P.J. Hairston is heading back into basketball, this time from the sideline.
Earlier this week, he was announced as an assistant coach for the Capital Seahawks of the 94x50 League, a new minor league venture that is trying to carve out a real place in the sport. The league’s name sounds unusual at first glance, but it comes from the dimensions of a court. The Capital Seahawks will play in Bowie, Maryland, on the campus of Bowie State, in the greater Washington DC area.
It’s a notable next step for Hairston, whose basketball path has been anything but straightforward. After a breakout sophomore season at North Carolina in 2012-13, he looked poised to become a star for the Tar Heels before getting caught up in possible NCAA violations. That summer turned into a long and complicated one, ending with a suspension and UNC deciding not to seek his reinstatement.
Hairston eventually moved on to the G League and still managed to hear his name called in the first round of the 2014 NBA Draft. His NBA career lasted three seasons, with a little more time spent in the G League as well.
He retired from playing in 2018, and the years since have not always been easy, sometimes for self-inflicted reasons. Nearly a decade after stepping away from the court as a player, he’s now trying his hand at coaching.
The 94x50 League is built around teams mostly in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, with San Diego as the lone outlier. Several of the league’s eight teams had already left another effort to create a third-tier league, which says plenty about how difficult this kind of startup can be. Low-level leagues like this have often struggled to survive, and the Seahawks are part of another attempt to make it work.
The teams are generally using smaller college gyms, so the league is still far from the G League in terms of scale. Even so, every basketball circuit has to start somewhere. For Hairston, this is a fresh chapter after a winding career, and the hope now is that the sideline gives him a steadier run than the one he had as a player.
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