When a mixtape of a player goes viral, oftentimes it can mean the end of regular life for oftentimes incredibly high ranked prospects. They become the center of their respective towns, schools, and cities, and similarly will oftentimes have almost insurmountable expectations placed on them. They say pressure makes diamonds, but it can also be suffocating, and this has never been more true than for this week’s athlete: Seventh Woods.
Seventh was only a freshman when his first hoopmixtape titled “Seventh Woods is the BEST 14 Year Old in the Country” went viral, pulling in millions of views within the span of a few months and forever changing the life of a kid who had just started high school. The title didn’t exaggerate, as in the video Seventh dunks on and humiliates more opponents than I can count while at the same time the crowd at his local South Carolina high school loses their minds. Everyone viewing the video online was impressed as well, and Seventh began receiving national attention and with it, high expectations.
You see, when people see a player at such a young age dominating the competition to the extent that Woods was, they often forget to factor in all the other factors that go into a basketball player’s performance(personality, size, etc) and tend to focus more on hyping the player up as the next big thing, and this is what happened to Woods. Seventh was all of a sudden lumped into a category with high school phenoms like LeBron James, Andrew Wiggins, and Jabari Parker, and in some cases, like Seventh’s, the expectations are too much.
After his freshman year, Seventh never recaptured some of the same hype that initially followed him around his high school career. He was always an incredibly talented prospect receiving interest from and eventually committing to UNC, but the comparisons to LeBron and the other high school legends that used to follow him around have greatly diminished. Now, not many remember the once great freshman, despite his playing for a national power, but if you’d like to see the video that started it all, I highly recommend giving it a click.