Victor Oladipo's rise from overlooked recruit to Indiana superstar - ALL-MET ELITE

Victor Oladipo's

rise from overlooked recruit

to Indiana superstar

ALL-MET ELITE

DEMATHA HS.

HYATTSVILLE MD.

 

Victor first joined a basketball team, the Green team, in kindergarten. He was excluded from his friend's Purple team, which got many of the best players. This was Victor's first athletic slight. "My team won the whole thing," he says. "The next year they put me on the Purple team." As he progressed through St. Jerome's CYO program, he was befriended by Nigel Munson, the point guard at nearby DeMatha Catholic High School, who would come by St. Jerome and play Victor one-on-one, whetting the latter's appetite to play for DeMatha "and to wear their blazers and bucks," Victor says.

DeMatha coach Mike Jones, who had played at the school under storied coach Morgan Wootten, first saw Victor in an eighth-grade CYO playoff game. "Victor stood out," says Jones. "He didn't score a whole lot of points, but he was always talking, always clapping, always around the ball." These are recurring themes in Victor's development.

He enrolled at DeMatha, played on the freshman team and made the varsity as a sophomore. According to Jones, Victor's first two varsity baskets were throwdowns, both in a November game against Coolidge High. "First time he was on the floor, he just took off ahead of the field and dunked," says Jones. "Nobody expected that." It was that year, Crean's last at Marquette, that the coach first went to watch Victor in one of DeMatha's optional 6 a.m. practices, which the sophomore seldom missed. "I'd guess he was maybe 6' 1" or 6' 2" at the time," says Crean. "You could see that he had this incredible athleticism and burst of speed and leaping ability, and you could see his relentlessness on defense, because he knew he wasn't going to get on the court at a high level unless he defended at a high level."

Kenny Johnson and Keith Stevens, the coaches of Team Takeover, a D.C.-based AAU squad, had seen many of the same qualities in the previous spring's tryouts. "Mike Jones told me he had this kid who was a little raw, but he had some potential," says Stevens. "He was a run-and-jump, high-motor kid, really raw. A lot of those kids don't develop, but Victor put in the time." Playing AAU involved complex travel arrangements, whereby Victor often spent weekends at his coaches' homes, because it was such a long drive to his house.

As a junior Victor was part of a DeMatha powerhouse that included Quinn Cook (Duke), Josh Selby (drafted by the Grizzlies, now in the NBDL), Jerian Grant (Notre Dame), Mikael Hopkins (Georgetown), Marcus Rouse (Stony Brook) and Naji Hibbert (Gardner-Webb, transferred from Texas A&M). "Victor is that rare guy who played on a high school team that was as good as his AAU team," says Crean. Early in the season, says Jones, Victor stood in front of the team's top players and volunteered to come off the bench. DeMatha went 31-4 and won the city championship. A year later Victor started and averaged 11.9 points and 10.3 rebounds; DeMatha went 32-4 and won another city title. Victor was named All-City but was ranked only No. 144 in the country by Rivals.com.

"At that time his motor, his passion for the game, his athletic ability were all ahead of his skill set," says Chris Caputo, an assistant at Miami, who was an assistant at George Mason at the time and saw Victor frequently. "Not a great dribbler, not a great shooter, not a dynamic pick-and-roll guy. But he was a tough guy who could defend and do whatever it took to win. His other qualities were developing. Those were things Coach Crean was able to identify that others were not." By the end several D-I schools were recruiting Victor, including Notre Dame, Xavier and Charlotte, but none had worked longer than Indiana.