William Gates Jr., the son and the namesake of ‘Hoop Dreams’ star William Gates, has transferred to Houston Baptist.
“Started spring semester classes this morning,” a source told NBCSports.com.
Gates began his college career at Furman, averaging 8.0 points as a freshman for the Palladins, but he saw his playing time get cut as a sophomore thanks to the emergence of a strong freshman class brought in by Furman head coach Niko Medved. He transferred out of the program after the first semester.
Gates is originally from Chicago, the city where the documentary starring his father was filmed. But the family -- Gates Sr. has four children -- decided to move out of the city to Texas due to the ever-escalating violence in Chicago. Part of the reason he left Furman was due to homesickness, a source said.
That was the best thing that could have happened to the younger Gates’ basketball career, as it took him away from a place where everyone was going to compare him to his father.
“You still had people who knew about the movie,” Gates told me when he committed to Furman two years ago, “but they didn’t really make the connection until they saw me play and they found out what my name was. There wasn’t any type of heckling or how it was in Chicago, it wasn’t like that.”
“Texas is not really a basketball state like that, it’s a football state. Chicago is a basketball city, so basketball is what everybody knows.”
Gates will have two seasons of eligibility remaining. He’ll be eligible to play after the first semester of the 2015-2016 season.
