A Giant Challenge: A 7'3" Teen's Quest to Find His Place On and Off the Court

Everybody mentions the Toyota Avalon when they talk about the Vanovers. This includes the Vanovers themselves, who are aware of what a sight it is to see 21 feet of teenage boy come spilling out of the back seat of a four-door Japanese sedan.

Chris and Robyn Vanover spawned three 7-footers: twins Brandon and Justin, and Connor. With the 6'3" parents included, the Avalon is routinely asked to haul 406 linear inches of Vanover to restaurants and movie theaters and basketball tournaments in and around Little Rock, Arkansas.

"It's not comfortable at all," Brandon said.

The tallest of the Vanovers is Connor, who is also the youngest. At 7'3", Connor, who will be part of the 2018 recruiting class, is one of the tallest high school prospects in the country. With blond hair, pale skin and a pair of thin legs that appear fashioned out of bendy straws, Connor is impossible to miss, even in a gym full of basketball players. When he goes out in public, the effect is amplified. He moves through life as an object of fascination for regular-sized folk.

People are usually nice, and Connor admits he likes the attention more than his brothers ever did. "Comfortable in his own skin" is how everybody phrases it, and it's a blessing, because when you're that tall, your patience will be tested.

For example, one time Connor took his girlfriend to the state fair, and she kept a tally of how many times that he was asked how tall he was (the follow-up question is always, "Do you play basketball?"). She gave up counting at 38. When Connor comes out of the locker room after a game, he sometimes finds people standing there wanting to take a picture with him.

"I used to joke with him," said his youth basketball coach, Tim Collins. "Connor, you're a celebrity."

Credit: Robyn Vanover

But now Connor is 17 and receiving scholarship offers from the likes of Ole Miss, Arkansas, Memphis and SMU. As a result, his game is subjected to more and more scrutiny, and a question has developed: In modern basketball, is there still a place for the slow-moving 7-foot-forever center? Or has basketball, once the great catch-all for boys like the Vanovers, turned them into misfits once again?

ESPN analyst Jay Bilas doesn't think so.

"The game has gotten a little more wide open," Bilas said. "But if you've got a player that can block shots, rebound, clog the paint and can also be a presence down low where you can play through that player … any player that's a threat to be double-teamed, you can do a lot of damage with a player like that."

That is Connor Vanover's challenge.

At the USA Basketball U17 tryouts in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in June, Vanover found himself trying to keep up. All the other big men invited to the camp were of a different mold. They all stood between 6'8" and 6'10" and were what you might call running, jumping, dunking, face-the-basket power forwards. Pitted against players like Wendell Carter Jr. and Austin Wiley—both top-15 prospects in the 2017 class—Vanover struggled to gain position inside and keep up as they ran the floor.

So far, Vanover has built his career around hitting mid-range jump shots. Because of his height, he is more or less always open, and he developed such a nice touch at such an early age that none of his coaches have ever made him post up. If he is to become comfortable as a traditional back-to-the-basket center, well, that work has just begun.

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Standing 7'1" and 7'0", respectively, Brandon and Justin Vanover experienced all the same gawking and question-asking their younger brother has. But they experienced it first and didn't like it as much.

"It was harder for me and Justin," said Brandon, a freshman center at Central Arkansas. "We were always the ones that always stuck out and stuff."

Connor passed his brothers in seventh grade, when he grew six inches in a span of six months. He hit the 7-foot mark in eighth grade, and from then on he's been the main object of fascination from his family. Connor admits he doesn't mind.

"I think he loves it, actually," Justin said.

Part of this amounts to a simple difference in personality, but having tall brothers helped.

"Seeing them go through it first," Connor said, "I could see what was going to happen. Sometimes it's hard being looked at all the time going everywhere. Most of the time people are nice about it. Usually it's not that bad. It's just good to have brothers to fall back on."

Robyn was a center at Arkansas in the '80s, and although she did coach her boys in YMCA ball when they were little, neither she nor Chris pushed them into hoops. Nobody did. When you're that tall, it just sort of happens. For Brandon, it stuck. Justin, on the other hand, quit basketball in sixth grade. He's now presumably the tallest saxophonist in the history of the marching band at Alabama.

Credit: Robyn Vanover

"[Justin] got all his athleticism from his father," said Chris, who never played basketball. "Not well-coordinated."

The athletic ability came from Robyn, who in her playing days set Southwest Conference records for blocked shots and field goals made in a game. People who saw both Robyn and Connor play see some similarities between mother and son, and Robyn does, too.

"I have a really good shot like his," she said. "So everybody comments that he shoots a lot like I did. I wasn't your true back-to-the basket center either. My favorite shot was at the elbow or down in the corner."

Connor's size gave him an opportunity, but his jump shot was something extra, something you didn't expect from a kid who looked like him. It gave him confidence.

"I wasn't a breakout star or anything," he said, "but I kept getting better and better."

Collins coached all three Vanover boys in youth basketball, though they didn't play on the same teams. Connor had already developed his shot by the time Collins got him as a 5'1" seven-year-old, and Collins didn't see a player who needed fixing.

"At the time I was working with my son and some other guys, and they were mostly guards, so we were doing some guard-generated work," Collins said. "And here's this 5'1" kid that's handling the ball like these little 4-foot kids. Then you see the shot."

It was actually Robyn, the face-up center herself, who tried to get coaches to send him to the block.

"I was like, 'Coach, you've got to get him to post up, get him to post up,'" she said. "They were like, 'Leave him alone, he's a good shooter.' He's the shooter he is today because of that."

Everywhere they went, Collins or the Vanovers were catching grief from opposing coaches and everyone else about their deployment of Connor's biggest advantage.

Credit: Robyn Vanover

"Here at home, you know, 'You got that big kid and he's out there shooting threes?'" Collins said. "I'm like, hey, that's how we win. He can see over everybody and you can't block it."

That wasn't all there was to it, though.

"He's not the strongest kid out there," Collins said. "Other kids kinda bullied him. We're here in Little Rock, so we're playing against some athletes. They'll get him down there and they'll root him out. I've seen it."

The same thing happened when he got to high school. Over the summer, Robyn said, it was impressed upon Connor that it would be helpful if he could dominate the paint.

"He has developed a little bit of a low-post game, although you don't see it very often," Robyn said. "He needs to be more comfortable when he catches it on the perimeter, not just thinking he has to go out for the three, but give a little fake and take it to the hole."

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A generation earlier, a basketball career like Connor's would have been unlikely. Traditional basketball—even after the three-point line was invented—revolved around a big guy in the post. And at basketball practice all the tall kids went to one side and worked on tall-kid stuff, and all the short kids went to the other side and did short-kid stuff. This arrangement was so predictable that NBA great Kevin Garnett famously insisted he be listed at 6'11" instead of 7'0" because he didn't want anybody calling him a center.

That was almost 20 years ago, and the traditional center was already out of fashion by the time advanced analytics began to change the way the game is played at the NBA level. Initially seen as a happy-but-not-necessarily-intended consequence of good post play and ball movement, the three-point shot is now the focal point of NBA offenses.

It's hardly a revolutionary thought—three has always been greater than two—but analytics nonetheless disabused the basketball world of old biases against three-point shooting. As a result, the game moves faster, and the requisite skill set for a big man has evolved to the advantage of (traditionally) undersized big men like the 6'7" Draymond Green, whose quickness and versatility fit more naturally into a wide-open game.

Noah Graham/Getty Images

Small ball, they call it, and even blue-blood college basketball programs like Kansas and Duke—schools that don't have trouble recruiting elite big men—will sometimes play a four-guard lineup.  

"Right now, you want threes and layups," Bilas said. "You used to have guys that were attacking the basket in transition. Now they're running to the corners. It's the threat of the three-point shot that has changed the game."

The market for big generic centers may be more bearish than ever before, but the game of basketball has some trenchant realities nonetheless.

"If Hakeem Olajuwon were in the draft this year, he'd go No. 1," Bilas said.

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"Nobody roots for Goliath," Wilt Chamberlain once said. One thing that is as true now as ever: When you're 7'3", everybody wants to see you get humiliated on the basketball floor. Dunking on anybody is a notch on the belt, but when the guy can floss his teeth with the net, it's not just two stylish points, it's the everyman's triumph over the monolith.

Everybody wants to dunk on Connor Vanover. 

"Randomly if I'm walking down the street, sometimes people will be like, 'Hey, I'll dunk on you,'" Connor said. "In games that will happen. Somebody will think, 'I should dunk on him.' Mostly I use it as motivation. If somebody wants to dunk on me, then I can dunk on him."

To do much dunking on people, according to the coaches who are scouting him, Vanover will need to get bigger, stronger and faster.

Unlike his brothers, Connor has never been much of an eater, snacking on fruits and vegetables over heavier, more caloric foods as a matter of preference. His weight has slowly risen to 230 pounds, but to handle the screening, rebounding and paint-protecting he'll be expected to do at the Division I level, he's still got plenty of calorie-loading and lifting ahead of him. Connor is eating every couple of hours and hitting the weights twice per day. He's gaining, but some people just have a tough time putting on weight.

"Slowly," Connor says. "I think it's working."

He didn't make the team in Colorado Springs. Competition was intense. The big men who made the final roster were Carter, the No. 4 player in the 2017 class, Jaren Jackson, Jr. (No. 29), Austin Wiley (No. 13), Jordan Brown (No. 6 in the 2018 class) and Carte'Are Gordon (No. 41, 2018).

Vanover isn't ranked among the top 100 players on any major recruiting site, but Scout ranks him as the No. 18 center in the 2018 class and the No. 1 player in Arkansas at the position. LSU, Ole Miss, Alabama, Memphis and SMU have offered scholarships, but Vanover isn't in a hurry to pick a school.

"I think the college coaches are just all keeping an eye on me and seeing what happens going forward," Connor said. "What I think they're really looking for is for me to get faster and stronger, to really show I'm not just pop out and shoot, and I can block shots and rebound."

Of all the tall people in his family, Connor has the highest-profile basketball career. He's also the most famous. Funny thing about that, though.        

When the Vanovers pack into the Avalon?

"They always push me to the middle," he says.

Recruiting ratings via Scout.com.

Tully Corcoran covers college basketball for Bleacher Report.