Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
Robbie O’Han was supposed to spend his last year of organized basketball playing mostly against prep schools and junior colleges.
Instead he got called up to one of the most storied teams in college hoops, the North Carolina Tar Heels, after spending three seasons with its junior varsity team, whose very existence is unknown to a majority of fans.
The Tar Heels are one of only a few universities to maintain a J.V. team, a hierarchy far more common in American high schools than in Division I, where the best programs mostly run single teams made up of scholarship recruits, top players with N.