No one ever confused Columbus for an East Coast city, but looking at the Ohio State basketball team makes the Atlantic Ocean seem a heck of a lot closer.
Jim O’Brien kicked off his fourth season on Sunday and things were still as they have been since his arrival in 1997. The team is athletic and guard-oriented, the recruits he brings in fit that mold and, lastly, the majority of those kids come from the nation’s Northeast region.
First, it was Scoonie Penn. Then, Brian Brown, Boban Savovic and Will Dudley. Then, Sean Connolly. Then, Zach Williams. And, finally, Brandon Fuss-Cheatham.
That adds up to six players on the roster, all of whom are in the rotation, four of whom are starters and two of whom are captains. Only five players on the roster hail from Ohio and each one plays a limited role.
It’s enough to make a fan’s head spin. But it also has been enough to get the Buckeyes to NCAA Tournament the last three years and to the Final Four in 1999.
“I think you go and get involved with guys with whom you have a connection,” O’Brien said. “It just happened to work out that we have three guys from Brooklyn and one from Boston.”
Of the East Coast players, five played prep basketball in the Boston-New York megalopolis, cities that are separated by less distance than Cleveland and Cincinnati.
The reason is simple. O’Brien is a Brooklyn native. He went on to play at Boston College, was an assistant at Connecticut and then a head coach at St. Bonaventure (NY) and BC.
And despite the fact that he is separated from his roots for the first time since a five-year stint as a player in the American Basketball Association, the apple still does not fall far from the tree.
“I think for me, it was that coach O’Brien and his staff were so down-to-earth that got me to come here,” said Brown, a Brooklyn native and senior captain. “My high school coach was very good friends with coach O’Brien and he kind of had that East Coast flavor to him.”
Which, often, seems to be what is attracting those players to Ohio State.
Penn of Salem, Mass., arguably OSU’s best player since Jimmy Jackson, came after playing the first two years of his eligibility for O’Brien at BC. Connolly of Peabody, Mass. originally had committed to O’Brien and BC but backed out when O’Brien left in March 1997 after the Eagles rejected a handful of players from his high-touted 1998 recruiting class for academic reasons. He then played at Providence in 1998-1999 before transferring the following year to play for the coach he wanted all along.
Dudley and Brown, who were teammates at Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn, were coached in high school by one of O’Brien’s prep teammates. And Williams, from Christ the King, played in the same prep league as the aforementioned two.
“Those things just happen to work out,” O’Brien said. “We always feel comfortable going into New York and up in New England because of our background.”
Before O’Brien signed on at OSU, that hadn’t been happening in the same fashion. But the coach has done much to tear down an East Coast perception of the Buckeye state.
“When I was first coming out here myself, I really had no idea what to expect,” O’Brien said. “But when you get out here, you kind of get a feeling of what it’s really like. The general perception of people in the Northeast who have not been here is that it’s a one-light cowtown. And, I’m telling you, nothing could be further from the truth.”
Players shared the perception that not only is Columbus viewed that way but Cleveland and Cincinnati also aren’t viewed as major metropoli, but simply as run-down rust belt cities.
“When I thought of Ohio, I thought of farmland,” Brown said. “Being from the city, I’m an up-and-going kind of guy. I had no idea.”
The players’ happiness here is the most valuable thing to O’Brien and his program.
The chain reaction has already been seen with Penn and Connolly and Brown, Dudley and Williams.
“I think the biggest thing is going to be guys from the East Coast going back and saying, ‘It was a happy four years and there’s no better place to be,’ ” Dudley said. “It all depends on us.”
Despite all this good feeling in the corridor that O’Brien has built, he would like to scale back and fortify his Midwestern inroads.
This can be supported by O’Brien ceasing the full press he had put on high profile Boston recruit Jermaine Watson, now a starter as a true freshman at, ironically enough, BC.
Watson had been recruited by O’Brien and his staff throughout high school but the chance to get an early commitment from 2002 recruit Ricardo Billings of Detroit outweighed his desire to nab Watson. OSU’s only starter who didn’t go to high school in the east, Brent Darby, also hails from Detroit as did 2000-01 captain Ken Johnson.
“I think early on, the people in New England and New York knew us a little better than people in Ohio,” O’Brien said. “But I think after we’ve been here for the four years that we have, that’s really not the case any longer.
“We’re not going into those areas thinking we have to get kids because we can’t get kids here. The major focus is on kids in the Midwest and particularly Ohio.”
Finding that balance is the goal. Since the East Coast still produces some of the best high school talent nationally, it would be silly to cut those ties for the sake of doing it.
But, as the years go on, chances are O’Brien’s ties will dwindle to some extent. He plans on being prepared for that and he’s done something about it by selling the school more than himself.
“In the beginning, 90 percent of my interest was because of coach O’Brien. But once I got out here and saw how Columbus was, it was good for me,” Dudley said.
“You got the support of the fans, I went to a football game (on a recruiting visit) and saw just how much support there was and the facilities were second-to-none. I think a lot of East Coast kids are going to realize that and it is coach O’Brien that opened it up.”
