Travis Trice of the Michigan State Spartans with Carlton Valentine after the East Regional Final of the 2015 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament at Carrier Dome in Syracuse, N.Y. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
There were so many times it seemed Travis Trice might not make it.
Before he was born, when people urged his then 18-year-old mother not to go through with her unplanned pregnancy.
At the end of high school, when college recruiters deemed him “too skinny” and “too short” to play Division I basketball.
During the spring of his freshman year at Michigan State, when a debilitating brain infection made him question whether he was going to live, let alone play in the Final Four of an NCAA tournament.
But there he was Sunday afternoon, on his knees at the Carrier Dome after defeating fourth-seeded Louisville in overtime, bawling. Not quite believing he had made it.
Finally a woman called out to him: “Travis, you need to go celebrate with your team.” And he stumbled over to the makeshift podium where his teammates and a trophy for the East’s Most Outstanding Player were waiting for him.
“I don’t deserve this,” he kept telling his parents.
His mother, Julie, disagreed.
“Travis is so worthy,” she said. “I don’t know another kid that deserves this moment.”
It’s an opinion Julie Trice has held since long before her son became the NCAA’s most heartwarming success story. Her pregnancy, which came during her senior year of high school, derailed her track career and a scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
“People were telling me I should get an abortion after I got pregnant,” she told the Detroit Free Press. “People have been saying ‘No, no, no, no, no’ to him forever.”
Travis’s future came into question again just nine months later, when his heart rate “flatlined” during the 41st week of pregnancy. An emergency C-section brought him into the world with the umbilical cord tangled around his ankles, but alive.
“You don’t understand the struggles that kid has had to go through … his whole life,” Julie said.
Trice, No. 20, on the court during the first half of the East Region Semifinal game between Virginia and Michigan State at Madison Square Garden. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
Born to a family of accomplished athletes — Julie was a track star, his father Travis Sr. a point guard for Butler — Travis Jr. “grew up, literally, in a gym” his mother said. Two weeks after he was born, Julie took him to Indianapolis to watch his first-ever basketball game. Travis Sr. would go on to coach a nationally-ranked team at Wayne High School in Huber Heights, Ohio, and Travis Jr. would become one of the school’s best players.
Despite all that, Travis Jr. might have never played for a top team like the Spartans if it weren’t for coach Tom Izzo. Scrawny by basketball’s standards — six feet tall and about 175 pounds — Trice was overlooked by most recruiters. But Izzo, 5′ 9″, who walked-on to the Northern Michigan University team four decades ago and never expected to become one of college basketball’s most prominent coaches, spotted him at an Amateur Athletic Union game his senior year and saw something he liked.
Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, left, with Trice during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against Central Connecticut State in 2011. (AP Photo/Al Goldis)“As a coach, you kind of fall in love with the guys that remind you more of yourself,” Izzo told USA Today. “… We’re kind of long shots.”
Trice’s odds grew even longer during the spring of his freshman year of college, when a still-undiagnosed brain infection suddenly sapped him of energy. He lost 20 pounds and was sleeping for at least a dozen hours a day — he could barely get out of bed, let alone play Big Ten basketball. Without telling his parents, Trice went to a doctor to be tested for mononucleosis. But the source of his fatigue wasn’t that, nor was it any other ailment his doctors could think of.
“It was definitely scary, throughout the whole thing it was, because at a certain point you’re wondering, ‘Am I dying?’” he told CBS a year after his illness. “Do I have some rare disease that hasn’t been figured out? … Toward the end, after a month and a half, you start thinking of brain tumor, cancer, AIDS. You start thinking of everything. I think for a while I went to a dark place.”
Eventually Trice told his parents. They took him to church, prayed for his recovery. And suddenly, seemingly miraculously, he began to heal. The experience deepened Travis’s faith and gave him a maturity rare for a college kid.
“I think God allowed me to go through that and I think it changed me to who I am today. I was in a dark place, and he kind of brought me out of that,” he said in 2013.
Trice went on to battle two concussions and infected blisters, working back from his injuries with a diligence that caught his teammates’ attention.
“A lot of people say, ‘I’m on this mission,’ and from what they do off the court and on the court, you can’t really tell. But when [Trice] says he’s going to do something, he’s going to do something,” junior guard Denzel Valentine told Sports Illustrated last fall.
Trice falls over Duke’s Seth Curry during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in 2011. (Frank Franklin II/AP)
That modest determination is a quality others have noted. In a profile for the Detroit Free Press, basketball writer Joe Rexrode nominated Trice as a charter member of the “basketball hall of fame for nice guys who never got in trouble” and “a hall for underrated overachievers.”
The family’s mantra, which Julie Trice often texts to them all, is a passage from the Bible: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
This year, his final year at MSU, appears to be the “proper time” for Trice. It’s the first in which Trice hasn’t had to deal with illness, injury or other unforeseen disasters —and he has been playing his best, leading his team in scoring with 15.3 
Trice in action against the Louisville Cardinals. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
Wayne 10 minutes left
Final Four-bound Travis Trice once wondered 'Am I dying?' - Washington Post
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