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He is back home. LaGrange High graduate Devin Dowell is back in his hometown. After spending his freshman season at Voorhees University, Dowell made the big decision to transfer to LaGrange College heading into his sophomore year.

This has been a long time in the making. LaGrange College coach Kendal Wallace recruited Dowell heavily out of high school and believes he can be a real star for the program going forward.

“I recruited the heck out of him and he chose another school and now he is back here,” Wallace said. “This kid and our program is going to make headlines in the next three years.”

“That was my first offer coming out of high school, but I just wanted to get away from LaGrange and explore, but I’m happy to come back home now,” Dowell said.

Dowell’s reasons for transferring were anything but selfish. Voorhees did not offer the degree he wanted which left Dowell at a crossroads. He looked down the barrel of transferring to a bigger school and giving up basketball, but LaGrange College called him home.

“They didn’t have the grade I wanted to teach, they only had pre-K through first and I want to teach second through sixth and they didn’t have that, so I told the institute and it was a pretty smooth process because the people on the team there understood,” Dowell said. “Transferring was a little scary at first.

“Around Christmas, I wasn’t getting any playing time and I thought about transferring to UGA or Kennesaw State and stop playing and focus on getting my degree, but I came back after Christmas and worked every day to get better, and I started to get more playing time.”

Academics are very important for Dowell and was the main reason that he decided to transfer. The rising sophomore currently holds a 4.0 GPA.

It was a slow start for Dowell in the college ranks as he struggled to keep up with the pace of the college game.

“I didn’t realize that the speed of the game was gonna be that fast in college, Dowell said. “We had five seniors and one of the seniors was playing my position, and I just learned from him every day. That’s how I honestly got better every day, every single day, I learned off one player because he played the exact same as me.”

Dowell eventually found his footing to become an impact player as a freshman. 

“I got newcomer of the year award at my old school and I got the most playing time of all the freshmen too,” Dowell said. “So it was a good experience overall.”

Dowell played in 17 games as a freshman, mostly as a shooting guard. That likely will not be the case this season as he looks to orchestrate the offense as a point guard.

“I feel like I can see the floor better, way better than when I was in high school. In high school, I feel like I just had to score,” Dowell said. “I’m a little nervous because there is more pressure on me, but I’m also excited because I like to have the ball in my hands.”

Dowell will be teaming up with another dynamic sophomore in the backcourt. Sammy Moss had a tremendous freshman season for LaGrange College in which he averaged a team-high 17.7 points per game on 46% shooting from the field and 39% from three en route to being named to the all-conference first team. This will not be the first time the two have shared the same court together.

“When I was at Callaway during my 10th-grade year, he was at East Coweta and they won,” Dowell said. “That very same year we had an all-star game in Carrollton and he and I were on the same team.”

Dowell, ever the perfectionist, has already hit the LaGrange College gym. Any chance he gets, every other day at the moment, he is in the gym taking shots or working out on campus. Dowell is home.