From the halls of Midway to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Austin Parker, left, and Caegan Jackson, right, the former Raider athletes are dancing in March.
Courtesy of Caegan Jackson
How two former Raiders found themselves dancing in March
After a big play in the CAA tournament, Parker and Jackson could be spotted calling for a foul behind the UNCW bench.
Courtesy of Caegan Jackson
With a CAA championship trophy in hand, draped with a basketball net after the ceremonious net-cutting that takes place after each team punches its ticket to the championship tournament, Jackson, left, and Parker, right, posed for a celebratory picture.
Courtesy of Caegan Jackson
With a Cinderella story happening in the NCAA tournament nearly every year, this year one of those stories hits closer to home for Sampson County.
Midway graduates Caegan Jackson, class of 2018, and Austin Parker, class of 2015, are both members of the staff for the UNC-Wilmington men’s basketball team, who punched its ticket to the big dance by winning the Coastal Athletic Association championship on March 11, with a 76-72 win over Delaware.
Jackson’s role is listed as a “special assistant to the head coach” on the Seahawks’ website. The Midway alum elaborated: “Austin and I were both managers — he was a manager at N.C. State and I’m a UNCW grad; I was a manager with Coach Siddle — so we’re not former players. We had to get out of the trenches; we were washing jerseys and Austin was cutting up practice film and all that stuff just to get where we are.”
Jackson’s current day-to-day sees less of the laundry service aspect that he used to climb the ranks, and more of an assistant — both on the court and in a personal capacity — to Takayo Siddle, the head coach of the Seahawks, he said. “I work closely with Coach,” he continued. “I mean, anything he needs. It is not much different than being a general manager, but I’m also a liaison to the donors and the media, so that takes up a lot of my time.
“In the new world of NIL and the transfer portal, the head coach really isn’t in a position to only focus on basketball anymore, so that’s really where my role comes into play,” Jackson said. “You could compare it to like a GM sort of role, but it’s a lot of really important stuff that the head coach doesn’t necessarily have the time to do.”
For Parker, his role revolves around film of both UNCW and its opponents. “My day-to-day? I do all the video stuff in terms of scouting to help the assistant coaches and the head coach with anything they need,” Parker said. “We scout anywhere between five to seven games leading up to an opponent. We watch their offense and what they do personnel-wise; what to take away; their strengths and weaknesses.”
Parker said he and his team have been working on film of Texas Tech — the No. 3 seed that the No. 14 Seahawks will face in tomorrow night’s opening round — highlighting how the team crashes for rebounds and the like, noting that the Red Raiders are “physical.”
With a hectic travel schedule for Parker, Jackson, and the rest of the UNCW team, Jackson said he unpacked his bag Monday night from traveling to Washington, D.C. for the CAA tournament the week before — just to turn around and pack it again for the trip to Kansas for the first-round matchup for the Seahawks.
The two former Raiders knew each other in high school, they said, but they have become closer since joining the staff at UNCW together.
UNCW and Texas Tech tip off tomorrow night at 10:10 p.m., with TruTV broadcasting the game.
Reach Brandt Young at (910) 247-9036, at byoung@clintonnc.com, or on the Sampson Independent Facebook page.