As Jett Canfield arrived on campus in 2018, most saw him in the mold of so many other walk-ons. A valuable member of team, vital to the scout team and a player who would get a chance to play when the score was out of hand.

As the 2019-2020 season began people began to look at Jett differently. Was he the next Tyler Clement? Because of the need (either through injury or foul trouble) would he get valuable minutes in multiple games?

Maybe fans were wondering. What was Jett thinking? Was he expecting a chunk of minutes, especially early on?

“No, I wasn’t," Canfield said. “ I knew my game had improved a lot and I knew I was working harder than I had ever worked before. Even when we were in Australia, it was hard for me to get any time at all. I knew there was still a lot of work for me to do. That was all while Marcus was hurt so I was thinking where am I even going to fit? I can’t even get playing time in Australia. Those kind of thoughts were in my mind, but I always tried to remind myself what the end goal was and what I need to do to get better.”

It sounds like a struggle. It sounds like a frustrating situation. It sounds like a guy that could just give up his basketball dreams. But if you think that, then you don’t know Jett Canfield. He has faced more challenging times than that. You only need to go back a ways to his final years of high school and AAU ball to see that.

Starting at 16, Jett was getting some offers. There was some interest from some smaller D-I schools. He was also getting a lot of interest from D-II schools. But D-I was always the route he wanted to take.

Then he got hurt. And continued to play hurt though his 17U AAU year. And the offers stopped coming. Again a time for reflection. A time to wonder. “A lot of those schools that were interested in me kind of stopped recruiting me,” Canfield said. “So then I knew I was going to go the preferred walk-on route. I took my visits to K-State and a few other schools. I went down to Oklahoma. I was actually pretty close to committing to K-State.”

And then a contact from Creighton changed everything.

“I came to Omaha for a game and fell in love with it. I liked the campus, the coaches, and I just liked the way we played. It ended up just being an extremely good match,” he said.

So Jett Canfield entered an unknown world as a Bluejay. He joined the team as a walk-on. His mind was racing. What would that be like? How would I be treated? How could I go a full year, red-shirting and not playing a minute? That’s a lot for any young man, not to mention the concerns about the class load at a school like Creighton.

But his fears quickly vanished when he got on campus and began to practice. “I will say that the way the program treats everyone, whether you’re the most important scholarship player or whether you are a walk-on who just came on board they treat everyone the same,” Canfield said. “I was hurt and still coming back from that. They treated me the same as they treated everybody. That says a lot about the program. That’s the way everything is run around here. It obviously made it a lot easier for me to get acclimated to everything.”

Of course there still is the grind of practice, the huge step up from high school to D-I basketball and the speed of the game. The speed of the game is what catches most freshman off guard. Was it really that much faster? “For sure it was for me,” he said. “It seemed especially fast for me, someone who was hurt for so long and felt so far behind. I was a step slow and then stepping up to this level I was an extra step slow. My red-shirt year was the best thing that happened to me, so I could get used to the speed we were playing at and the type of athlete that belongs at this level.”

The red-shirt year is a long grind. It tests your mental approach to the game. “I treated it as a year to improve my game and to get as good as I could get. Sometimes, it was hard to keep the big picture in mind. There were obviously ups and downs throughout it, but it all worked out,” Jett said.

Fast forward to November of 2020. The season had finally come. There was no Davion Mintz because of injury. Denzel Mahoney was not yet eligible so coach McDermott was mixing and matching his line up at the 1-4 positions making sure the guys he needed down the stretch of the season weren’t burned out in December. That meant playing time for Jett, and not just in blow outs, but some meaningful time.

Jett logged 17 minutes in the opener against Kennesaw State. He scored his first two points of the season at Michigan. Then he logged meaningful minutes in two pre-holiday games against Cal Poly and North Florida.

Next came the much anticipated trip to Las Vegas as the Jays took on San Diego State. No one at the time dreamed of the season the Aztecs would eventually put together, finishing 30-2 and staying at the top of the polls for most of the season. Creighton, still playing without Davion Mintz who would eventually be lost for the season, and Denzel Mahoney who was still a few weeks away from being eligible, were no match for SDSU. The 31 point loss was a hard, cold slap in the face for a team that had so many big dreams about the season. However, it may have been a bigger blow to the fans.

But no worries. There is always the next game. Except it happened to be against last year’s national runner up, Texas Tech. The game was just 24 hours later with not much time to prepare or emotionally heal the scars from the night before. In the back of the minds of the fans, and maybe even a player or two, was the reality that this trip to the desert may net them two losses.

But there seemed to be some renewed confidence as fans entered the arena that night. Maybe they were thinking it couldn’t be as bad as last night. Maybe that thought coupled with a pre-game pep talk by the parents of the players at an alumni gathering gave the Jays’ fans more hope. And with the way the game started, that hope grew.

Everything that went wrong the night before was going right for the Jays in this game. Creighton raced out to a double digit lead and the fans grew loader with every bucket. But just one issue arose. Creighton’s backup point guard, Shereef Mitchell, had picked up two fouls. Mac certainly couldn’t risk a third. But no worries or hesitation by coach. Jett was ushered to the scorer’s table by coach Mac and entered the game. But here in lies the beauty of this team. No one looked away from Jett when the team was on offense. He was as valuable as any other player on the team. If you didn’t know you would have thought Jett was one of the starters.

With less than four minutes in the half the Jays were rolling. Ty-Shon Alexander came down on a fast break. Canfield spotted up in the corner and Ty-Shon never hesitated once. A quick pass to a wide open Jett. Swish.

While watching the game, my phone lit up with several texts. One text said “Jett may have saved our season.” That’s probably a bit much, for a three point shot, when the team was already up by 12. But, it did seem like an enormous boost to the team at the time. More importantly, his teammates had the confidence he would make that shot.

While the shot may not have been the turning point of the season, one could say that game was definitely a turning point. Jett commented. “We had just gotten our brains kicked in the night before. We could have either folded or come back. It felt like a big game for us. Ty-Shon drove it in there and kicked it out to me. For him to have the confidence in me and all my teammates to have the confidence in me was great. I didn’t think much. I just shot it. I think that’s a big testament to the program that everyone contributed to my confidence.”

From there the season rolled along. Between shortening the bench as conference season began and Denzel Mahoney becoming eligible playing time became difficult to find. So Jett altered his approach. “I kind of reverted to my mindset I had the season before,” Canfield said. “I started doing my off-season lifts again. I started really getting back after it with the goal of getting better for the coming years. But I still stayed prepared. I was still locked in. I was looking at all the scouting film. I was doing all that stuff, but my mindset had definitely shifted throughout the course of the season.

For players that don’t see a lot of action during the games, one of their most important duties is running the scout team, especially during conference season. What seems like a lot of extra work can also be very rewarding and fun. I mean, imagine getting to be Myles Powell or Marcus Howard? “Let’s just say when the coaches are assigning the roles, you have your fingers crossed that you get the one that can shoot it a little bit, like Markus Howard,“ Canfield said. “You are supposed to do exactly what they do. You are able to take some step-backs and some shots that you normally wouldn’t take.”

Most Jays’ fans have seen the video of Jett being told that he was on scholarship. It was one of the coolest moments of the college basketball season and, definitely a life changing moment for a walk-on.

Jett walked us through how this all came about: “Yeah, so Mitch and I were late for the bus. And I would never be late to the bus. I was sitting up there with Mitch and he said he had to use the restroom. I told him I’d wait, I guess. It was taking a long time so, I told Mitch I was going down there so I wouldn’t be late. He told me to wait for him and that they’d be fine. We were late and they didn’t say anything to us until practice the next morning.”

No one said anything? Was that a bit strange? “Yes a little,” he said. “It wasn’t a huge deal. I was thinking that at least I was with Mitch and they probably aren’t going to get too mad at Mitch.”

Jett continued: “At practice the next day nobody was talking. I was trying to talk more to pick up the energy. Mac had us get on the line and start running. He brought us in and made just me and Mitch run. That’s when the whole deal happened and that’s what you saw in the video”

Before Jett got the word that he was on scholarship, he got an ear full from coach Mac (of course part of the ruse). As he was chastised for being late it would have been very easy for him to speak up and defend himself. Especially when a teammate made him late, but the only thing out of his mouth was “Yes Sir.” It was Jett taking responsibility, falling back on his upbringing. “Yeah it was just kind of habit looking back on it,” Jett said. “Just going all the way back with my Dad, accepting responsibility. I wasn’t happy about it because it obviously wasn’t my fault. But, at that point I wasn’t going to throw Mitch under the bus or anything, so I was just trying to accept responsibility for the whole thing.”

When his teammates mobbed him and he had a few seconds to let it sink in, he was overcome with emotion. “I was just feeling pure happiness and excitement, just because of everything that I have been through,” Canfield said. “The injuries and the recruitment not going how I wanted it to and then to have it work out like it did, just gave me the full range of emotions to say the least.”

Then came March 7th, a day no one thought would be the virtual end of the season for Creighton’s men’s basketball team. It was, of course, the showdown with Seton Hall for the conference title and number one seed in the Big East tournament. It was an atmosphere like none other and that atmosphere gave the team even more confidence before the tip. ”It was just electric,” Canfield said. “There was just a different vibe about the whole thing and you could literally just feel it. It was cool to see the students too because we were already on spring break at that time. They could have just left and went home. For them to stick around made it super special. And once I felt that vibe, there was just no way would we lose this one. It just felt like it was meant to be at that point.”

The Jays rolled to a 77-60 win. It was an emotional game with plenty of back and forth that the final score doesn’t show. But towards the end the emotions bubbled over. A lot of talking back and forth between the teams. “Obviously, it was a huge game,” Jett said. “There was a ton at stake. Emotions were flying high. There wasn’t any ill will towards each other, but, like I said there was just so much emotion. Obviously, we ended the game on a crazy run. It was insane. They had some guys that didn’t take too kindly to it or didn’t like it. That’s just how it goes. That’s just hoops. That’s just the competitive spirit of it all.”

After that Saturday, the whole world seemed to change hourly. Covid-19 was beginning to take hold in America but, it couldn’t possibly cancel the Big East tournament could it? ”We didn’t think they would cancel the whole thing,” Jett said. “But a couple of guys were talking how it wouldn’t be as much fun without spectators there. I agreed with that. Having fans is part of what makes it fun. We talked about that as a team a little bit. We felt that as long as we could play and go compete, everything else would work itself out. It was never in our minds they would get rid of the whole thing.”

We all know now the tournament would be cancelled. But not before Creighton and St. John’s played the first half of the quarterfinals. While there was some buzz before the tip around Madison Square Garden that the game could be cancelled, Canfield said the team heard none of it. “We had no idea. We didn’t know that the other conference tournaments were getting called so we were just getting prepared. We were getting loose and we weren’t thinking about any of that at all.”

It was fitting that in the end, on this last day of basketball for the season, a walk on from Topeka, Kansas was about to make his mark on this team again.

Going into the game with St. John’s, Creighton was short-handed. Marcus Zegarowski would not play in the Big East tournament because of injury. This left the point guard position thin again. So when Shereef Mitchell got into some foul trouble, Jett was summoned. And it didn’t take long for Jett to have a scoring chance. Wait. Is this a flashback to Vegas? Ty-Shon feeding Jett? Wide open from the same corner? Would the result be the same?

Swish. Just like that Jett Canfield had scored in the Big East tournament. Did that cross his mind? “No. I was just so locked in on everything else, I wasn’t thinking about that kind of stuff,” Canfield said. And as he reentered the shortened game with less than two minutes left, he scored five more quick points to help the Jays inch closer at the end of the half. Jett relived his scoring spree. “I think they stretched their lead to six or seven and if I remember right, I hit the floater on the play after that. After I hit that floater, I was feeling pretty good about myself, so I was running around looking for the ball. They were in that weird zone deal that they were running, and Mitch pitched it back to me. I guess I was just feeling it a little bit and let it fly.”

And then the team’s world changed again. At halftime, coach Mac walked in the locker room and told the team that the game and the tournament had been cancelled. “The air just sunk out of the room,” Jett said. “We were bummed.”

And then a second blow happened later that day when the NCAA announced that the tournament had been cancelled. “The Big East Tournament was enough of a punch and then to say the NCAA is done too,” Jett said. “Talk about something you work your whole life for. I’ve dreamed of this moment since I can remember. One Shining Moment, I would just watch them over and over again. We are about to be a two seed or three seed. And to not have it and to not be able to go through with it was tough to say the least.”

The pain of having the season end is slowly disappearing. It’s even allowing the team to look ahead to next year. But a new year does not guarantee success. “Next year will be a totally different situation,” Canfield said. “It will be a new set of challenges we will have to face and overcome. Looking ahead, with what we have coming back, what a great group of leaders we have. There will be some new guys and we will have to learn how to play with each other. But we’ll obviously do it and get it rolling again.”

You can’t have a conversation with Jett Canfield for very long and not be impressed with what a fine young man he is. Then add his big moments on the court this season along with being the ultimate teammate, Jett Canfield is another in a long line of players that gives Creighton its “culture”

P.S.

Several days after we spoke Jett sent me a text. He said he wanted to make sure he added something to our conversation. And it was no shock that it wasn’t something about himself but, rather about the team and his teammates. Here is what he had to say:

“There is really a level of trust and friendship with this team that’s hard to describe, both on and off the floor. I have been at the Championship Center many times very late at night when no one is watching. I want to work my tail off because I so badly want to be a part of this team’s success. And trust me, I learned this level of hard work and dedication from my teammates. I felt like I have always been the guy to outwork everyone but, guys like Mitch and Marcus and really all the guys have shown me there was an entirely different level. I want to be ready and prepared when my number is called to make an impact. I want all my teammates and coaches to know they can trust me and call on me. That’s my focus every day.”

With attitude and dedication like that, it’s easy to understand why the Creighton Bluejays were the 2019-2020 Big East Champions.