Why UNC’s Seth Trimble surprised this NY teacher with tickets to Syracuse game

Alicia Thomas, a physical-education teacher in Watertown, New York, was already planning on making the roughly hour-long drive to the JMA Wireless Dome on Saturday for UNC’s men’s basketball game against Syracuse. She’d bought her tickets in January. But then, on Tuesday, she got a call from an old friend offering an upgrade.

“A couple days ago, Trevor (Trimble) called me and said, ‘Hey we’ve got two tickets for you,’” Thomas told the N&O on Saturday, referring to Seth Trimble’s dad. “He said, ‘Seth and I, our family, want you to sit with us.’”

And so it was that Thomas found herself seated next to the Trimbles — in the front row, just behind the UNC bench — to watch the Tar Heels beat the Orange, 77-64, on Saturday with forward Henri Veesaar back in the lineup.

Thomas, despite living deep in the heart of Syracuse country and spending her whole life in upstate New York, is a North Carolina fan. As you might imagine, it’s not often she gets to make the trip down to Chapel Hill to see UNC play. But that hasn’t stopped Thomas from forging a relationship between her school, H.T. Wiley Intermediate, and the Trimble family, as detailed in the N&O last fall.

It all started when Thomas met Trimble’s parents in a chance encounter outside the JMA Wireless Dome after a UNC-Syracuse game back when Trimble was a freshman. They kept in touch over the years and, during Trimble’s junior year, he recorded a short video for Thomas’ class.

Trimble, wearing a North Carolina Jumpman hoodie and standing outside on a sunny day on campus, spoke directly into the camera and delivered the following message to Thomas’ students:

“Coach Thomas, what’s up, I hope you’re doing well. Coach Thomas and you kids in the classroom at the Wiley School, I hope you guys are doing great. I just want to motivate you guys to keep going, keep up your grades in the classroom, to not be afraid to say ‘no’ and just stay focused. I promise if you guys stay focused and chase your dreams each and every day, that you guys will live the life that you want to live. So just keep going, and continue to be great. Appreciate y’all and go Heels!”

Thomas said that, when she showed the video to her students, “the whole class just erupted.”

“I was the cool one that day,” she told the N&O’s Luke DeCock last year.

And Thomas was the cool aunt on Saturday, bringing her nephew along to the game with her. Both wore Trimble’s jersey — “once they dropped in the (store), we immediately ordered them,” she said — and chatted with Trimble after the game.

The photo Thomas took with Trimble will, no doubt, be shared with her students come Monday.

“We have a little over 300 students, and some of them are Cuse fans — I’ve seen a lot of them here tonight, actually, when they were walking by — (but) I’ve converted some of them,” Thomas said. “The thing about these videos… we never get big-time athletes to send our kids anything. So when Seth shouted them out, it was game over. And the kids were constantly like, ‘When is he playing? When can we watch him?’ And so it really got a lot of them into it more.”

This story was originally published February 22, 2026 at 12:25 PM.