How a year as a high school coach helped shape Jaelin Llewellyn

In the hardest year of his life, Jaelin Llewellyn went home. 

Virginia Episcopal — a preparatory boarding school in Lynchburg, VA — isn’t Llewellyn’s technical home. Yet even though he grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, Llewellyn’s basketball maturation unfolded at VES, where he earned all-state honors as a junior and a senior. It’s where he felt comfortable. 

And in 2021, comfort is what Llewellyn needed most. 

While the rest of the college basketball world trudged through a pandemic-stained 2020-21 season, Llewellyn could only watch. The Ivy League canceled its season, shuttering campuses in hopes of mitigating the spread of COVID-19. No other league followed in its footsteps. 

And so Llewellyn — then a junior at Princeton — had nowhere to play and nowhere to go. 

Enter VES. 

“What else am I going to do?” Llewellyn asked with a smile on Oct. 14 at Michigan’s Media Day. “I just stayed in the gym as much as I could.”