Mayo basketballer starts second NCAA college season with a bang
Castlebar man Victor Okojie has started his sophomore year playing NCAA college basketball with UMass Lowell Riverhawks in winning fashion.
The team based in Massachusetts outside Boston defeated the Rivier University Raiders on a very comfortable 121-57 full-time score.
Okojie started the game and on a team that’s seen a good few changes from last year, the Mayo man and Irish international will get more game time in his second year.
The 6’8’’ tall forward scored 13 points on a 5 for 7 shooting performance, among them 2 three-pointers made. Okojie also collected 4 rebounds and blocked 2 shots.
He played 16 minutes in a performance that saw the whole team getting game minutes under the belt as the game as a contest was essentially over by half-time, as Lowell were leading 60-29 by then.
Okojie originally hails from Castlebar, and came to basketball rather late. He stared playing a bit more than four years ago. He was spotted by teacher Niamh Loftus at St Gerald’s College Castebar.
“I saw him walking down the corridors. He was ahead of everybody else,” Loftus remembers. “So I asked him, would he play basketball? He said he wasn't into it, he was only into the soccer, and I said, I only wanted to do something simple. Stand at the free throw line, turn and pass off the ball,” Loftus said in a previous interviews.
Victor would show up to a couple of training sessions afterwards and one would be forgiven to believe, that he picked up basketball because he's tall – but far from it:
“I was decent at Gaelic and soccer. But not being good at something pushes me to want to be better at it. So not being good at basketball and seeing the level I could go to just made me fall in love with getting better in the sport.”
Okojie quickly learned and showed his potential and right now he is living the American Dream playing college basketball.
The next game with the UMass Lowell Riverhawks will be this Thursday, November 5, away to Merrimack.