What makes college sports unique sometimes gets obscured. Especially these days.
Blinded by the bright lights of games starting close to midnight to fill programming blocks for television. Overshadowed by big money being paid to coaches and now players. Drowned by the seemingly endless annual flood of athletes from one school to the next, with overboard social media fury and praise from fans and haters they all receive gushing through phones every second.
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It’s hard to remember at times that these are young adults surrounded by other young adults who are all still learning and developing, preparing for their lives beyond the classrooms. Professionally and socially.
Until you get a gentle reminder that the athletic giants do still walk among their peers. Or a not-so-gentle clue, as gobsmacking as a Coen Carr slam dunk over a classmate on a random Tuesday night in March.
MSU Coen Carr dunks during midnight madness festivities, Friday, Oct. 3, 2025, in East Lansing.
Earlier this week, Michigan State basketball‘s Carson Cooper put out a late-afternoon open call on his Instagram story for a pickup game on Tuesday, March 31. The departing senior and some of his teammates, whose season came to an end with a loss to Connecticut in the Sweet 16 on Friday in Washington, planned to head to IM West and have some fun. It was something his former teammate, Frankie Fidler, did a year ago.
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According to Lucas Gentilia of The State News, MSU’s campus newspaper, the bleachers and sidelines on the main first-floor court of the intramural building were packed by 7:30 p.m. with students wanting a shot to take on the not-technically-pros or just to get a close-up glimpse of their elite basketball talents. Cooper, Carr, Jesse McCulloch, Cam Ward and Divine Ugochukwu – back on the floor less than two months after undergoing foot surgery – formed a team and accepted challengers.
Kur Teng and Nick Sanders watched from the sidelines. So did beloved mascot Sparty. Along with a couple hundred others inside the steamy gym on an unseasonably warm early spring night with overhead fans not working. No tickets, no NIL, no TV. Just a bunch of ballers with pride at stake. All of them feeding off the organic energy of a spontaneous basketball celebration.
Even though MSU isn’t in the Final Four in Indianapolis this weekend, the basketball buzz was in full bloom on campus that night.
“Every school doesn’t do something like this,” freshman Troy Fox, who played against the Spartans, told Gentilia, who covered the team for The State News this winter. “Right after March Madness, you don’t have teams pulling up to the gym to hoop with the fans, so it’s super-cool.”
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The IM West building on the campus of Michigan State University on Feb. 3, 2026.
Cooper said by phone Wednesday that he and his teammates texted in their group chat about telling people where they were going to play before he posted it publicly. When he arrived a little late, Cooper hardly saw anyone at IM West, but the staff told him they would open the main gym and pull out the bleachers.
Unbeknownst to Cooper, McCulloch and others already were -on IM West’s upstairs courts. Moments later, when he saw his teammates walk through the doors …
“It was just like a flood. When it was all set up, it was like floodgates,” Cooper said. “I thought people were still filtering in, but everyone was already there.”
Videos of Carr, Cooper and McCulloch throwing down dunks quickly flooded Instagram and X. In one, Carr took off on a fastbreak, swirled the ball behind his back off the dribble and threw down a one-handed dunk as an opposing defender raised his hands and got out of the way. In another, the high-flying junior forward tossed the ball off the backboard and soared from the free-throw line for a self-assisted alley-oop. Cooper contorted and threw down a ferocious tomahawk jam off a drive.
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Afterward, players posed for pictures and talked with classmates. For them, it was a chance to connect with their community and vice versa. For those they played against, it was a fleeting but memorable opportunity to feel what it was like to be in the spotlight, albeit with hundreds watching instead of tens of thousands.
“That’s kind of us giving back to these guys, these students, for coming to all our games and everything,” Cooper said. “I’m sure there were some freshmen or some kids texting their buddies or going back home and saying, ‘Yo, I just hooped against these guys.’ So it was pretty cool.”
Carson Cooper is introduced during midnight madness festivities, Friday, Oct. 3, 2025, in East Lansing.
As word spread outside of East Lansing early Wednesday morning, it brought back a barrage of memories. From myself, from friends and others who went to MSU, from former players over the years who did the same.
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Pickup games that my Freep predecessor, Joe Rexrode, and I each played separately while in college against former Jud Heathcote guard Kris Weshinskey. The time in 1993 a good friend of mine in Emmons Hall, Drew Kurtz, got invited by Ray Weathers to play a hush-hush nighttime run with Magic Johnson at Breslin Center. Others recalling playing intramural league games over the past 50 years against MSU football players.
Those hooping experiences, even some 30 years on, remain every rank-and-file Spartan’s One Shining Moment. Just like the unseasonably warm night in March 2026 that current students will be reminiscing about 30 years from now.
In the great circle of life, Rexrode’s son, Brennan, was one of the students who saw Cooper’s post and rushed to IM West on Tuesday night to be part of a memorable moment in the final few weeks of his freshman year at MSU. His dad, who now works for The Athletic in Nashville, Tennessee, was in town briefly and dropped him off before he went to watch – because when Brennan got to IM West after 7, there already was a long line of people hoping to get next.
“There were kids that were waiting for hours, before the hoopers even got there. Just to even run,” the younger Rexrode said after watching from the baseline. “Of course, they just destroyed everyone.”
GET READY: Michigan State basketball looking to 2027 Final Four, in Detroit
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It was a reminder of why people fall in love with and follow college sports. The familiarity of knowing someone from your class or your hometown or that you competed against, chasing their athletic dreams after high school. Even in an era when the transfer portal shortens the clock to know the athletes (and interest has been waning at times among fanbases because of it).
College is – or at least should be – transient by nature. Cooper, Jaxon Kohler and Nick Sanders will graduate in a month along with thousands of their other fellow students. That includes Joe Rexrode’s oldest son, Jack. IM West will be demolished next spring. Time passes, and life at MSU moves on. For Tom Izzo, his basketball program and the campus at large. And even someday, he too, will be gone.
But as Izzo says, it’s all about leaving a footprint in the sand. And the memories from that impromptu Tuesday night run will stay with everyone who was at IM West for a long time.
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him @chrissolari.
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This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Michigan State basketball delivers reminder of what college is about
