-coach Scott Taylor said recently.
The offense was in a funk. Shots weren’t falling. So Taylor threw Maye in the game, even though he didn’t know the offense.
“It was like, ‘Hey, man. Just go play,’” Taylor said.
Initially, Maye didn’t want to ruffle feathers by hogging the ball. He was just a sophomore, his first game with a new team. He told Duwe Farris, a 6-foot-6 senior who went on to play at the University of North Carolina, that he’d try to get him some shots.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool,’” Farris said. “And then by the second half, I was like, ‘Drake, bro, forget it. You keep the ball.’ He was that good.”
In just 30 NFL starts, Maye has already taken the league by storm. He’s a legitimate NFL MVP candidate and was recently named second-team All-Pro. On Sunday, he earned his first playoff win by knocking off Justin Herbert and the Los Angeles Chargers.
But long before he was the captain of the Patriots, bringing back memories of the team’s heights under Tom Brady and now prepping for a divisional-round matchup against the Houston Texans, Maye was a high school hoops star, throwing down dunks, pulling down rebounds in traffic and kick-starting fast breaks. And he played for only those few winter months before returning to football.
“Which is unbelievable,” Farris said, “because all these other guys like me would commit our whole lives to playing basketball, and then Drake would show up for four months and just destroy everybody.”
Patriots new Franchise QB Drake Maye basketball highlights 🔥 @DrakeMaye2 pic.twitter.com/9QJs4eQARZ
— Robert Griffin III (@RGIII) May 9, 2024
The hard part for Maye’s coaches, at least initially, was getting him to be more aggressive. Even at 6-feet-5, he was a distributor. At the high school level, conversations usually go the opposite way. But with Maye, his coaches actually wanted him to shoot more.
“He’s coming in and facilitating, and that’s who he is. He’s getting everyone involved and was like, ‘I don’t want to come in and feel like I’m taking over,’” Taylor said. “And we were like, ‘No, dude, we actually need you to score and score early.’”
That’s part of what made Maye’s game different from most of the football players who would pick up basketball in the winter. Football players usually fit into a stereotype on the hardwood. They rebound, play good defense and make use of their five fouls. But they don’t usually have finesse or touch. Maye had both.
“When he hit you, you went backward,” said Nick Jones, then an assistant coach at Myers Park. “He rebounded very physically. He was big. But he also had the touch and the skill of his brother Luke, who was obviously the basketball player in the family. So that’s what made Drake so intriguing as a basketball prospect. Here you have this football body and football mindset, but with a Division I (basketball) skill set.”
Colleges came calling during that sophomore season. They wanted him to consider focusing on basketball instead of football. Clemson, in particular, really liked him.
“But it didn’t go any further than that because everybody knew he was going to be playing quarterback somewhere,” Jones said.
The Myers Park basketball team brought an Xbox into the locker room to play NBA 2K before practices. But everything with Maye has to be a competition. So he drew standings on the whiteboard for everyone to keep track of their season-long records.
“But he wrote his name in, like, 48-point font, 10 times bigger than everyone else, just to make sure everyone knew he was undefeated,” Taylor said. “And he (played with), like, the Wizards, too.”
College football coaches were showing up at Myers Park that sophomore basketball season for Maye, as well, part of the full-court press to try to recruit their next quarterback. Myers Park went from playing in front of family and friends to some of the biggest names in sports.
“You’d show up to a game, and Nick Saban is sitting there,” Farris said. “Like, oh, this is different.”
Maye was briefly committed to play for Saban at Alabama before flipping to stay home and play quarterback at UNC. But those basketball games stuck out to Saban.
“He really impressed me by the way he played basketball,” Saban said on “The Pat McAfee Show” in November. “He probably could’ve played basketball at North Carolina, too.”
“Drake Maye really impressed me by the way he played basketball..
He probably could have played basketball at North Carolina too..
I like it when players played multiple sports because to me that says something about them as a competitor” ~ Coach Saban #PMSLive pic.twitter.com/qCJkH5WvRN
— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) November 14, 2025
The madness of Maye’s run in basketball reached a fever pitch his sophomore season when Myers Park made the playoffs. Maye’s brother Luke, who at the time was a senior at Chapel Hill, came to watch a third-round game and brought with him teammates Walker Miller and Cameron Johnson, who now plays for the Denver Nuggets.
“Pro sports down here are big, but college basketball is really big,” Farris said. “So everyone was a little starstruck.”
“It was a whole circus,” Jones said.
That night, Maye went for 25 points and 18 rebounds. “And had some big dunks,” Farris added.
Maye’s midrange shot was impressive, coaches said, but he really stood out as a passer.
“He rebounded the crap out of it,” Taylor said. “And once he got the rebound, especially in high school basketball, when your most skilled passer is also rebounding the ball, all of a sudden your break is taking off.”
Maye played basketball as a junior at Myers Park, too, but his senior season was scrapped due to the pandemic. As a student at UNC, he ran full-court games with friends such as Farris at the basketball arena, one of the perks of being the starting quarterback. But he also put together an intramural team with some other football players and showed up for games against frat bros and the like.
“It was a couple of your classic humungous football players who were going to foul the hell out of you, but then a couple who could really play,” Farris said of that intramural team. “And Drake gave some poor kids hell there. I’m sure those were some long days for them walking back to the dining hall.”
Drake Maye, second from right, with (left to right) North Carolina basketball players Walker Miller, Cameron Johnson and brother Luke Maye before a high school playoff game. (Courtesy of the Maye family)
Maye has jokingly likened his basketball skills to “a poor man’s Jayson Tatum.”
Is the comparison legit?
“Absolutely not,” Jones said. “But that sounds just like him because he believed that any time he stepped foot in the gym, he could beat you in a shooting competition or one-on-one. That was his approach.”
Maye’s competitive basketball days are over, of course. He’s a star quarterback in the NFL who’s two wins away from taking the Patriots to a Super Bowl as this magical season rolls on.
But basketball will always be a part of Maye’s story.
On the eve of the NFL Draft in 2024, with the whole family in Detroit awaiting news of where Maye would play professionally, Maye got to pick that night’s activities, a rare treat for the youngest of four boys. Other players at the draft opted for a nice dinner to celebrate what was to come.
Maye wanted to hoop. So he rented a court at Detroit Athletic Center, right across from Ford Field, and put together a five-on-five game.
The next day, he became the Patriots’ quarterback of the future, and his life changed forever. But for one more evening, he was just a kid playing basketball.
