Longwood University Athletics

Story By Chris Cook, LongwoodLancers.com
Video by Emily Dassel, Big South Conference

From the "Stay Humble, Hustle Hard" tattoo on his left shoulder to the Bible verse John 16:33 inscribed on his forearm, Juan Munoz's left arm is a tapestry of ink.

But there are other markings on Munoz's body that, despite never asking for them, tell as much of his story as any of the artwork that decorates his entire left arm. Those marks weren't made with ink, but rather with a scalpel wielded by an orthopedic surgeon who reconstructed the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee not once, but twice.

For Munoz, while those wounds have long healed over, the impact left in their wake remains ever-present – both physically inside his reconstructed knee, and emotionally in the person that adversity has inspired him to become. 

In his five-year journey at Longwood, Munoz has gone from highly-touted freshman to a player who nearly gave up the game, to now one of the premier point guards in the Big South. But what occurred between the start of that process to now is a tale of perseverance and grit, represented physically by the surgical scars etched into his knee but symbolically by how far Munoz has come. 

"The biggest thing is anything can be taken from you at any moment," he said. "I don't want to take anything for granted, I just want to put everything I can into basketball."

A Promising Future, Interrupted
When Munoz committed to Longwood as part of the program's 2015-16 signing class, he had all the credentials of a player who could make a transformative impact on the Lancer basketball program.

Hailing from Morrisville in the basketball-rich Triangle region of North Carolina, Munoz was among the top high school point guards in the state. ESPN ranked him as North Carolina's No. 19 prospect and No. 5 at his position, which was elite company in a North Carolina senior class that also produced first-round picks Bam Adebayo, Harry Giles and Grant Williams. 

Munoz arrived in Farmville in the summer of 2016 with the opportunity to take the reins as Longwood's starting point guard as a true freshman. He was well on his way to winning the job too, but in a routine preseason practice during his first fall preseason, the course of his basketball career changed in an instant.

In an intrasquad scrimmage, Munoz was coming off a screen and knocked knees with a teammate. He said his leg went numb, and he took himself off the court. 

"Instantly something felt wrong," he recalled. 

At first he kept the severity of the injury to himself but after a few days, he admitted to his coaching staff – and himself – that he needed to see the team doctor. The prognosis was a torn ACL. Munoz would require surgery and nearly a full year of rehabilitation, effectively postponing his first season of college basketball.

But even facing such a lengthy recovery, Munoz's spirits rarely sank. He attacked his rehab with the same tenacity and work ethic that turned him from an undersized high school point guard into a potential freshman starter at Longwood.

Assuming his hard work and dedication to that process would get him back on the court the following year, he became a model rehab patient and teammate. 

"He really took it upon himself to say, 'I really want this. I really want to play basketball. That's what I'm going to do," said Carly Fullerton '07, Longwood Director of Sports Medicine and Head Athletic Trainer. 

"It was a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week thing where he was in there every day doing what he needed to do, spending hours in the athletic training room, doing stuff at practice, staying upbeat for his teammates, everything. Especially as a freshman, it's very easy to crumble with something like this, but he never did."

After nine months of rehabilitation, Munoz was cleared to return to basketball activities unimpeded. Even while still regaining his explosiveness and general comfort on the court, he still showed the ability to play a prominent role in Longwood's guard rotation.

But Munoz's would-be comeback story came to an abrupt end nearly one year from the anniversary of his surgery when, once again, he felt a familiar pop during a preseason scrimmage. This time he didn't need to wait for an exam to know what happened.

"I heard a pop, and as soon as I landed I instantly knew it was my ACL," he said. "I put in so much work the first time, and to just have a landing I've done thousands of times sideline me again, it was pretty tough. 

Medical studies have shown that athletes who suffer a torn ACL and return to their sport are at statistically higher odds of suffering another torn ACL, either in their reconstructed knee or the opposite one. It's a risk Munoz was aware of, but unfortunately for him, the odds weren't in his favor. 

"I felt like I did everything right coming back the first time," he said. "It wasn't supposed to happen again."

Longwood's team doctor gave him a familiar diagnosis – surgery, recovery and a lengthy rehab – but the shockwaves from that second injury went beyond his knee. Now, after grinding through nearly a year-long recovery process and missing out on his first year of college basketball, doubt about his ability to bounce back a second time seeped in. 

"The first couple weeks before I had surgery, I was thinking about just hanging it up just because I knew how long the rehab process was," he said. "I knew how long I'd be away from the game. My dad said something to me before surgery: 'You can be frustrated today, but after you get your surgery I want you to attack this head on with everything you have.'"

Munoz carried those words with him into his second surgery and kept them close afterwards, knowing he was facing another full year of rebuilding his strength, stability and athleticism one day at a time. 

"He knew what he was getting into that time," Fullerton said. "He knew he had to put in the work. You never saw a decrease in his recovery, and he had this mentality of 'I'm going to prove you wrong, I want to be back on the court, and I'm going to get back on the court.'

"There was always that desire to be back, to work hard to get back."

But five months after he went under the knife for a second time, Munoz would face another challenge: He would have to prove himself all over again to a new head coach who had never seen him play.

Finding His Footing
In March of 2018, Longwood announced Griff Aldrich as the new head coach of the men's basketball program. He took the reins riding a wave of momentum from his time at UMBC, where as the Director of Recruiting & Program Development he helped build the program into the 2018 America East Champion and the darling of the 2018 NCAA Tournament.

The roster Aldrich was slated to take over at Longwood included three returning starters and three others who had played at least 20 games in 2017-18. Munoz, who two years into his collegiate career had participated in more surgeries than college basketball games, was a giant question mark.

"Honestly I didn't see anything," Aldrich recalled. "The reality was Juan had two ACL injuries, and if I saw anything it was just a commitment to trying to get back. I didn't know how good he was. He looked really small in his high school clips, so it was a real concern.

"But the truth is I felt like Juan deserved a chance to get healthy and have the college experience he wanted. He wanted to be here, so it felt like the right thing to do was give him that opportunity."

Munoz was also the only returning point guard on the first Longwood roster Aldrich inherited, so to put the onerous burden of manning that position solely on the shoulders of a player who had never seen the floor did not bode well for the Lancers' prospects in Aldrich's debut season. Aldrich and his staff immediately sought out and signed two veteran point guards, Sean Flood and Shabooty Phillips, who could step in immediately.

Not only would their signings give Longwood depth at the point guard position, it would also allow Munoz to come back into the fold at his own pace. It was that decision by Aldrich and the staff that laid the groundwork for the success Munoz is now experiencing in 2020-21.

"The first thing was he just wanted me to get healthy," Munoz said. "He was understanding in my rehab process. He knew it would take some time for me to get back to 100 percent. That's why I'm grateful for him, that he was willing to deal with my recovery process and my rehab process."

Aldrich worked Munoz in slowly at first that season, bringing him off the bench as the third-string point guard to spell Phillips and Flood. He did not play in three of his first five games in what was his redshirt freshman year, and in the other two games he accumulated just 15 minutes. 

However, while a 13-minute, two-point debut against Randolph on Nov. 6, 2018, did little to stand out on the box score, it was a watershed moment for Munoz that planted seeds of success that would bloom later that same season.

"I was nervous. Super nervous," Munoz said, recalling the feeling of taking the court that night in his collegiate debut. "It had been two years since I'd been on the court playing an actual game, so just the whole feel of the atmosphere, the crowd, the other team, the refs – it was just surreal."

His two points that night came from the free throw line, but he also dished three assists and grabbed four rebounds. Two games later, in an 89-73 win against Delaware State, he hit his first career three-pointer. 

Then, at a three-day tournament in Seattle, Wash., Munoz's growing confidence in both his knee and himself started to show itself in his stat line. Against Denver, he scored 12 points for his first career double-digit scoring game, and the next night he earned a career-high 24 minutes on the court. 

By season's end, Munoz had posted seven double-figure scoring games, including four of those in his final nine outings. His highlight of the season came in Longwood's final game when he poured in 15 points, hit 4-of-5 three-pointers and dished three assists without a turnover in a College Basketball Invitational quarterfinal matchup against DePaul.

Most importantly, he lasted the entire season and was heading into a sophomore season that for more than two years prior was anything but guaranteed. 

The Return of Juan Munoz
With both his legs solidly beneath him, Munoz broke out during his sophomore season. 

He emerged as one of the top point guards in the Big South in 2019-20, leading Longwood in scoring and ranking among the Big South's top 10 in assists, steals and assist-to-turnover ratio. He worked his way into the starting lineup midway through the season and ended the year with 10-plus points in 13 of his final 17 games.

And while he acknowledged the injuries had forced him to become more mindful and intentional with his decisions and movements on the court – compared to the "reckless" manner he played with before – he had officially become a legitimate piece of Longwood's backcourt rotation.

More impressively, he graduated from Longwood in May of 2020 with a bachelor's degree in business administration and was accepted into the university's Master of Business Administration program for the 2020-21 year. 

Now Munoz finds himself as the Lancers' "most seasoned player," according to Aldrich, and the sure-handed floor general of a talented but developing Longwood team. He has proven through his first seven games of 2020-21 that his breakout sophomore season was no fluke, once again leading Longwood in scoring at 15.1 points per game and ranking among the Big South's top 10 in three-point percentage, made three-pointers per game and minutes per game. 

But even as his on-court production is proof enough of the legitimacy of his comeback from injury, he continues to grow in other ways. 

As one of only two Lancers who have spent multiple years in Longwood's program, and thereby multiple seasons under Aldrich's leadership, a sizable leadership burden has fallen to Munoz by default. 

Of Longwood's 17 players, Munoz is one of only seven who had suited up in a Lancer uniform before this season. Seven of those newcomers are in their first season of college basketball period, including his fellow backcourt mate, the dynamic but unseasoned Justin Hill. 

"Juan is a very good player, but I think his journey has been one where his development as a leader has been curtailed because he necessarily had to be so focused on getting himself right and getting himself healthy and able to be back on the court," Aldrich said. 

"For so many years, he had to be focused first and foremost on himself so that he could be healthy; so the transition now for him is being others-focused. That's a healthy thing – if you're going to lead, you have to be healthy first before you can lead others. But the mindset shift for him is a big jump, going from 'I need to focus on just getting myself right' and letting guys like Shabooty and [Damarion Geter] take that mantle of team leadership. Well that mantle has now been passed to him, and it's something he's desperately working at."

Munoz has proven that he can take charge on the court when the time arises. He already has a 29-point game to his credit this season, and he has scored in double figures every time out. But his growth as a leader has been put into overdrive in the early portion of 2020-21 with multiple veteran guards out or hampered by injury, including starting junior DeShaun Wade, athletic and defensive-minded junior college transfer Jermaine Drewey, and the dynamic Heru Bligen.

In their absence, Munoz has frequently found the eyes of his teammates on him in pressure situations. He admits he is still growing in that area, but just as he regained his abilities as a player through focus and hard work, so too is he growing into his role as a team leader.

Perhaps the best example of his growth in that capacity came in Longwood's fifth game this season against North Carolina A&T. With the team in need of a win, Munoz found his voice and led the team to a commanding 77-60 victory over the Aggies not just with his play, but with his attitude and demeanor.

"It started in shootaround," said Aldrich after that win. "He was vocal, he was giving everybody energy, giving everybody confidence. Similar to the Wake [Forest] game, it was very clear whose team this was, and he just controlled it right from the tip. I'm just extremely proud of Juan."

Now as Longwood enters its final non-conference game of the season this Monday at 8 p.m. against Virginia Tech, the Lancers have a Big South Conference schedule full of possibilities ahead of them. 

Picked to finish No. 6 in the conference's preseason poll, tying for the highest the Lancers have ever been projected, the Lancers have as good a shot as any of the other 10 Big South teams to make even more history for the program under Aldrich in 2020-21. Munoz has been there for all of it, from helping Longwood earn a bid to the College Basketball Invitational and winning a postseason game in 2019, to last year's program-record fourth-place Big South finish and nine conference wins. 

All the while, the reconstructed ligament in his right knee has slowly become a part of him. So too have the lessons Munoz learned along the way.