‘Homecoming’ embraces the high-pressure world of college sports

Maya’s Simone Hicks has been away from tennis for some time; Smith’s Damon Sims didn’t want to enter the Major League Baseball draft but still wanted to play ball.

A spinoff of “All American,” “Homecoming” gives them ties to the original series but also lets them go in a new direction in a new setting.

Using Bringston as a base, Carroll says she hopes she can show the pressures that come from being at an HBCU. “Bringston is almost an amalgamation of a few different campuses. It pulls from campuses in Atlanta and the D.C. area,” she says. “I wanted to go to an HBCU and didn’t get a chance to, so I was like, ‘We’re gonna go now…I’m just gonna create my own.’”

At Bringston, the two leading characters run into a variety of friends and antagonists who push the boundaries of the college experience.

For support, Simone relies on Thea, the extremely competitive head of the tennis team.

Ironically, Maya does, too.

Camille Hyde, who plays Thea, is a tennis whiz. “I never lost a match in high school. In prepping for Thea, I brought some of my mentality when it came to tennis to Thea, which is we don’t lose. If we come close to losing and we win, it wasn’t good enough. So you train harder, you work harder that that’s that.”