Trey Bonham Adjusts To Life As A Civilian
By FRANZ BEARD
GatorBaitMedia.com
It is 3:33 in the morning in Lexington, Virginia. There is a loud drum roll coming from the barracks courtyard at the Virginia Military Institute. Only minutes before there was the sound of a door being kicked in, a cadet being marched to the courtyard and the drumroll stopping long enough for the president of the honor court to shout that this cadet has violated the honor code.
Then come the unmistakable, unforgettable words, “His name will never be spoken in these barracks again!”
The drumroll resumes. It’s loud and echoes through the courtyard as cadets stand at the railings and watch the proceedings down below. The cadet who violated the honor code is escorted to the front gates where he is banished, gone forever with no chance of being reinstated. As the cadet waits outside the gates, members of the honor court are in his room, hastily packing his belongings, which will be delivered in an unceremonious manner to the now former cadet who waits outside the gates. This is a time-honored tradition at VMI that dates back to the time when Thomas Jackson was an instructor. He went on to be known as Stonewall Jackson during the Civil War.
Trey Bonham never violated the VMI honor code. He spent two years at VMI and he remembers vividly every time he stood on the rails to watch one of his classmates being drummed out, forever disassociated with the school. Drum outs always happen at the exact same time.
“3:33 a.m. … halfway to hell, that’s what they say,” Bonham said Tuesday morning in the foyer of the Florida basketball practice facility.
Something as simple as a little white lie can result in a VMI cadet taking the halfway to hell march while the drums roll loudly, incessantly until the violator is forcefully removed from the premises. Now that Bonham is at the University of Florida where he has resumed student life as a scholarship basketball player for Todd Golden, he appreciates what he learned at VMI, all the while relishing this opportunity to live life as a civilian in what he knows as the free world once again.
He's no longer in the Army. He’s just a student-athlete. Instead of barracks that are fairly Spartan, he lives in an apartment. There is no curfew every night. No 6 a.m. wakeup or 7 a.m. breakfast roll call. No roll call at 6:30 p.m. before eating dinner. No enforced study from 8 p.m. to 11:25. No taps at 11:30. No upperclassmen and higher-ranking cadets going nose-to-nose over even the most trivial matters.
Now that VMI is in his rearview, Bonham can appreciate all his experiences at the military school but those first few days in Lexington had him calling his retired Navy dad and begging to come back home to Mobile. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
“Yeah, my dad was always on me because I know that first week, I was like, ‘I don’t even want to play basketball no more,’ like, ‘get me out here.’ But, he was just like, it's gonna be better for you,” Bonham said. “You're gonna learn a lot. So he was always in my ear trying to get my hopes up.”
The temptation to go over the wall diminished the more he grew accustomed to VMI’s unique way of transforming minds and bodies. The academics are as rigorous as the physical and mental demands. It is not an easy life but the lessons learned there will stick with Bonham forever.
So, there are no regrets for the two years at VMI. While he feels free in Gainesville, now adjusting to life without the military restrictions, much of the VMI routine has become ingrained and may never be abandoned. For that, he’s grateful.
“I mean, it led to me learning discipline,” Bonham said. “That was the biggest thing I learned from a military school. So I try to keep the same traditions: waking up early, getting in my bed by 11:30. So, same stuff, just nobody yelling in my face now.”
Life wasn’t completely grim at VMI. Basketball provided an escape outlet. That is why Bonham went to VMI in the first place. Dan Earl liked a fast, up and down tempo, which was tailor-made for a small, waterbug-quick point guard who is a whirling dervish on the court. After making the Southern Conference All-Freshman team in 2020-21, Bonham averaged 13.6 points, 3.6 rebounds and 2.9 assists for a 2021-22 team that went 16-16 while breaking even – 9-9 – in league play. The SoCon is an underrated low major so even a .500 season is pretty remarkable for a military school that is always challenged to find talented kids who are willing to choose the enforced discipline of a military school over the freedom they will have playing at a civilian school.
Bonham chose VMI over schools like Tulane coming out of high school in Mobile. He experienced plenty of positives at VMI but he wanted to expand his game and he wanted a chance to see how his game would translate at the power school level so he entered the NCAA transfer portal. It didn’t take long until he met up with Todd Golden, who sold him on what the University of Florida could offer both from an academic and basketball standpoint.
The academics were a given since UF is one of the top five public universities in the country. Playing in the SEC was obviously a step up from the SoCon. The deciding factor was Golden, who laid out perfectly his basketball philosophies.
“Florida’s pitch was that he trusted in me, we ran a familiar offense, and the SEC,” Bonham said. “Going to high school in Mobile, Alabama, that’s been my dream to play in the SEC. There wasn’t much they had to do to get me. I was already in as soon as they called.”
It may have been one of those he had me at hello conversations, but the more Golden talked, the more Bonham felt that Florida was the right place to be.
“Just coach Golden’s philosophies and him just trusting in me,” Bonham explained. “You know, being undersized, he has complete trust in me that I can play the same as I did before. So his trust in me, and they run the same offense that I ran before, so just that familiarity brought me here.”
At Florida, Todd Golden is doing a structural and philosophical rebuild of the basketball program. Golden sees no reason why the Gators can’t be a consistent top 25 team that regularly makes deep runs in the NCAA Tournament. Golden believes Final Four appearances are entirely possible complete with national championships.
Under Mike White, the coach Golden succeeded, the Gators were good enough to make it to the postseason in all but his first year on the job (2015-16) and the COVID year (2019-20) when there were no tournaments. Other than a second season run to the Elite Eight where the Gators were a bad three-minute stretch from making the Final Four, it seemed the program flatlined.
Just good enough to be taken seriously. Not good enough to make a dent in the NCAA Tournament.
Then came the seven-year itch. After another season of good but not good enough, White grew weary of Florida’s restless fan base that remembered how Billy Donovan proved you can win championships at Florida. That White elected to bolt didn’t surprise many people. That he chose Georgia was somewhat of a shock. At Georgia, expectations will be several notches below what they are at UF. A 20-13 record at Florida makes the fan base nervous whereas at Georgia it gets a contract extension and a raise. Georgia has never won a national championship (Florida has won two) and has only one trip to the Final Four (UF has five). At Florida, White had some very good recruiting classes like the one in 2019 that featured 5-star recruits Tre Mann and Scottie Lewis, but they never got the Gators on a deep run in the NCAA Tournament.
White also was active with transfers and he brought in some good ones like Canyon Barry, Kerry Blackshear Jr. and Tyree Appleby but again, none of them had the magic the Gators needed to keep up with the likes of Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee.
Golden has six holdovers from the White era – Colin Castleton, Myreon Jones and CJ Felder who all started college somewhere else and Jason Jitoboh, Niels Lane and Kowacie Reeves who were recruited out of high school. He has brought in a pair of very good high school recruits from perennial Florida powerhouse Dr. Phillips in Riley Kugel and Denzel Aberdeen. He has brought in four transfers – Bonham, Kyle Lofton (from St. Bonaventure), Alex Fudge (from LSU) and Will Richard (from Belmont) – a highly regarded group, all of whom were heavily recruited once they entered the portal.
Fudge and Richard were wings at their previous stops but both are multi-dimensional and capable of playing and defending more than one position. Lofton and Bonham are pure points but both are explosive enough scorers and good enough full court defenders that they can play and thrive together on the court at the same time if Golden chooses to go that way. While Lofton is 6-3 with a 6-9 wingspan, Bonham is pint-sized and ultra-quick.
Asked if he’s 5-11, Bonham just grinned and responded, “We’ll say that … yeah! I’ll take it!” He is a streaky outside shooter with a nice pull-up midrange shot. A lack of height isn’t a deterrent for taking the ball fearlessly to the rack. At VMI he was known for blowing by defenders to get into the paint where he forced the other team’s big guys to either challenge him or let him get all the way to the rim.
“Being my size, you can’t go in scared,” Bonham said. “You’ve got to be a dog. I’m not scared of nobody. I don’t think six inches [difference in height] is that much anyway.”
Now that he’s done with the military life and settling in to the expanded social scene that he finds in Gainesville and adjusting to new teammates, it’s the daily basketball workouts that have him both motivated and excited about the future. He is getting coached up like never before when the Gators work out.
“You’ve got six coaches watching everything you do,” he said. “They’re on you, motivating you, getting on your case for every single detail.”
Details. They were part of Bonham’s daily life at VMI where the days were planned out from start to finish. Here at Florida and out of the military life, there isn’t nearly as much structure to life away from basketball but on the court, that’s a different story. Golden likes a free-flowing game in which tempo is pushed at all times, but adequate attention is paid to every detail.
On the practice court, Golden is not simply an observer. He is a hands on coach but unlike the upperclassmen at VMI who never missed an opportunity to get in his face and yell about something, Golden takes a quieter although no less intensive approach. He’s a teacher, not a screamer.
“He’s not yelling and bouncing off the walls, but he’s talking to you and making sure you’re doing every little thing right,” Bonham said. “He’s just as involved as everyone else.”
Intense and involved. That’s the way Bonham likes it. It’s a whole new life, a whole new approach to basketball and he no longer hears doors being kicked in and the sound of a constant drum roll as a classmate is banished from school.
Perhaps it’s too early to tell if Trey Bonham has found basketball heaven, but one thing he knows for sure, this isn’t halfway to hell.
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