UNC football recruit Jones may end up at Hargrave
Chatham, Va., and Chapel Hill aren’t all that far apart as the crow flies.
But for Dwight Jones Jr., the multi-sport standout from Cummings High School, there’s quite a difference.
He’ll be in either of those places when football season begins this year, and it increas-ingly appears that he’ll be at the out-of-state location.
The status of Jones, a receiver, has been a major point of discussion regarding North Carolina’s football team. In some opinions, he could be an impact player as he was one of the highly touted recruits to land in coach Butch Davis’ first recruiting class.
Cummings coach Steve Johnson said Saturday that it’s likely Dwight Jones Jr. will be at Hargrave Military Academy in southern Virginia. He has been a test score shy of meeting admission requirements for North Carolina.
“I guess you can never say never,” Johnson said. “I know they’d like to have him (in Chapel Hill). Probably going to Hargrave for a year wouldn’t be a bad situation either.”
Jones, who couldn’t be reached for comment, has a reporting date of Aug. 13 at Hargrave.
Athletics director Jay Perdue of Cummings said that a recent conversation with Ken Browning, an assistant coach at North Carolina, suggested that the Tar Heels staff doesn’t expect Jones with the program this fall.
“Speaking to Kenny, I think they were kind of resigned to the fact that he’ll spend a semester at Hargrave,” Perdue said Saturday, noting that anxiety from North Caro-lina’s fan base has fueled some speculation about the standout. “They won’t have to wait long. Dwight will be there soon.”
Perdue, also the Cummings offensive coordinator, said that sending Jones to Hargrave was part of a potential plan from early in the recruiting process, stemming from conversations with former coach John Bunting and later with Davis.
“You wish everything could be cut and dry, but it’s not always,” Perdue said.
Ideally, Johnson and Perdue said, Jones would spend only one semester at Hargrave, then join the Tar Heels for the spring semester and go through spring practice.
Jones, an all-state player on Cummings’ state-championship football and basketball teams, has been in contact with Hargrave’s staff.
“Hargrave has turned out a lot of great players,” Johnson said, referring to Eastern Guilford graduate Torry Holt, who stars in the NFL.
Players don’t lose a season of eligibility by attending a prep school such as Hargrave, and Perdue called it often an ideal stepping stone to a college program.
“Those guys up at Hargrave work with you to get that score up,” Perdue said. “A lot of kids, I think it will help make the transition to college. I think everything is a growing process. Everybody we’ve ever sent to Hargrave has done pretty good when they’ve come out. I think it’s a positive thing. It’s nothing new.”
Antonio King, who went on to Kent State, and Mike Hinton, who landed at Ohio Uni-versity after time in the Virginia Tech program, are Cummings graduates who went through the Hargrave program.
Sources at North Carolina have said that Jones could be an integral part of the 2007 team’s plans if he’s with the Tar Heels. Using that theory, there also were suggestions that Dwight Jones Jr. wouldn’t be a candidate to redshirt this year because he potentially could fill needs right away.
While the second session of summer school has brought many players to the Chapel Hill campus, the only reported incoming freshman attending the first session was quarterback Mike Paulus.
To many monitoring the football program, that was an indicator that Paulus could be — and perhaps expects to be — a main contender for the starting quarterback slot this year.
After verbal commitments were made to North Carolina, Paulus was credited with keeping several members of the recruiting class intact as the Tar Heels underwent a coaching change from Bunting to Davis.
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