Chase Michael Jeter was born on September 19, 1997, in Las Vegas, Nevada, into a basketball family with deep roots in one of the city's most hallowed programs. His father, Chris Jeter, played at UNLV and was a reserve on Jerry Tarkanian's legendary 1989-90 Runnin' Rebels — the team that destroyed Duke 103-73 in the national championship game, the most lopsided title-game margin in tournament history. Chris became a police officer for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. He coached his son from childhood, and the lesson was always the same: earn everything.
Chase grew up at Bishop Gorman High School in Summerlin, the powerhouse private school that produces more Division I talent than any program in Nevada. He played JV as a freshman and made varsity as a sophomore, but his rise accelerated dramatically between his junior and senior years. By his junior season, he was averaging 14.7 points and 10.6 rebounds per game alongside five-star teammate Stephen Zimmerman, leading Gorman to a 30-3 record and the Nevada Division I state championship. As a senior, he put up 16.2 points and 10.6 rebounds and won another state title — Gorman's fourth consecutive.
Jeter was named Nevada's Gatorade Player of the Year, a McDonald's All-American, and ranked as the No. 11 overall recruit in the 2015 class by ESPN — No. 14 on the RSCI composite. He was also selected for the 2014 USA Basketball U18 team that won gold at the FIBA Americas Championship in Colorado Springs, playing under an assistant coach named Sean Miller. He maintained a 3.86 GPA and was a National Honor Society member. He wanted to be a lawyer someday.
His final five schools were Duke, UNLV, Arizona, UCLA, and Kansas. The UNLV angle was the obvious storyline — his father's school, the program that had beaten Duke in the most famous blowout in championship history. Chris Jeter accompanied his son on a visit to Duke and posed for a photo: his UNLV national championship ring next to Coach K's Team USA ring. The image said everything about the decision Chase was about to make.
On August 4, 2014, at the adidas Nations tournament in Los Angeles, Jeter appeared on ESPNU and unzipped his jacket to reveal a Duke T-shirt. 'I just loved the feel and the environment,' he said. 'Cameron Indoor is a great place and a great basketball environment.' He chose the program his father's team had humiliated twenty-four years earlier. It was, in its own way, an act of independence — a son choosing his own path, 2,300 miles from the city that defined his family's basketball identity.