Kris Jenkins' Final Four Run with Villanova Has Rich Family Ties

As questions go, this one was neither provocative nor clever. It certainly was more softball than hardball.

What's your relationship with Kris Jenkins like?

Yet, it drew an instant laugh from Villanova senior point guard Ryan Arcidiacono, who stood from the seat at his locker and—above the din after the Wildcats' Sweet 16 victory over Miami in Louisville, Kentucky—shouted across the room toward the junior forward.

"Hey, Kris! Aren't we best friends?"

"No!" Jenkins shouted in return.

Arcidiacono: "Then what's our relationship like?"

Jenkins: "We don't have one!"

And with that, a giddy room became giddier.

A day later, Villanova's five starters were seated on a press conference dais along with coach Jay Wright. Jenkins was asked about his typical facial expression, which looks at all times like the beginnings of a guarded smile—yet rarely, it seems, does the smile flourish.

Senior forward Daniel Ochefu, seated next to Jenkins, cut in: "This is his face. He always looks like he's mad and wants to smile. We all know Kris is a great guy with a great smile."

Ochefu beamed at Jenkins and urged him: "Just let it shine!"

Junior guard Josh Hart leaned in from Jenkins' other side with an attempted hug.

"Don't touch me, Josh," Jenkins said.

They all laughed, and then they laughed some more as Wright called Jenkins a "clown putting on a business face."

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Good luck spending five minutes around these guys without hearing the words "fun" and "family" bandied multiple times. It's impossible to believe there's a closer team still alive in the NCAA tournament.

If this isn't the greatest time of the 22-year-old Jenkins' life…well, how could it not be? He's in the Final Four with his Villanova brothers. He's also there with his real-life brother, North Carolina's Nate Britt Jr., whom Jenkins will face if both teams reach Monday's national final. For the first season in Jenkins' basketball life, he's in terrific physical condition. And he's crushing it on the court, averaging more than 15 points per game in the tournament and winning Most Outstanding Player honors in the South Regional.

"He has the prettiest shot in the world," said freshman guard Jalen Brunson, who refers to Jenkins as a big brother. "Every time he shoots it, you're surprised if it doesn't go in."

Jenkins averaged 12.7 points during the regular season, when he led the Wildcats with 73 three-pointers made, but he binged down the stretch, averaging 21.8 points over the final five games. In three Big East tournament contests, he totaled 59 points and connected 10 times from long range.

He's carried that performance into the tournament.

Jenkins made his first shot of the Miami game, shook his head and said to no one in particular, "Can't guard me." Much later, he hit the dagger three that ended any suspense and made the Hurricanes' shoulders sag.

In the South final against No. 1 overall seed Kansas, he outplayed Jayhawks star Perry Ellis from start to finish. Jenkins buried a triple to end the first half, backpedaled, turned and high-fived his teammates as they left the bench with the second-seeded Wildcats up by seven. After the final horn sounded, he toppled to the floor in a hug with Hart—finally, that hug—before running to a cluster of Nova fans and giving them a one-man ovation.

"It's one thing to know a guy is a good shooter, seeing him in practice and being with him every day in shooting drills," Wright said. "But it's a different level of confidence for all of us when you go through game after game in a season and the guy hits big shots every time."

Jenkins cracks up teammates by imitating Shaq, claiming to be a Stephen Curry clone and bellowing after big shots, by anyone on the team, "Mama, there goes that man!"—a line coined by NBA analyst Mark Jackson.

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But their favorite Jenkins expression? It's the very thing he told teammates after burying a 30-foot shot-clock-beating jumper against Miami.

"When in doubt, I'll bail you out."

A Rivalry Turns Into A Family

This won't be the first time Jenkins and Britt have shared a final four stage as members of different teams.

When they were 10, they met in the semifinals of an AAU tournament in Florida. Jenkins, from Columbia, South Carolina, already was pushing 6'0"—doughy, perhaps, and not fast, but with a feel around the basket that had made him the tournament's most dominant player.

Nate Britt Sr. told his team: "That kid's better than any kid from our area at U11 or U12. We've got to get him out of the game. We've got to get him in foul trouble." They did, and Britt's Washington D.C.-based squad went on to win the championship.

Nine months later, Britt got a call from Kelvin Jenkins, who asked if the coach remembered his son, Kris.

"Oh, yeah," Britt said. "He was a ballplayer. We never forget ballplayers."

The Jenkins' third daughter and youngest of four children, a baby named Kori, was suffering from DiGeorge syndrome, a primary immunodeficiency that endangers the heart. The family was making trips to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and Kelvin and his wife Felicia wanted their eldest child Kris to have somewhere to play and train—somewhere to stay away from it all, too.

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Kris enjoyed it, clicking with Nate Jr. and other players. So the question became: "Can Kris stay with you for the summer?" The answer was yes, and things went well in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.

At first, Nate Jr. was relieved just to have another boy his age to share the pressure. And, in the strict Britt household, the pressure was no joke—to perform athletically and academically. But Kris also was a more advanced player at the time than Nate, who didn't want to be the second-best player in his own house. That led to a competition that drove each boy to improve but also galvanized their bond. By summer's end, Kris was comfortable with all the Britts.

Back home in South Carolina, things soon became far more difficult. Little Kori died at 11 months. Felicia and Kelvin were headed for a separation that would become permanent. Kris, at home now for the school year, began, according to Felicia, finding trouble—with the wrong friends, with his own misbehavior and with his performance in the classroom.

Yet, he also was doing little things at home that he'd never done before—good things: making his bed, washing dishes and being more considerate. Kris told Felicia these things had been expected of him inside the Britt household. Felicia was struck hard by the significance of that, even as her son surely was awash in emotional upheaval.

"I don't know how much it all affected him," she said. "At the time, I never really went into conversation with him to see how much it was affecting him because I was struggling with it so much myself. I struggled with it for a long time."

Felicia was a basketball coach—new on the job as the head coach at Division II Benedict College in Columbia—and that meant a lot of travel. She was besieged by grief, of course, and doing her best to care for Kris' younger sisters, Kaiya and Kelci. The Jenkins did what Felicia describes now as the hardest thing in her life: asked the Britts to take in Kris on a permanent basis.

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"Felicia called me and said, 'What did you do to my son?'" said Britt Sr., at the time a police officer. "I thought she was going to get on me. But she said he'd picked up on a lot of good things at our house over the summer.

"I talked to my wife, Melody, who wasn't really feeling it at the time. I asked her, 'Would you give one of our children away?' She said, 'Of course not.' I said, 'If a mother's doing it, don't you think she's reaching out because she needs some help?'"

In short order, the Britts became Jenkins' legal guardians, and Jenkins, 13 at the time, began to become, for all intents and purposes, a Britt.

"It really didn't take long for Kris to feel like an actual brother," Nate Jr. said. "I had friends, but I was kind of a loner before he came—we started doing everything together and just never stopped. Maybe it took, like, a year?"

But let's skip ahead now, for things have worked out wonderfully for Kris Jenkins. He has "Coach" and "Miss B," also described by him as his "other dad and mom." He has a brother in every sense of the word in Tar Heels guard Nate. Kris and Nate excelled with the AAU team D.C. Assault and at Gonzaga College High School, and they now are seeing their shared dreams of big-time basketball come to fruition. They're in daily contact and have cheered each other on from afar throughout the tournament.

Photo courtesy of the Britt family

"It really is incredible that this is happening for both of us," Jenkins said.

He has 19-year-old sister Natalya Britt, with whom he talks via FaceTime every day, and Jenkins girls Kaiya, 16, and Kelci, 14, on whom he dotes. And he has Felicia, no longer coaching—she's awaiting the right opportunity to get back into the game—but still devotedly in his life.

Jenkins—awash in love—says he's better for it all.

"My guardian family took me in and changed my whole, entire life," he said. "It's something I hold dear to my heart and I cherish and value."

His life was, in a sense, in doubt. And the Britts bailed him out.

A Life Transformed

Jenkins, 6'6", weighed 280 pounds when he got to Villanova. His heaviness preceded him.

"I played against him in AAU ball," Arcidiacono said. "He was huge. I thought, 'Man, this kid needs to learn how to play some defense and learn how to lose some weight.'"

Jenkins was a two-time Gatorade District of Columbia player of the year, an effortless scorer with a feathery touch. What he didn't know when he arrived at Villanova was that Britt Sr. and Wright had been in lengthy discussions about an ongoing problem: Jenkins would have to remake his body to succeed, but he didn't seem to have the drive to on his own.

"I guess I was too comfortable," Jenkins said. "I had a lot of success in high school and felt I didn't have to change anything because I was doing well."

Villanova strength coach John Shackleton has had an intense relationship with Jenkins from Day 1. Jenkins was listed at 255 pounds during his freshman season, a product of extra sprints, extra lifts and more. He was 240 by the start of his sophomore campaign, though his eating habits still included too much fried food, juice and soda.

Jenkins was stubborn—until he woke up about his physical condition, which happened after the Wildcats' second consecutive early exit from the NCAAs in 2015. He was scoreless off the bench for his first-seeded team in a second-round game against North Carolina State.

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"I definitely didn't feel like I gave it my all," Jenkins said, "because I felt like I wasn't in good enough shape to do so. That's the regret I have."

All the fried stuff finally went off the menu last summer. All the juice and soda, the same—replaced by water. Jenkins became not only a workout warrior, but—at a comfortable 235—a focused man.

"I work out relentlessly with Coach Shackleton, with energy and high effort," he said. "I'm still working on all of it, but it's something I'll work on every day because I want to have a healthier life. It's something I'll keep doing even after I'm out of basketball.

"It's a change for a lifetime."

It isn't his first one of those, you know?

The Britts were there at the final regular season home game, an 84-71 victory over Georgetown. Felicia was there, too, having chosen that event over Kaiya's and Kelci's South Carolina state championship game for Columbia's Keenan High. They're basketball players, too, with college dreams of their own.

"I just want for them what we gave Kris," Felicia said.

It disappointed the girls that they missed the chance to share the day with Kris, but they'll be in the stands in Houston for Villanova's meeting with Oklahoma on Saturday. So will droves of aunts, uncles, cousins and friends on the Jenkins and Britt sides.

Awash in support—who wouldn't want all that Kris Jenkins has?

He has traveled a different path than most, but he's never been alone along the way. Indeed, his coming of age has been quite the family affair.

Steve Greenberg has covered college sports for nearly 20 years, namely for the Sporting News and the Chicago Sun-Times. Follow him on Twitter @SLGreenberg.