Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images
High school athletes who have the talent to play in college take a ton of different things into consideration when deciding where to commit. Five-star basketball recruit Baba Oladotun weighed a number of options before deciding to take his talents to Maryland, and it sounds like traffic was one of the reasons he opted the play for the Terrapins instead of Georgetown.
As things currently stand, there are around 20 high school basketball players slated to graduate in the spring who have shown enough promise to earn a five-star designation from the scouts at ESPN who’ve been tasked with evaluating the best up-and-coming guys in the country.
That includes Baba Oladotun, who recently kicked off what will be his final season at James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Springs, Maryland. The 6’10” forward is listed as the top player in the state and among the top ten prospects in the country, and he received over 40 official offers from schools that were hoping to lure him to their men’s basketball program.
Oladotun, who reclassified in order to make the leap to college as a 17-year-old next year, narrowed down his options to four teams before revealing his final decision on Wednesday, and the school he opted for seemed to really reap the benefits of its proximity to his home.
Baba Oladotun’s dad says traffic influenced his decision to play at Maryland instead of Georgetown
Oladotun listed Arkansas, Kentucky, Georgetown, and Maryland as his Final Four before announcing his commitment on Wednesday, but he revealed it ultimately came down to the last two after he unzipped the jacket that was concealing a shirt that was emblazoned with the Terrapins logo.
Oladotun made it clear he wanted to stick close to home while pointing to his parents’ support as a “crucial key” to his development.
His father, Ibrahim, served as his de facto agent during the recruitment process, and he said the proximity of the two schools made him personally lean towards Maryland (it takes around 20 minutes to drive to College Park from Silver Springs, while you can get to Georgetown in around twice the time if you get lucky with the notorious awful traffic around Washington, D.C.).
He shed some more light on his thought process, saying (via Inside the Black & Gold):
“When you look at it, if I have to go to Georgetown, [it’s] maybe 15, 20 minutes more. You multiply that by 365 days, that’s about 7,000 minutes, that’s about 120 hours. What can you do with that?…
I’m very stingy when it comes to my time. I can drive 20 minutes to the game, get good parking… I can go to campus and grab my two daughters and go have lunch and dinner. How long am I going to have that opportunity? I don’t know.”
I can’t help but respect that kind of practicality.