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2028 OH LB/EDGE Asa Burch
- By Worm02
- Football Recruiting
- 3 Replies
Burch has been offered by Youngstown State.
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UConn Huskies
- By ScriptOhio
- Buckeye Basketball
- 6 Replies
Great "feel good story" about Braylon Mullins, someone could make an actual modern day true to life "Hoosiers movie" here:
www.si.com
There is a black Dodge police cruiser parked in front of Greenfield-Central High School, and it’s not difficult to deduce who drives it. The Connecticut Huskies license plate on the front is the giveaway.
Inside the building, school resource officer Josh Mullins is trying to get back to work, but the interruptions keep coming. A stunning college basketball scramble play in Washington, D.C., Sunday tilted life here in Greenfield, a town of about 25,000 located in the flat farmland terrain that stretches out east of Indianapolis. Mullins’s oldest son became a March legend in that instant, and the smile remains plastered on his face.
“Enjoy the moment, man,” officer Mullins says. “These things don’t happen to everybody.”
This thing happened to a basketball family with deep roots in this community—a family that rejected the nomadic lifestyle of modern prospects and stayed home. This thing was the fulfillment of a recruiting pitch by UConn coach Dan Hurley, and a mother’s wishful Instagram prophecy nearly two years earlier. This thing was the realization of a gym rat’s dream, a live-action monument to a lifetime of practice shots, a distillation of all that work into one fundamentally flawless wrist flick.
“If you’re from Indiana,” Josh Mullins says, “you better be able to shoot.”
Freshman Braylon Mullins’s 35-foot swish beat the buzzer and Duke in the NCAA men’s tournament East Regional final. It propelled UConn to yet another Final Four, and it poetically brings the freshman who launched it back home, where his thunderclap of a shot echoes loudly. The electronic sign in front of the school on North Broadway celebrates the event: “Congrats UConn. GC is proud of you Braylon.”
The shot came at the confluence of opportunity and preparedness. And the preparation stretches back through time in Greenfield: to Christmas mornings in the high school gym; to a floodlit backyard court on Fifth Street; to a childhood friendship turned teenage courtship turned lifetime partnership. This all-time March moment was generations in the making.
Josh and Katie Mullins met in second grade at Harris Elementary, classmates well before soulmates. After matriculating half a mile down the street to Greenfield-Central, which houses both the middle school and high school, they eventually became best friends. On Valentine’s Day 1998, when Josh was a standout basketball player for the Cougars and Katie was a cheerleader, they went on their first date.
Katie’s family had been in Greenfield forever, establishing a farm outside the city limits that is nearly 150 years old. Josh’s grandparents moved there from Kentucky and never left. This place, about 25 miles outside Indianapolis but not to be confused with affluent suburbs like Carmel or Fishers, is all they knew. Katie’s uncle, Guy Titus, is the mayor. Josh’s cousin, Gary Achor, is running for sheriff.
“We’re just little townies that have always been here,” Katie says.
They actually lived elsewhere during college. Josh went to Lincoln Trail Junior College in Robinson, Ill., to play basketball, and Katie followed. But she was driving 2 ½ hours home nearly every weekend to work at a tanning salon, and after graduating from Lincoln Trail opted to attend nearby IUPUI (now known as IU Indianapolis) to get her four-year degree. This time, it was Josh’s turn to follow Katie—he signed with the Jaguars, becoming a starter and double-digit scorer on their only NCAA tournament qualifier in 2003.
They got married after college and, naturally, settled in Greenfield, a town bisected by U.S. 40 and dotted with American flags and driveway basketball goals. (Knightstown, site of the gym used in the movie Hoosiers as the home of the Hickory Huskers, is 12 miles away.) Josh became a police officer and the couple had three boys—Braylon and twins Cole and Clay, who will play at Division III Franklin University next year. Basketball was an inevitable family bonding element.
Katie remembers Braylon pushing around basketballs before he could walk. By the time the boys were old enough to play, the family lived in a modest house where Katie grew up on West Fifth Street, with a backyard court that became the launching pad for all that followed. Other kids flocked there to play with her boys.
“It was the go-to place in the neighborhood,” Katie says.
But the standing game was Josh and one of the twins against Braylon and the other twin. The rules to keep it relatively fair: Josh had to wear flip-flops and could shoot only three-pointers.
“We would go out all the time,” Josh says. “We played under the lights. It was one of those things where you want your kids to do the same thing as you until they tell you they hate it. [Braylon] never told me that. We put a ball in his hands and it just never left.
“It’s the difference being great and good. You just got to do extra things. And I gave him the ball at five and it just took off from there.”
By the time the boys were in middle school, Josh was on the Greenfield-Central coaching staff. That led to a family tradition—Christmas morning shootarounds in the school gym, Cougar Fieldhouse. Built in 1969, it had an original capacity of 4,620—huge by most standards, but not compared to some of the cathedrals in the state. (New Castle, about 25 miles away, seats 10,000 and is the largest high school gym in the nation.) The current Cougar Fieldhouse capacity is 3,100.
That is where Braylon really honed his shooting stroke and all-around game.
“I met him here every single morning at 7:15, an hour before school, for four years,” says Luke Meredith, the coach of the Cougars during Braylon’s tenure. “He shot by himself. We listened to music, just talked. There would be other guys that he would drag along with him, including his twin brothers. But he was the one constant.”
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Braylon Mullins’s Shot Was a Lifetime in the Making
“You better be able to shoot”: How small-town Greenfield, Ind., shaped the UConn freshman to step up on the biggest stage in March Madness.
www.si.com
Braylon Mullins’s Shot Was a Lifetime in the Making
“You better be able to shoot”: How small-town Greenfield, Ind., shaped the UConn freshman to step up on the biggest stage in March Madness.
There is a black Dodge police cruiser parked in front of Greenfield-Central High School, and it’s not difficult to deduce who drives it. The Connecticut Huskies license plate on the front is the giveaway.
Inside the building, school resource officer Josh Mullins is trying to get back to work, but the interruptions keep coming. A stunning college basketball scramble play in Washington, D.C., Sunday tilted life here in Greenfield, a town of about 25,000 located in the flat farmland terrain that stretches out east of Indianapolis. Mullins’s oldest son became a March legend in that instant, and the smile remains plastered on his face.
“Enjoy the moment, man,” officer Mullins says. “These things don’t happen to everybody.”
This thing happened to a basketball family with deep roots in this community—a family that rejected the nomadic lifestyle of modern prospects and stayed home. This thing was the fulfillment of a recruiting pitch by UConn coach Dan Hurley, and a mother’s wishful Instagram prophecy nearly two years earlier. This thing was the realization of a gym rat’s dream, a live-action monument to a lifetime of practice shots, a distillation of all that work into one fundamentally flawless wrist flick.
“If you’re from Indiana,” Josh Mullins says, “you better be able to shoot.”
Freshman Braylon Mullins’s 35-foot swish beat the buzzer and Duke in the NCAA men’s tournament East Regional final. It propelled UConn to yet another Final Four, and it poetically brings the freshman who launched it back home, where his thunderclap of a shot echoes loudly. The electronic sign in front of the school on North Broadway celebrates the event: “Congrats UConn. GC is proud of you Braylon.”
The shot came at the confluence of opportunity and preparedness. And the preparation stretches back through time in Greenfield: to Christmas mornings in the high school gym; to a floodlit backyard court on Fifth Street; to a childhood friendship turned teenage courtship turned lifetime partnership. This all-time March moment was generations in the making.
Josh and Katie Mullins met in second grade at Harris Elementary, classmates well before soulmates. After matriculating half a mile down the street to Greenfield-Central, which houses both the middle school and high school, they eventually became best friends. On Valentine’s Day 1998, when Josh was a standout basketball player for the Cougars and Katie was a cheerleader, they went on their first date.
Katie’s family had been in Greenfield forever, establishing a farm outside the city limits that is nearly 150 years old. Josh’s grandparents moved there from Kentucky and never left. This place, about 25 miles outside Indianapolis but not to be confused with affluent suburbs like Carmel or Fishers, is all they knew. Katie’s uncle, Guy Titus, is the mayor. Josh’s cousin, Gary Achor, is running for sheriff.
“We’re just little townies that have always been here,” Katie says.
They actually lived elsewhere during college. Josh went to Lincoln Trail Junior College in Robinson, Ill., to play basketball, and Katie followed. But she was driving 2 ½ hours home nearly every weekend to work at a tanning salon, and after graduating from Lincoln Trail opted to attend nearby IUPUI (now known as IU Indianapolis) to get her four-year degree. This time, it was Josh’s turn to follow Katie—he signed with the Jaguars, becoming a starter and double-digit scorer on their only NCAA tournament qualifier in 2003.
They got married after college and, naturally, settled in Greenfield, a town bisected by U.S. 40 and dotted with American flags and driveway basketball goals. (Knightstown, site of the gym used in the movie Hoosiers as the home of the Hickory Huskers, is 12 miles away.) Josh became a police officer and the couple had three boys—Braylon and twins Cole and Clay, who will play at Division III Franklin University next year. Basketball was an inevitable family bonding element.
Katie remembers Braylon pushing around basketballs before he could walk. By the time the boys were old enough to play, the family lived in a modest house where Katie grew up on West Fifth Street, with a backyard court that became the launching pad for all that followed. Other kids flocked there to play with her boys.
“It was the go-to place in the neighborhood,” Katie says.
But the standing game was Josh and one of the twins against Braylon and the other twin. The rules to keep it relatively fair: Josh had to wear flip-flops and could shoot only three-pointers.
“We would go out all the time,” Josh says. “We played under the lights. It was one of those things where you want your kids to do the same thing as you until they tell you they hate it. [Braylon] never told me that. We put a ball in his hands and it just never left.
“It’s the difference being great and good. You just got to do extra things. And I gave him the ball at five and it just took off from there.”
By the time the boys were in middle school, Josh was on the Greenfield-Central coaching staff. That led to a family tradition—Christmas morning shootarounds in the school gym, Cougar Fieldhouse. Built in 1969, it had an original capacity of 4,620—huge by most standards, but not compared to some of the cathedrals in the state. (New Castle, about 25 miles away, seats 10,000 and is the largest high school gym in the nation.) The current Cougar Fieldhouse capacity is 3,100.
That is where Braylon really honed his shooting stroke and all-around game.
“I met him here every single morning at 7:15, an hour before school, for four years,” says Luke Meredith, the coach of the Cougars during Braylon’s tenure. “He shot by himself. We listened to music, just talked. There would be other guys that he would drag along with him, including his twin brothers. But he was the one constant.”
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.
continued
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X ... Twitter
- By Steve19
- Open Discussion (Work-safe)
- 2041 Replies
I sold that '64 Nova to pay student fees at Ohio StateWhere's the Nova with ludicrously tall rear tires and the front end pointed diagonally toward the ground? More importantly, where's the customized van with flames or some imitation John Frazetta art on the sides?
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"We Choose to Go To The Moon!"
- By Steve19
- Open Discussion (Work-safe)
- 73 Replies
Login to view embedded mediaFirst woman on the moon
You have to be old enough to appreciate this.
If you don't understand it, you are too young.
Let the youngsters into the wonders of early TV
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Indiana Hoosiers (2025 National Champions)
- By ScriptOhio
- College Football
- 467 Replies
Expected No. 1 Fernando Mendoza puts on show at Indiana pro day
Expected No. 1 pick Fernando Mendoza threw roughly 56 passes in front of scouts from all 32 NFL teams and more than 100 members of the media Wednesday.
Expected No. 1 Fernando Mendoza puts on show at Indiana pro day
Fernando Mendoza warmed up with his college roommate Wednesday while nearly two dozen college teammates took turns running the 40-yard dash.Then the Heisman Trophy-winning Indiana quarterback did what he always seems to do: deliver another impressive performance.
All 32 NFL teams sent scouts to Indiana's campus, more than 100 media members were credentialed and dozens of family members and friends of ex-Hoosiers showed up for a pro day unlike any other in school history. Most came to see the guy expected to be the first pick in this month's NFL draft, and Mendoza didn't disappoint, using his platform to potentially help his ex-teammates improve their draft standing.
"I feel like it went great," Mendoza said after throwing the last of his roughly 56 passes inside the John Mellencamp Pavilion. "You know quarterbacks have passed, have done shorter pro days than that. However, I just wanted to make sure everybody could showcase their abilities in front of all 32 NFL teams and really run routes that are applicable to the timing we're going to be running in the NFL."
Mendoza threw short, deep and medium-range passes, targeting receivers to the left, right and over the middle. He also threw on the run.
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But Mendoza also said he's far from a finished product.
"I'm putting all of my efforts toward just trying to be the best quarterback possible for the season," he said. "But I know at the next level, there's going to be a lot more snaps under center, and that's a big adjustment. I need to get used to that and just the nature of the game. Not only that, the hash [marks] are more condensed and the speed of the game is faster. So, all those things I look forward to learning."
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