Brothers

If you grew up in a athletic family, one of your hopes is to play with your brother or sister on the same team and have a chance to win championships together. You have the Morris brothers that played together at Kansas and the Lopez brothers at Stanford as examples. They even played in the pro's together. But this next duo is different.

Nate Britt, a guard for the North Carolina Tarheels and forward Kris Jenkins of the Villanova Wildcats will be playing against each tonight for a chance to win the Division I men's basketball championship. While this is a great story on the face of it, this is not even the half of it.

Britt and Jenkins first met when they were eleven years playing AAU basketball. During that early time, Jenkins mother, Felicia, was dealing with a sick daughter and basically stayed with her daughter in the hospital. During this time, Kris basically stayed with the Britt's, continuing to play basketball and living with them. Her daughter, Kori, died at the age of eleven months. Her mother eventually took a job as a head coach at Benedict College in South Carolina. She asked the Britt's if Kris could stay with them. She was noticing a change in her son in the wrong direction. As she said, "..."Understand it was the most difficult decision I made in my life," Felicia Jenkins said. "But I knew I had to make it in order to make sure he had the best opportunity." For the Britt family, it was a no brainer: "I said as a mother, could you imagine going to someone else and saying you want them to take care of your son?" Britt Sr. told his wife. "So how do we say no?"

As for the guys, they took to each other like, well, brothers. While at Gonzaga College High School, they each won their own Player of the Year award.

Tonight's game will not be the first time they played against each other in college. In a 2013 tournament matchup, their competiveness showed. Although in the same room, they didn't speak one word to each other. "They were going back and forth," Nate Britt Sr. said. "They weren't talking. They were texting each other in the same room. It was unbelievable."

By the way, their relationship is not symbolic; the Britts legally adopted Kris in 2007. Like Kris himself said, "...I definitely have two great families. "I consider myself to be very, very lucky and blessed and fortunate to have two great families to take care of me and guide me and keep me in the right place."


While I hope for a great game tonight, I already know that the outcome will be a winning one.