This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Follow Peak here.
Brandon Dwyer is a walk-on fifth-year senior on the Florida Gulf Coast men’s basketball team. He earned his undergraduate degree in business management and is currently working on his MBA.
We just lost to Cleveland State in the semifinals of the College Basketball Invitational last season, and I was the last person to leave the locker room. I sat there and thought: Is this the last time I’m ever going to play? Is my college career over?
I was a senior, but I had one more year of eligibility if I wanted it. I just didn’t know if I did. I didn’t take my jersey off after the game. I walked out to the gym and looked around, trying to take everything in.
It sank in: Did I fail to do what I had said I wanted to do for four years? Which was to score just one point in a Division I college basketball game.
I had played seven minutes in six games that season and missed both shots I took. In my head, I was thinking: Do I really want to come back for a fifth year? Do I want to spend all that time and effort to maybe get seven minutes and two or three shots at scoring a point? Do I want to wake up early every morning to do conditioning, knowing I’m not going to play? Do I want to do more school? Do I want to work every day for an opportunity that might not even come?
That was definitely my lowest point.
As I thought more about my decision, I realized I would always look back with regret if I didn’t come back for my fifth year. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, and even if I went 0 for 10, at least I’d know I’d given it my best shot.
I’m from Newark, Delaware. I went to the same school from kindergarten to 12th grade, 10 minutes away from my house. After my senior year, I had a bunch of Division II and Division III interest, but my only Division I opportunity was as a walk-on at La Salle in Philadelphia.
I’m going to be honest: I had no idea what a walk-on was. They basically told me: You’d have a jersey, you’d be on the team, but you wouldn’t be on an athletic scholarship. You’d be on an academic scholarship. But all I heard was: Division I basketball and close to home.
I arrived at campus two days after my high school graduation so I had no summer. But I didn’t care because I was so happy to play Division I basketball. I slowly learned that a walk-on had a very different role than a scholarship player, and I realized I had two options in that role: Either embrace it or fight it.
I decided to embrace it. I knew I’d enjoy going to practice and the whole process way more than if my entire goal were to fight to be on scholarship. Not that I didn’t want to be on scholarship, but if I made that my singular goal every day, I was going to lose my mind. So much of that was not in my control.
Fast forward to the end of that year. Our head coach was fired. I didn’t know if the new coach would even keep me. I had no game film and only minimal practice film.
But I had built a strong relationship with two of my assistant coaches at La Salle, Pat Chambers and Kyle Griffin. Coach Chambers was hired as the head coach at Florida Gulf Coast and Coach Griffin as his assistant. Coach Griffin came up to me one day and asked what my plan was. I had no clue. I was 19.
He said, “If we have a walk-on spot, would you want to go with us?”
I said, “Absolutely.”
I was in a completely different world in Fort Myers, Florida. It was 95 degrees and sunny every day. I saw dolphins at the beach. I started making TikTok videos for my family and friends back in the Northeast, just to show them what I was experiencing every day.
I had no aspirations at all. I literally just did it to show them what I was doing. I did that for 20 days in a row, and I think I had 5,000 followers. I was like: What is happening?? But I realized I enjoyed making videos. Six months later, I had 100,000 followers.
One day, I wasn’t on my phone for most of the day, and when I did get back on it, my TikTok was exploding. Someone had made a stitch of one of my videos. A stitch is when someone else takes your video and adds something to the end of it, whether it’s a reaction or an image. Someone stitched one of my videos with my stats on ESPN: zero points, zero rebounds, zero assists, zero minutes.
The video got around 10 million views, and everyone was just ripping on me. In that moment, I realized that I had two options: I could either fight it and say, “I play Division I basketball. I’m better than you, Little Jimmy.” Or I could embrace it and laugh at myself.
So the first video I posted after that was captioned: “me excited on game days only to end up playing zero minutes.”
@bdwyerr
zero points, zero assists, zero rebounds. #basketball #foryou #foryoupage #trending
♬ its a wrap sped up – xxtristanxo
Over the next few months, I posted more about how I didn’t play and how I was on the road to get minutes. And then someone commented: “You’re on the road to one point.”
I was like: That’s genius. I’m taking that.
That was in the spring of 2023.
My junior year, I redshirted so I didn’t play at all.
My senior year, as I mentioned, I played seven minutes in six games.
Coach Chambers always preached: “Be an all-star in your role.” Do what you do at the best level you can do it. Obviously, I don’t play, so an all-star in my role was different.
During practice, I keep the shot chart. If someone falls on the court, I grab the towel and wipe up their sweat. If someone needs water, I get it.
During games, I keep track of something we call “kills,” which is when we get three stops in a row. I also keep track of something called “attitude,” where we track everything but scoring. That could be an assist, a charge, a foul drawn, a paint touch. During timeouts, I run behind the bench and grab two or three of the foldable chairs and put those in a semicircle on the court.
I take pride in that.
I think that’s the only way you can be successful as a walk-on. You have to find joy in that. I’ve been around other walk-ons who don’t, and they’re miserable.
Over the last five years, I learned about the importance of self-belief. As many supporters as I had on social media and among my teammates and coaches, I had way more people that didn’t want me to score. I learned how to use that as motivation. The road to one point was kind of a hate comment, but I turned it into something positive.
My mentality has changed. If something seems initially negative, I’ve learned there’s typically always something positive you can take out of it. Yes, not playing and not scoring on the surface is a negative and embarrassing. But instead of thinking I’ve been in college for five years and I haven’t scored, I would think I’ve been in college for five years and I’m still TRYING to score. That mindset is something this whole experience has taught me.
In the first game of this season, my teammates blew out the team we were playing. My coach came up to me with six minutes left and said: “I’m going to put you in at the four-minute mark. Go get on the bike.”
On my first possession, I shot an off-the-dribble three that hit only the backboard. I thought: I just blew it. Then I looked at the clock, and there were more than three minutes left.
A possession or two later, my coach ran a play for me called Curry. I ran off a double pindown screen and got an open look. I shot it and, full transparency, I thought I missed it. But this time, it went in.
FGCU walk-on Brandon Dwyer went four years without scoring a point in a game.
He has millions of followers on social media from his “ROAD TO 1 POINT” content.
In the first game of his graduate season, the arena erupted when he hit a 3-pointer.pic.twitter.com/e9IYQKSDyR
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) November 4, 2025
I felt such a sense of relief that I didn’t even remember what celebration I did; someone showed me the video afterwards. I put both my hands up and stuck my tongue out. I’ve never done that before. I don’t know where that came from at all.
A couple of minutes later, I hit another three and finished with six points.
They named me the player of the game, which I thought was hilarious. I played the last four minutes of the game in garbage time, and I got interviewed as the player of the game.
I knew if I ever scored, I was going to do the Wilt Chamberlain sign. I found a crappy piece of white paper and a Sharpie that I kept in my bag and wrote “6” on it and my teammate took my picture in the locker room.
It was definitely worth the wait.
— As told to Jayson Jenks
