The fact that it was now three seasons since that initial introduction and he was seated in the security-coded, inner sanctum of the No. 7 Flyers tells you he provided some lasting answers to that first question.
Who is Cam Greer?
•At 5-feet-5 ½ inches, the junior walk-on from the South Side of Chicago is the shortest player on this year’s Dayton team and one of the shortest ever to wear a Flyers’ uniform. And yet few players stand taller than him when you consider what he’s done on and especially off the court.
Greer is a fan favorite at UD Arena. His effervescence in warm-up drills and on the bench throughout the games has added to his stature, so much so that at times it’s almost as if he shoulder to shoulder with 6-foot-9 Obi Toppin and 6-11 Jordy Tshimanga.
And once he gets on the court – which over three seasons has been late in 22 games, including Saturday’s 70-56 victory over Fordham at UD Arena – Greer has not missed a shot.
He’s attempted and made one field goal each season. The first two were three pointers and this year he made a back door cut, got a Jhery Matos pass and added a reverse lay-up against Virginia Tech in the Maui Invitational. And he’s also been perfect on the two free throws he’s attempted.
• Greer’s a guy who, when you ask the favorite highlight of his career, he tells you about fellow walk-on Jack Westerfield hitting a late three-pointer against La Salle on his Senior Night last year. Greer fed him the ball and soon after Westerfield was bathed in glory from the sellout crowd, the vocal Red Scare student section and the rest of his joyous teammates.
But no one beamed more afterward than Greer:
“That’s one of my favorite moments – just getting that assist – it felt amazing knowing I helped him have his special moment.”
•Mostly Cam Greer is a guy who has his priorities straight.
He was the valedictorian in a graduating class of 229 at Rich Central High School in Olympia Fields, one of Chicago’s south suburbs. At UD he’s a chemical engineering student with several academic scholarships.
He takes his studies seriously, so much so that last Wednesday night when the Flyers played at Duquesne he missed his first game ever because of a time conflict with chemical engineering lab he had.
“It was really hard not being with the team, but I’ve been trying to focus a lot more on school because it’s the priority in my life,” he said. “I try to do the best I can to attend my classes and this lab meets only once a week, so it’s hard to make the work up, especially when you’re working with a group.”
The lab ended at 4:40 pm and the game tipped off at 7.
Greer didn’t have the necessary cable feed at his Frerick Way apartment to watch the game and said he couldn’t find the broadcast online.
“I ended up paying to watch the game,” he said. “I had to see it.”
Though watching from afar, he said he was just as animated as he is on the sideline:
“I was up. I was up clapping, yelling things, doing whatever I could to lift our team. Those are my brothers.”
Keeping hoop dreams alive
He initially grew up on Oakdale Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. His dad is a metro train engineer and his mom, a former accountant, is now a church secretary.
Once his younger brother Caleb was born, the family moved and Cam ended up at Rich Central, where he was known for his academics, but also played varsity basketball two season and was the starting point guard and team captain as a senior.
“I wasn’t the basketball star at my school, but I helped lead us to a regional championship and the Sweet 16, so we did pretty well,” he said.
While he knew academics was his path to college, he still wanted to keep playing basketball.
He got an offer from Benedictine College, an NAIA school in Kansas, and he drew interest from a few NCAA Division III schools, but when he decided he wanted to study chemical engineering, he began surveying the best engineering schools in the nation.
“I saw the University of Dayton was one of the top schools and I knew about Dayton,” he said.
Before Kendall Pollard went on to Chicago hoops power Simeon Career Academy and then became a Dayton Flyers favorite, Greer said they went to school together at Oakdale Christian Academy.
He found out he could get engineering scholarship money from UD and then, once he visited the campus, he said he was sold.
“You could just feel a sense of community in the air,” he said. “I know that word is thrown around a lot here, but you actually could feel it.”
And once he was here, he said his basketball dream flickered back to life.
“Knowing what I did about Dayton basketball, I thought it would be great just trying out for the team.”
The Flyers – under first-year head coach Anthony Grant – held a walk-on tryout in September of 2017 and Greer said 12 guys were invited to vie for two spots.
The group first was pared to six and Greer said, “Whatever the coaches asked me to do, I did it. I gave it my all.”
He was one of the two chosen to join the team. The other player, he said, suffered an injury soon after and gave up the venture. But earlier in the summer, Dalton Stewart had been added to the roster as a preferred walk-on.
When he joined the team Greer found himself under the purview of veteran walk-ons Joey Gruden and Jack Westerfield.
“It’s one thing to hear from the coaches what’s expected of you as a walk-on – how they want you to carry yourself and what they want from you in practice and games – but Joey and Jack really became influential in my life, not only on the court, but off,” he said.
“Now that they’re gone (Gruden is a graduate assistant with Chris Mack at Louisville and Westerfield is a G.A. on Archie Miller’s staff at Indiana) we still talk.
“It all goes back to the culture here and our bond. Our brotherhood.”
‘That guy’
Before their final entrance into UD Arena just before each game, the Flyers players line up in the dimly lit tunnel and begin pumping themselves up by yelling, singing, dancing, jumping. pushing each other or maybe pretending to box, whatever works best to get them fully amped.
“The first time I came out on the tunnel, I remember it like it was yesterday,” Greer said. “I was telling Joey, ‘Man, I’m nervous. What if I get out there and start missing lay-ups and air balling?’”
He said Gruden calmed him down and what came next was an exhilarating experience he still feels each and every time he and his teammates burst into the roaring arena.
“You hear the music crank up and the flags (cheerleaders carrying big UD banners) run past you and then you come running out and everyone’s standing and cheering. It’s just so surreal,” he said. “It’s a dream come true really.”
As a freshman Greer got in just four games and took his lone shot – a three-pointer he made – in a game where the Flyers were getting trounced at St. Joseph’s.
Last season he played in five games and along with a couple of rebounds and an assist on the year, he buried a three in a resounding Dayton win at Rhode Island.
This year – sometimes preceded by the Red Scare chanting his name, hoping Grant hears them and calls him from the end of the bench – Greer already has played in 13 games. And while he did hit two free throws at home against Charleston Southern, his score was early in the year in Hawaii.
His dream is to finally hit a basket in UD Arena and hear the crowd roar.
And yet, he was the object of fans’ cheers earlier this season when he drove the baseline late in a game against Houston Baptist and flipped a no-look pass to Chase Johnson, who scored inside.
This season is special, he said, not just because of the growing victory count and the lofty national ranking, but because of the feeling players have for each other:
“We love each other so much this year and it’s because of the culture we have here. We have a lot of veterans on the team and they understand what Coach Grant wants and how to get everybody connected.”
The community feels that, as well, and that’s why the town and the team are feeding off each other so much this year.
And that brings us back to the original question.
With the Flyers popularity soaring this season, is he – especially on campus – recognized by other students?
Do they know who Cam Greer is?
He started to laugh:
“It’s not like I’m Obi or Jordy. I’m not 6-foot-9 or 6-11. They walk into a room and people are like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ Everyone figures they must play basketball and a lot of people probably know their names, too.
“But me? I might be wearing a basketball hoodie, but at 5-foot-5 ½. I don’t get a lot of attention. But every once in a while there are people who know me.
And sometimes they’re like: “Hey, aren’t you that guy on the team?”
He is that guy.
The little guy who is one of the most towering figures on this year’s team.
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