Graphic by Charles Nailen/The Hoya Braswell

Freshman year he arrived at Georgetown, a shooting guard thrown into the unenviable role of starting at point guard for a team coming off its worst season in recent memory. It was a trying year, both for the player and the team.

There were losses to mediocre teams, the retirement of the legendary head coach and the ensuing transfer of leadership, the team’s first losing season in decades and a player ready to give up.

Luckily for Georgetown he didn’t, because Kevin Braswell has matured into Georgetown’s team leader as well as one of the best point guards in the history of Hoya basketball.

Braswell is far from satisfied with what he and the team have accomplished, however.

“I want to do better than last year. I want to at least get Coach [Craig] Esherick a Big East Championship ring. I saw Allen Iverson come here and in two years take them to the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight, and I’m thinking that I’d like my last two years to be like that.”

That is an ambitious goal for a young team on which Braswell is the only senior, the only remaining player in the program who was coached by John Thompson before he retired in January of 1999. Nonetheless, if there is someone that can lead Georgetown to even better things, it is Braswell.

“If I was asked which player had helped us get back to the Sweet 16 the most, it would have been Kevin,” Head Coach Craig Esherick said. “He shares a big part of the credit for why we got to the point where we got last season. And I’m going to put a whole lot of pressure on him this year to get us to the same place.”

When Braswell arrived at Georgetown, however, there were certainly no guarantees that either the team or his own play would develop as they have. Georgetown’s play was uninspired at best three years ago, hampered by a coaching change and a team without much top-tier talent.

In fact, the memories from Braswell’s freshman year that are most vivid in his mind don’t come from the hardwood, but from Harbin, his freshman dorm. This is understandable, because despite scoring 13.5 points per game, Braswell was a rookie learning the college game and the point guard position without any star players to help him shoulder the load on a team that wandered through a forgettable season.

“There were times when I was ready to give up, but Coach Esherick was always there behind me,” Braswell said. “It was hard for coach Esherick to straight come in and take over a program following in John Thompson’s steps, but he has taken me along so well. You have to struggle to get better, and I had to come in and learn that college is a totally different game from high school.”

Braswell’s star continued to rise during his sophomore season, when he led the team in scoring (14.8 per game), assists (179) and steals (90) and capped off the season with a career-high 40 points in the NIT against Virginia.

Unfortunately, that performance came in the NIT and not the NCAA Tournament, as the team improved during the 1999-2000 season but continued to be hampered by inconsistency. Although both Braswell and the team had taken a step forward, both were still awaiting the breakthrough that would push them over the top.

That breakthrough finally came last year, as Georgetown returned to the NCAA tournament and Braswell developed into a true point guard, a floor general with the ability to dictate the flow of the game. Despite scoring only 11.5 points per game, Braswell had a career-best field goal percentage, assist and steal totals and assist-to-turnover ratio in leading the Hoyas to the Sweet 16.

During the course of the season Braswell also broke the Georgetown career record for steals, but Braswell “didn’t know it until people started telling me. It’s just something you think about once its already done,” he said.

But for Braswell, the true highlights of the season were not anything he accomplished as an individual, but the hurdles the Hoyas overcame as a team:

“The Syracuse game was great [winning 72-61 at home]. All the students running out on the court and us jumping around with them: that’s the first time that has ever happened to me. It meant so much going into the tournament. On top of that, most people never get to play against their best friend ever, but I did in the Maryland game [against Juan Dixon in the Sweet 16].”

Helping get the team to this position signaled Braswell’s changeover from being a scoring point guard to the team leader, putting winning over all else.

“I want to sacrifice whatever I can for our team to win, which I tried to do last year. I do whatever I can to make the team flow,” Braswell said, the ultimate sign of maturity for a player in any sport. “Last year I improved as a point guard, and now I want to put the two together: scoring and being a point guard,” something Braswell should have ample opportunity to do with the arrival of a capable backup in freshman Drew Hall.

This provides Braswell with the opportunity to play at both the point and shooting guard positions, being both the distributor of the basketball and a primary outside scoring threat – something Braswell is intent on establishing himself as.

“I’m a much better shooter than my statistics show. This year I’m going to make sure I show I can do a lot of other things. I want to make sure I bring my field goal percentage up this year.”

What bothered Braswell most about last season was not his lower scoring output, but the way in which it came: The one statistic that rolls off Braswell’s tongue is 3-7-8, or his 37.8 field goal percentage, the one number he focuses on as a mark to improve.

There is no doubt he can improve upon this with an improved shot selection, just another step forward in his basketball maturity and another step forward for the Hoyas’ success on the court.

“I can’t be more happy right now. Find me at the end of the year and I’ll see if things went the way I wanted, but right now I can’t be any happier,” Braswell said.

“There aren’t too many guys that can say they came to a program when the program was on the downfall and helped turn it right around and bring it back up.”

When Braswell walks across the stage at graduation in May and goes from student to alumnus, he can look back and say he was that guy.