Piece on the Champagnie twins from The Athletic

From today. Copy and pasted below for those who don't subscribe. Nice piece... Their own men: The Champagnie twins are thriving after charting separate paths
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The pandemic created one positive side effect in the Champagnie household last spring. Identical twins Justin and Julian reunited under the same Brooklyn roof for the first time in several months after completing their freshman seasons at Pittsburgh and St. John’s, respectively. Though no one enjoyed the quarantine or the reason behind it, Christina Champagnie loved having her sons back together, the sounds of their laughter and arguments once again filling the home.Christina also noticed something different about the boys. They were no longer just two panes of the same window, a yin and yang whose only noticeable differences were their hairstyles. They had each grown and matured during the first significant time apart in their lives. She especially saw a change in Justin, who had always relied on Julian for basic tasks such as setting the alarm clock and keeping them on schedule. Now Justin was his own young man, able to act independently of his brother.That’s also when Christina realized that the difficult decision the twins made back in the spring of 2019, one that left their parents heartbroken, had been the right one. Unlike most famous basketball-playing twins, the Champagnie brothers figured that splitting up their unbreakable bond would make each one stronger in the long run.“We had a lot of conversations about it,” Julian says. “We realized that we’re not always going to be together and that at some point in time we’d have to go our separate ways. It was tough, but it was absolutely the right decision. We’re still twins, but we’re not so much the same anymore.”They each forged their own trail, but those paths have followed strikingly similar and surprisingly successful parallel tracks. Both turned in solid freshman campaigns that many casual fans probably didn’t notice. At the very least, nothing about their rookie seasons suggested the Champagnie supernova that was to come as sophomores. Justin is a frontrunner for Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year honors, leading the league in scoring and rebounding. Julian is the top scorer and one of the best shooters in the Big East. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, each twin was named the player of the week in his respective conference, a feat that might never have happened before.Neither one was a highly decorated recruit, but both worked relentlessly at their games while pushing one another to get better. Divided, they stand tall.“It really is an unbelievable story,” St. John’s coach Mike Anderson says. “And it keeps getting better.”
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Justin (left) and Julian at age 5. (Courtesy of Christina Champagnie)The original plan was to stay together. That’s all the brothers knew from the time Julian was born seven minutes after Justin. They started playing basketball at age 5 and always hooped for the same team, except for a brief period in third grade where they were put on opposite squads. That didn’t go so well.“Oh, my goodness, they were so competitive,” Christina says. “And then I had to go home with both of them, which was the worst. Because I always had to go home with someone who was losing.”After their junior season at Bishop Loughlin High School, the twins settled on taking a prep year. But in February of their senior season, both went on an official visit to Pittsburgh. Justin immediately fell in love with the school and the program and wanted to commit on the spot, although his mom persuaded him to wait. Julian was less sure and still leaned toward taking that post-graduate year. For the first time, the boys seriously discussed going it alone.People on the outside didn’t know this. Most assumed they would still be a package deal for college. Pitt coach Jeff Capel thought he was going to land both. In fact, whenever he texted or left voicemails for the twins, Julian would quickly reply, while Justin was agonizingly slow to respond.When the boys issued their declaration of independence to their parents, Mom and Dad were initially crestfallen. “I cried for three weeks straight,” Christina says. “I was devastated.”Justin committed to Pitt in March 2019. Julian’s prep school intentions changed when Mike Anderson was hired at St. John’s the following month. Anderson had heard from Bishop Loughlin coach Ed Gonzalez that Julian was still available, and the former Arkansas, Missouri and UAB coach knew it would be a good idea to make early inroads in New York City. So Anderson made a pitch to Julian: Instead of a prep year, why not use a summer in Queens as your finishing school? The Red Storm also had an in with the family. Ranford Champagnie, the twins’ father, starred as a midfielder on St. John’s 1996 national championship soccer team. The idea of playing for his dad’s alma mater appealed to Julian, and he committed to Anderson in May 2019.“They both made their own identity and own path,” Gonzalez says. “That part I didn’t see coming. But maybe it’s the intuition of twins. They said, let’s go our separate ways and make it happen.”Neither fan base did cartwheels over commitments by the Champagnies — the name, of Jamaican origin, is pronounced like sham-Penny. Both boys were rated as three-star recruits, though a couple of major scouting services didn’t even bother to give Julian a rating. Justin was the lowest-ranked of Capel’s four-man signing class in 2019. A Pitt fan blog called it “not necessarily a negative” that Julian didn’t follow his brother to the Panthers.This is how it had gone for much of their basketball careers. They never had mixtapes on YouTube or were identified early by the recruiting insiders. They didn’t even make their middle school’s sixth grade team. A year later they attended the Brooklyn Patriots grassroots team tryouts on little more than a whim. After the first day, when they competed with about 100 other boys, Christina told them she didn’t think all the travel to and from games and practices was worth it. The team’s coach called her the next day and insisted she was making a mistake, because he saw Division I potential in the twins.Yet even at Bishop Loughlin, they played on the freshman team, leading it to a city championship, and didn’t crack varsity until their sophomore years. But they were always in the gym, trading elbows in one-on-one sessions after practice and continually refining their skills. The attention gradually came.“Nobody ever believed in us,” Justin says. “Guys from school, teammates, random teachers and coaches, other kids’ parents – you name it. They felt that me and my brother wouldn’t have a shot at Division I. I always used that as motivation. I developed the mentality of kill or be killed.”Adds Julian: “We just wanted it more than a lot of people.”On the court, they played like their personalities. Justin has always been the rambunctious one, never holding back his aggression or his voice. He’s liable to let loose a roar after a dunk, talk trash to a defender. Julian was the quieter of the two, but his words carried weight.“Justin is going to be fiery and have confidence, but Julian was the stabilizer for me, the glue,” Gonzalez says. “When the pressure was on, Julian would be the one to say, ‘OK, let’s calm down.’ In that sense, he was the leader.”Both put up similar numbers in high school and complemented each other well. Gonzalez remembers a tournament in Delaware when Justin turned his ankle early in a game. Julian told his coach, Don’t worry, I got this. “And he was unbelievable that day,” Gonzalez says. “It was like he was playing for two people.”Still, Justin drew a little more interest on the recruiting trail. After all, he was the one posterizing opponents on dunks, flying down the lane with abandon and making sure everyone knew about it. The partnership could have continued to work in college, but both are now playing their natural power forward position for their respective teams. They’re also doing it in their own styles.“Justin, he’s just so loud and so extra,” Julian says. “If I tried to scream after a play, it would sound horrible. But that’s what pushed him forward, ahead of me. I had to figure out my own way, to be known and not be in his shadow.”
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Justin is a favorite for ACC player of the year honors. (Charles LeClair / USA Today)Justin casts quite the shadow these days.He was snubbed for the ACC All-Freshman team a year ago despite averaging 12.7 points and 7.0 rebounds and coming on strong late in the season. Now there’s no ignoring his production, which borders on ridiculous. He’s averaging 20.1 points, 12.1 rebounds, 1.5 blocks and 1.5 steals for the Panthers (8-5, 4-4 ACC). According to College Basketball Reference, TCU’s Kurt Thomas in 1994-95 is the last player to reach all those benchmarks in a season. And while Thomas was never a threat from beyond the arc, Justin is shooting 40 percent on 3s while attempting more than four per game. He has a true shooting percentage of 60 percent.“I thought he had a chance to grow and really take a step this year,” Capel says. “But if anyone, myself included, told you that his numbers would be where they are, they would be lying to you.”In back-to-back games in early December, Justin put up 20 points and 20 rebounds at Northwestern and 24 points, 21 rebounds and five assists versus Gardner-Webb. A few days later he suffered a knee injury in practice and was projected to miss six to eight weeks. Instead he returned exactly a month later, dropping 24 points and 16 rebounds in a Jan. 16 win over Syracuse. As he threw down a dunk early in that game, he yelled, “I’m back.” Three days after that, he led Pitt to a win over Duke on ESPN, finishing with 31 points, 14 rebounds, five blocks and two steals in a superstar-making performance.Justin’s rebounding prowess is extraordinary at his listed height of 6-foot-6. (St. John’s has Julian as 6-8, although his mom says the twins are more like an inch apart). “I wouldn’t say he’s like this freak athlete for how high he can jump,” Capel says, “but he is a freak for how quick he can jump, especially on the second jump.”Justin has also matured quickly. Before the season began, he told Capel to be demanding of him. He admitted he didn’t always handle tough love well as a freshman, but he was ready for it as a sophomore. And, Capel says, Justin hasn’t sulked or given the staff attitude when they’ve gotten on him in practice.“I’ve become a man,” Justin says.Julian, who did make the Big East freshman team, has become the Man for St. John’s. He’s scoring 19.8 points per game, nearly 10 points better than last season. While he doesn’t clean the glass quite like his brother, he still grabs 6.8 rebounds per game, which ranks in the top 10 in the league. He’s also shooting 43 percent from 3 on nearly six attempts per game and is contributing 1.5 steals and 1.3 blocks per game for the Red Storm (11-7, 5-6). He had 29 points and 10 rebounds in a win over Boston College, 33 and 10 in a loss to Creighton. His usage rate of 28.2 percent is higher than his brother’s, something that certainly wouldn’t have happened if they wore the same jersey.Julian still doesn’t match Justin’s volume, but he has found his voice.“Even last year, going down the stretch, he started talking more and more in huddles and in the locker room,” Anderson says. “This year, we can’t get him to shut up. But it’s easy to follow a guy like that when he’s one of our hardest workers.”
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Julian leads the Red Storm in scoring, with 19.8 points per game. (David Butler II / USA Today)College basketball history is full of talented twin tandems, including Dick and Tom Van Arsdale (Indiana), Markieff and Marcus Morris (Kansas), Andrew and Aaron Harrison (Kentucky), and Caleb and Cody Martin (NC State and Nevada). Stanford was dealt a pair of pairs: big men Brook and Robin Lopez and Jason and Jarron Collins. Almost without fail, these DNA doubles played for the same school, providing a BOGO value.One notable exception was the Grant brothers. Horace and Harvey both began their college careers at Clemson in 1983, but Harvey redshirted his first year while Horace played. A year later, Harvey transferred, going to Oklahoma by way of junior college. Horace stayed and became the ACC player of the year in 1987. Harvey developed into a prolific scorer for the Sooners and helped them get to the 1988 national title game. Both went on to long and successful NBA careers.Harvey says now that it was a difficult decision leaving his brother, who almost transferred with him. But looking back, he’s sure it was the right call.“We grew up,” Harvey Grant says. “He became his person and I became my person. It was essential that — if I wanted to become a player with my own niche — I had to go on my own. Once I left, I said to myself, ‘OK, now you’re either going to sink or swim.’ I took it upon myself to go and be the player I thought I could be.”Their campuses sit nearly 400 miles apart, but the Champagnie twins remain closely connected. They talk several times a day, texting and FaceTiming before and after practice. They’ll break down one another’s games, even if they can’t always watch it live. They lean on each other through the ups and downs of being a college athlete. They understand one another like no one else and can be brutally honest in a way others can’t. Knowing that they’re not alone in their experiences despite being apart offers a unique perspective.“Every day I pick his brain and he picks mine,” Justin says. “We share ideas how to get better. I feel like it’s a big plus for us. We get both sides of the spectrum, from the ACC and the Big East.”They also still compete like hell. They’re very aware of each other’s box scores and stat lines. Julian knows he’s less than a point behind Justin’s scoring average — “and I intend to catch him,” he says.Both have bugged their coaches repeatedly about scheduling a St. John’s-Pitt game. Capel and Anderson are open to the idea, but such Champagnie wishes might not come true. Justin’s stock has soared to the point where he’ll most likely enter the NBA Draft after the season. Both the Panthers and Red Storm are on the fringes of NCAA Tournament contention. But maybe they could meet in the NIT.Careful what you wish for. Harvey Grant remembers his second year in the league when he played against Horace’s Chicago Bulls. Horace went to attempt a layup, and Harvey decided there was no way he was going to give him an easy one. He pummeled his twin with a hard foul. “The fans were shocked,” Harvey says. “They were like, why would he foul his brother like that? But that’s the kind of competitive nature we had.”Christina doesn’t even know what she would do if her sons’ teams did match up. She’d have to bring her entire family to the game, she figures, and divvy up shirts for the two schools. It’s not something she ever envisioned, her twins on opposite sides. She misses seeing them together and dreams of maybe a time down the road where they team up as pros. But she beams at how much they’ve grown. Justin and Julian will always be her twin boys, but now they are also their own men.
 
I read it in the Athletic.  Great article and to say I am happy that Capel was wrong and that he didn't get both would be a huge understatement.

Interesting that their high school coach had a similar reaction to what MJMAHERJR said and others agreed with in the Marquette post game thread about a feeling of calm when Julian has the ball.
 
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