OJ Mayo
Encyclopedia : O : OJ : OJM : OJ Mayo
Ovinton J'Anthony Mayo, aka OJ Mayo (born November 5, 1987 in Huntington, West Virginia, United States) is a student at North College Hill High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is considered by several media outlets to be among the best high school basketball players in the United States.[link] [link] He is scheduled to graduate in May 2007.
Early years
The first public mention of Mayo occurred in the Ashland, Kentucky Daily Independent newspaper in an article called 'Phenom' in the paper's January 21, 2001 edition, when Mayo was just a sixth grader. In that article he was listed as being a "6-foot-1½ point guard with size 14 shoe". The article also mentioned that he had repeated a grade and therefore was ineligible to play varsity high school basketball as of yet.Mayo commuted from Huntington to Rose Hill Christian, a private school in Ashland, since student athletes can play high school varsity sports as seventh graders in Kentucky. In the seventh grade, he put up numbers that dwarfed the production of players five years his senior. In his first game for his varsity team he scored 27 points, had seven rebounds and three steals. He was a seventh grader playing against juniors and seniors in high school.
During his seventh grade year in January of 2002, Mayo was mentioned in Sports Illustrated Magazine and on CBS Sportsline.com. There were also full articles in the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Huntington, West Virginia Herald-Dispatch and USA Today.
After the completion of the basketball season during his eighth grade year, he moved to Cincinnati with his grandfather in order to attend North College Hill high school near Cincinnati, and test his mettle in a more competitive environment.
The Phenom
In 2006, the 6' 5" 205 lbs. 18-year old junior point guard was selected as Mr. Basketball of Ohio for the second consecutive season, in addition to being named Associated Press Division III Player of the Year for the second consecutive season. He averaged nearly 30 points, six rebounds, and seven assists per game. He also led his team to consecutive AP poll titles and garnered much attention from the media, appearing in the pages of Sports Illustrated among other publications. Much like another Ohio high school star, LeBron James, Mayo has drawn large enough crowds to force his team into seeking larger venues to support the growing crowds, and often attracts National Basketball Association stars such as James and Carmelo Anthony to watch his games.When his team played a game in Huntington, 3,500 fans packed the Veterans Memorial Fieldhouse in order to watch him play. When his team played a game at Cerritos College, 6,500 fans filled a moderately sized arena to watch him play. On Martin Luther King Day in 2006, more than 10,000 fans came to Xavier University's Cintas Center to watch Mayo and North College Hill play Cincinnati Taft. In February, the largest crowd to ever see a high school game in Cincinnati, more than 16,000, watched North College Hill fall to the nation's number one rated team, Oak Hill Academy. Mayo had been considered a lock to make the leap straight from high school to the NBA, but the recent Collective Bargaining Agreement between the NBA and its players has instituted a rule that a player must be at least a year out of high school before he can enter the NBA, thus curtailing those plans. On July 5, 2006, it was reported by ESPN that OJ will attend the University of Southern California. [link] On July 8, however, WSAZ-TV reported that USC was one of only three that Mayo was considering (the other two were Kansas State University and the University of Florida.
External links
- Mayo's high school career and recruitment are being followed on [Bearcatnews.com]
- A Sporting News article on Mayo [Aug 2005]
- [Article about Mayo and North College Hill's basketball team (by writer Jeff Hillard from Cincinnati Citybeat Magazine, 2004)]
- [NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement announcement.]
- Was named a [second team 2005 Parade Magazine All American]
- A USA Today article from January, 2002 [article]
- An article from December 9th, 2005 Huntington Herald-Dispatch [link]
- An article dated December 31st, 2005 from DraftExpress[link]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.