Ottawa-Glandorf’s Colin White is presented the Mr. Basketball trophy alongside Tyson McGlaughlin, left, and OHSAA Executive Director Doug Ute at last year’s state basketball tournament.
Richard Parrish | The Lima News
COLUMBUS – Colin White appears to be enjoying the early stages of his college basketball career.
Asked how things have been going since moving in at Ohio State this summer the reigning Ohio Mr. Basketball from Ottawa-Glandorf was as positive as a convention of protons.
“It’s been great. It’s been a good four months down here. It’s just getting better every day with practice starting. Coach has been great and the team has been awesome,” White said earlier this week at OSU’s men’s basketball preseason media day.
White, a 6-6 shooting guard/small forward, is one of two freshmen on the Buckeyes’ rebuilt roster, which includes seven transfers.
He finished his Ottawa-Glandorf career with a school record of 2,027 points and the Titans played in the boys state basketball tournament all four years of his high school career.
Ohio State coach Jake Diebler said, “It’s been great having Colin in this program. He plays hard every day. He’s very coachable. There’s an element of toughness and winning to him. His winning in high school has been well documented.
“He has shot the ball consistently and he takes care of it. He’s got to continue to work on the defensive side. But I’ve been really impressed with his summer and start to the preseason this fall,” he said.
What role White plays and how much he plays this season will be determined as the season unfolds and how the players competing for playing time at the same positions he plays are doing.
His goal is to play as many minutes as he can. But if that doesn’t happen, he sees himself as possibly being what some people might call an energy player. “Just coming in and providing my team with a spark,” White said.
“I’m probably not going to be leading the team in minutes or anything like that. I just want to impact winning. Coming in and impacting winning in a certain way, whatever way that is, whether that’s getting excited for my teammates or being on the floor, making plays, knocking down threes, or getting to the rim.
“I brought with me the toughness that I played with in high school and my all-around game. I feel like I’m a very versatile player so I can play a lot of positions and fit in a lot of places where people maybe wouldn’t expect me.
“That’s what I’ve been doing down here, just bringing a lot of versatility, expanding my game. I’ve been shooting it pretty well since I’ve been down here, just trying to become that knock-down shooter that I feel like we need. And getting into the paint, especially with my size. I feel like I can get into the paint and attack downhill. That’s stuff I feel like I can get better at as the season goes on,” he said.
One change Ottawa-Glandorf fans will notice is White will be wearing number 20, not the 22 he wore in high school. Ohio State retired 22 to honor Buckeyes legend Jim Jackson in 2001. Malaki Branham asked Jackson for permission to wear it in the 2021-2022 season and received his approval but White chose not to pursue it.
In addition to the challenges of playing NCAA Division I basketball, White has chosen a challenging major in engineering, which brings to mind Aaron Craft, another northwest Ohio player who was on a similar path from 2010-2014 when he was OSU’s starting point guard for three years while being a pre-med major.
Craft graduated from Ohio State’s medical school last spring and is in his first year of residency in otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat) at OSU’s Wexner Medical Center.
“It is challenging. At the beginning of the summer, I talked to Aaron a lot about how it was going to be hard. It’s not going to be easy and there’s going to be days where I’m going to have a lot of school work and basketball and basketball takes the forefront sometimes. But school work has to be up there, too,” White said.
“There are certain days where it’s tough to go to class in the morning, then go to practice for 5 or 6 hours and be at the gym for a long time and then go back and do a lot of homework. I talked to him extensively at the beginning of the summer. He reassured me that it can be done. He did it and had great success. Hopefully, I can kind of follow in his footsteps.”
