I posted a video a while back about the incredible story of Preston. Well this is now a national article and it's phenomenal
all credit goes to Brian Bennett
enjoy fellas -- also I'll post the mixtape they pieced together that got him the offer from Ohio
The rapid rise of Ohio’s Jason Preston: ‘This kid was born to run the point’
By Brian Bennett 5h ago 8
In the spring of 2018, Ohio needed a point guard. Its backup at the position, Zach Butler, had transferred. The returning starter, Teyvion Kirk, was better suited off the ball. Then-assistant coach Will Ryan was given the task of finding a lead guard, so he scoured through potential transfers, junior college options and unsigned seniors from the high school ranks.
That’s when he stumbled across a Twitter post that highlighted a virtually unknown recruit named Jason Preston. In the two-minute clip, Preston scores a few times. But mostly he is shown delivering pinpoint passes to teammates.
“It was this grainy footage with not the best lighting,” Ryan recalls. “Maybe it was shot on an older iPhone or something. I’m watching the video and thinking, is this real? Are there kids really out there who pass the ball this well?”
Ryan’s disbelief was understandable. Preston’s ascension from obscurity to being one of the best point guards in America doesn’t seem possible in an age when kids are scouted and identified from the time they’re pre-teens. He started exactly one game in high school — on Senior Day — and averaged two points in his final season. Only a chance encounter at an AAU tournament kept his basketball dream alive. That low-fi mix tape on Twitter got him two mid-major college scholarship offers.
Here he is now, as a 6-foot-4 junior for the Bobcats, very much on the NBA’s radar and contending for All-America status. Through four games this season, he’s averaging 18.8 points, 7.8 assists and 7.0 rebounds while shooting 53.8 percent from 3-point range. In a 77-75 loss at Illinois on Black Friday, Preston’s skills and unusual backstory took center stage as he dropped 31 points, eight assists and six rebounds against preseason first-team All-American Ayo Dosunmu. “One of the best we have faced,” Illini coach Brad Underwood wrote in a text message. “A pro!”
All this from a guy who lost his mother to cancer in high school, who compiled most of his prep highlights while not even playing for the school’s top team and who mostly learned his passing skills from watching LeBron James and Chris Paul on TV.
“It’s a phenomenal story,” Ohio coach Jeff Boals says. “With everything he’s been through, to be the type of person and player he is, it’s like a movie.”
Kevin Jackson remembers when he first saw Preston on the court. The dozens of kids who came to Believe Prep Academy in Athens, Tenn., with dreams of playing in Division I would run together in different groups on the practice floor. Jackson, a New York City native and former grassroots coach who has worked with Kenny Anderson, God Shammgod, Rafer Alston and other notable point guards, noticed the skinny kid with auburn hair continually get the ball to teammates in the right spots. One-hand skip passes through traffic, lobs to the post, outlets to start a fast break. You name it, Preston could do it.
“In this generation, you get so many kids who want to score and play isolation, play that James Harden basketball,” says Jackson, Believe Academy’s director and coach. “And this kid genuinely wanted to make people better. He was genuinely a facilitator. I told him, you remind me a lot of Jason Kidd.”
Preston hadn’t played on any of the prestigious grassroots circuits. He was an afterthought on his team at Boone High School in Orlando, Fla. His coach there didn’t play him at the point, instead asking him to stand in the corners and shoot 3s when he wasn’t glued to the bench. He was 6-foot and 140 pounds as a senior. Most of his court time came at an L.A. Fitness, where he and his friends would play for hours.
Somehow, he still harbored dreams of playing in college. His mom, Judith, had instilled the love of the game in him from an early age. She gave him a toy basketball hoop when he was little. A big Detroit Pistons fan, she had him watch games with her and study the little things that pros did to be successful. When Preston was 11, his mom told him she had lung cancer. He’s not sure how long she knew, because she kept many details private. She tried to shield him from the pain and the treatments as long as possible before she died in the summer before his junior year.
“She was definitely a selfless person,” Preston says. “She always put others first.”
Judith raised Preston alone for most of his life. After she died, his aunt moved to Orlando from Jamaica with her son to help take care of him. Preston lived in a house with them and his mom’s best friend and her son. The small house was crowded, but Preston had no complaints. He and the other two boys would hoop in the yard or at a park nearby. Although his high school career wasn’t going anywhere, Preston says that basketball “was a nice little stress reliever.”
The summer after his senior year, Preston took two online classes at UCF. He planned to enroll there in the fall as a regular student to study journalism. In late July, a friend asked if he wanted to join an AAU squad for TNT Elite. The team only had four players and needed a fifth. Preston said yes, excited he would get to play point guard the entire game.
The team performed well at tournaments in Georgia and at Disney World, and Preston’s play gained him some notice. A UNC Asheville assistant approached him and said he was interested but out of scholarships; he suggested Preston go to prep school. After the Orlando tournament, Preston met with Brad Traina, a former UCF player who was recruiting for Believe Prep. He offered him a spot. The name of the school was appropriate, for Preston had little to go on but faith.
“I always had belief in myself,” he says. “These were my dreams and my goals, and they never really went away for me.”
Having lost his mom just two years earlier, Preston now had to move to a new state and live on his own, albeit in a large dorm filled with other basketball hopefuls. He earned a spot on Believe’s national touring team, coached by Tyson Waterman who is now an assistant at Wichita State. He wasn’t seeing many minutes, though, and his roommates were playing for one of the school’s other five squads. (This has been described by Preston and others as the “C” team; Jackson bristles at that designation and says the teams were more evenly divided than they’ve been portrayed). Preston asked if he could play with his friends when he wasn’t needed for the national team. What else did he have to do, really, other than play basketball and go to school?
Preston started at the point for that team and even put up a triple-double in a game. On an eight-hour bus ride back from a tournament, he asked the coaches for all the game film they had. Then he did a separate screen recording of all his highlights and asked a friend to splice it together. Believe tweeted the finished product out from its account.
(
all credit goes to Brian Bennett
enjoy fellas -- also I'll post the mixtape they pieced together that got him the offer from Ohio
The rapid rise of Ohio’s Jason Preston: ‘This kid was born to run the point’
By Brian Bennett 5h ago 8
In the spring of 2018, Ohio needed a point guard. Its backup at the position, Zach Butler, had transferred. The returning starter, Teyvion Kirk, was better suited off the ball. Then-assistant coach Will Ryan was given the task of finding a lead guard, so he scoured through potential transfers, junior college options and unsigned seniors from the high school ranks.
That’s when he stumbled across a Twitter post that highlighted a virtually unknown recruit named Jason Preston. In the two-minute clip, Preston scores a few times. But mostly he is shown delivering pinpoint passes to teammates.
“It was this grainy footage with not the best lighting,” Ryan recalls. “Maybe it was shot on an older iPhone or something. I’m watching the video and thinking, is this real? Are there kids really out there who pass the ball this well?”
Ryan’s disbelief was understandable. Preston’s ascension from obscurity to being one of the best point guards in America doesn’t seem possible in an age when kids are scouted and identified from the time they’re pre-teens. He started exactly one game in high school — on Senior Day — and averaged two points in his final season. Only a chance encounter at an AAU tournament kept his basketball dream alive. That low-fi mix tape on Twitter got him two mid-major college scholarship offers.
Here he is now, as a 6-foot-4 junior for the Bobcats, very much on the NBA’s radar and contending for All-America status. Through four games this season, he’s averaging 18.8 points, 7.8 assists and 7.0 rebounds while shooting 53.8 percent from 3-point range. In a 77-75 loss at Illinois on Black Friday, Preston’s skills and unusual backstory took center stage as he dropped 31 points, eight assists and six rebounds against preseason first-team All-American Ayo Dosunmu. “One of the best we have faced,” Illini coach Brad Underwood wrote in a text message. “A pro!”
All this from a guy who lost his mother to cancer in high school, who compiled most of his prep highlights while not even playing for the school’s top team and who mostly learned his passing skills from watching LeBron James and Chris Paul on TV.
“It’s a phenomenal story,” Ohio coach Jeff Boals says. “With everything he’s been through, to be the type of person and player he is, it’s like a movie.”
Kevin Jackson remembers when he first saw Preston on the court. The dozens of kids who came to Believe Prep Academy in Athens, Tenn., with dreams of playing in Division I would run together in different groups on the practice floor. Jackson, a New York City native and former grassroots coach who has worked with Kenny Anderson, God Shammgod, Rafer Alston and other notable point guards, noticed the skinny kid with auburn hair continually get the ball to teammates in the right spots. One-hand skip passes through traffic, lobs to the post, outlets to start a fast break. You name it, Preston could do it.
“In this generation, you get so many kids who want to score and play isolation, play that James Harden basketball,” says Jackson, Believe Academy’s director and coach. “And this kid genuinely wanted to make people better. He was genuinely a facilitator. I told him, you remind me a lot of Jason Kidd.”
Preston hadn’t played on any of the prestigious grassroots circuits. He was an afterthought on his team at Boone High School in Orlando, Fla. His coach there didn’t play him at the point, instead asking him to stand in the corners and shoot 3s when he wasn’t glued to the bench. He was 6-foot and 140 pounds as a senior. Most of his court time came at an L.A. Fitness, where he and his friends would play for hours.
Somehow, he still harbored dreams of playing in college. His mom, Judith, had instilled the love of the game in him from an early age. She gave him a toy basketball hoop when he was little. A big Detroit Pistons fan, she had him watch games with her and study the little things that pros did to be successful. When Preston was 11, his mom told him she had lung cancer. He’s not sure how long she knew, because she kept many details private. She tried to shield him from the pain and the treatments as long as possible before she died in the summer before his junior year.
“She was definitely a selfless person,” Preston says. “She always put others first.”
Judith raised Preston alone for most of his life. After she died, his aunt moved to Orlando from Jamaica with her son to help take care of him. Preston lived in a house with them and his mom’s best friend and her son. The small house was crowded, but Preston had no complaints. He and the other two boys would hoop in the yard or at a park nearby. Although his high school career wasn’t going anywhere, Preston says that basketball “was a nice little stress reliever.”
The summer after his senior year, Preston took two online classes at UCF. He planned to enroll there in the fall as a regular student to study journalism. In late July, a friend asked if he wanted to join an AAU squad for TNT Elite. The team only had four players and needed a fifth. Preston said yes, excited he would get to play point guard the entire game.
The team performed well at tournaments in Georgia and at Disney World, and Preston’s play gained him some notice. A UNC Asheville assistant approached him and said he was interested but out of scholarships; he suggested Preston go to prep school. After the Orlando tournament, Preston met with Brad Traina, a former UCF player who was recruiting for Believe Prep. He offered him a spot. The name of the school was appropriate, for Preston had little to go on but faith.
“I always had belief in myself,” he says. “These were my dreams and my goals, and they never really went away for me.”
Having lost his mom just two years earlier, Preston now had to move to a new state and live on his own, albeit in a large dorm filled with other basketball hopefuls. He earned a spot on Believe’s national touring team, coached by Tyson Waterman who is now an assistant at Wichita State. He wasn’t seeing many minutes, though, and his roommates were playing for one of the school’s other five squads. (This has been described by Preston and others as the “C” team; Jackson bristles at that designation and says the teams were more evenly divided than they’ve been portrayed). Preston asked if he could play with his friends when he wasn’t needed for the national team. What else did he have to do, really, other than play basketball and go to school?
Preston started at the point for that team and even put up a triple-double in a game. On an eight-hour bus ride back from a tournament, he asked the coaches for all the game film they had. Then he did a separate screen recording of all his highlights and asked a friend to splice it together. Believe tweeted the finished product out from its account.
(