Just as importantly, he’s now living in Oxford with his girlfriend, Kilynn Trammell, and their daughter Melah, who will turn three on Tuesday.
Saturday they all were at Millett Hall.
Just as he had in the season opener five nights earlier, Darweshi gave Miami its only real offensive threat Saturday, scoring 21 points in a 75-65 loss to Texas State in the home opener. Monday night he scored 21 in an eight-point loss at Evansville.
As her dad was putting on an offensive show in the second half — scoring 15 of his 21 points — Melah sat on her mom’s lap, wearing her red Mickey Mouse shirt, and sparkling earrings, while making face binoculars with her hands so she could focus on her daddy.
Next to her sat Darweshi’s parents, Dwayne and Natasha, his brother Denzale and a couple other relatives and friends.
“Man, I don’t even know how to say just how much better this is to have Darweshi here with us,” Kilynn said. “He’s excited too. I can tell the difference how he is every day; how it affects him, as well. And it’s great for Melah. She loves being around him and she loves watching him play. Her eyes are on him all the time. She knows his number and she’s pointing him out and cheering, saying, ‘Go Daddy!’”
Central State sweethearts
Darweshi and Kilynn met as Central State students.
She’s from Indianapolis and wanted to experience an HBCU, but she ended up there because of a last-minute back track.
“I had been accepted and was all set to go to Tennessee State University, but two weeks before I was to leave, I got cold feet,” she said. “Now, I can’t even tell you what was going on in my 18-year-old self, back then. I got scared, so I decided to switch to the HBCU closest to home that accepted me. That was Central State.”
Although he had starred at Princeton and then gone briefly to the Woodstock Academy in Connecticut and Dohn Prep in Cincinnati, Hunter said he wasn’t able to draw a scholarship offer from any Division I school or any other Division II school except CSU.
He said the University of Cincinnati had given him some looks, “but didn’t like my ball-handling skills” and while the Naval Academy brought him in for a visit “they wanted me to take the SAT or ACT again and I wasn’t going to do that.”
At Central State, he made an instant impact on the court,
In his first game, an exhibition against Wright State, he scored 35 points, and that night was the best player on the court.
“I was a man on a mission that game,” he said. " Wright State didn’t recruit me, and I was right down the road from them. I thought I easily could have helped them out. I wanted to show them (and the rest of D-I) what they missed.”
Six weeks later CSU played at Miami, and he scored 17 points and grabbed 13 rebounds.
“That day I remember thinking I’d love to play here,” he said. “And after that game, I knew I could play at the Division I level.”
He ended up leading the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SIAC) in scoring with a 20.7 points per game average and won All-SIAC first-team honors and was named the SIAC Freshman of the Year.
By then, he had decided he was going to try to make it at a D-1 school. And that was before CSU fired head coach Joseph Price and then the SIAC cancelled the following season due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As all this was happening, Kilynn discovered she was pregnant.
When she’d met Darweshi, she said she was impressed by how humble he was and how motivated he was with his studies and his basketball:
“That first semester I didn’t take things as seriously. I thought I could depend on my automatic brains and miss a class here and there and just go out, but he was like, ‘Oh no! That’s not the way.’ I saw how every day he was at it from 7a.m. until 9 or 10 p.m.”
She said when she told him was pregnant he was more supportive than she had hoped he’d be.
Telling her parents was tough as well: “I was scared and nervous, but while they made sure I knew how disappointed they were — how they hadn’t seen this for me — they were supportive too. They said, ‘We know how we raised you and we have faith in you to do the right thing. They supported us both.”
But things got tougher before they got better.
Hunter said his best offer came from Weber State in Ogden, Utah, and he joined the team during the COVID lockdown, so there were strict protocols that kept the Wildcat players isolated in something of a bubble.
Kilynn was back home in Indianapolis living with her parents and feeling alone as she dealt with the pregnancy issues on her own.
“It was very hard, and I often felt scared and alone,” Kilynn said. “The last five months of my pregnancy I went through it by myself. There was no Facetime in the ultrasound appointments, none of that. It really hit me when Darweshi wasn’t able to make the baby shower in September. I was bawling my eyes out.
“That’s when we had ‘The Talk.’
“It was like, ‘OK were both sacrificing. You’re not able to be here for something so important in your life and I’m sacrificing because I’ve put school on hold and am not able to accomplish the goals I’d originally set out to do.’
“We agreed to always focus on the bigger picture. We’d sacrifice individually for what would eventually be good for both of us and our daughter.”
Just as the season was about to start Hunter took a brief leave from the team so he could be there for the birth of his daughter. He got home in time to drive Kilynn, whose labor was being induced, to the hospital.
He was in the delivery room when Kilynn birthed their 7-pound, 4-ounce daughter.
“That was really amazing,” he said. “I was really nervous, but everything went smooth. Kilynn was great.”
When Darweshi returned to the veteran Weber State team, he said the rotation was set and he never could crack it. He played just seven games with the Wildcats that season and averaged 2.9 points.
He then transferred to Northern Illinois, where he played in 60 games over the next two seasons, started 18, averaged 6.4 points and, most importantly, got his degree.
Although Kilynn and Melah, who was just a couple months old, did fly out to Weber State once to see a game — Darweshi didn’t get on the court that night —they made several trips to Northern Illinois and he would come see them in Indianapolis.
It was still a strain and that’s why coming to Miami this season worked so well for them.
Kilynn is now taking classes at Miami University Hamilton and Darweshi, who is taking graduate classes, is trying to put together one stellar Division I season with hopes it will launch him into a pro career.
He doesn’t talk about that, except as a byproduct of helping Miami “turn this thing around.”
That’s why Miami went after him in the transfer portal. The RedHawks are desperate to add a spark to their long-struggling basketball program.
They’ve have had just one winning season in the past 14 years and that was a 12-11 campaign in 2020-21.
This year’s team is young and short-handed, especially with its two big men out. Reece Potter, the 7-foot-1 freshman center, was unable to play Saturday because of a hand injury and 6-foot-8 senior Anderson Mirambeaux hasn’t dressed yet because of an undisclosed reason.
That helps explain Miami’s inability on the boards Saturday, losing the rebound battle, 44-26.
The loss dropped Miami to 0-2.
‘Change up the juice’
At the prompting of second-year coach Travis Steele, Miami moved its team bench from the north end of the sideline, where it’s been for decades, to the south end Saturday.
“We need to do something different at Millett,” he said. “It’s been a long time since we’ve won here. We’ve got to change up the juice, the mojo. It’s not going to be the fix-it all, but we have to show this is different.”
He wants the team, the fans, everyone to have a different view of Miami basketball.
He wants people to like what they see when they look out onto the court.
That was not a problem for Darweshi Hunter’s family, especially his girlfriend and daughter, who sat four rows behind the bench.
He’s finally found a home this season.
And Saturday his little girl, with hand binoculars pressed to her eyes, was up there, jumping up and down and yelling:
“Go Daddy, Go!”
And he did.
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