Ohio State men choosing to remember last year's struggles as fuel for new season
There is no forgetting what the 2022-23 season was for the Ohio State men’s basketball program. A 16-19 record, a stretch of 14 losses in 15 games and missing out on the NCAA Tournament for the first time in six years are all experiences that no member of the team hopes to repeat.
But there is a choice to make between either using last year as fuel to fire what the Buckeyes hope is a rebound year and simply closing the door on the past in hopes of turning over a new leaf. As the 2023-24 Buckeyes opened their preseason last week, coach Chris Holtmann and his players were clear on which path they are taking.
The scar tissue from last year is real, and Ohio State is planning to use it to its advantage this season.
“You don’t want to bury it, because we’re using it as fire from last year,” Zed Key, the program’s most-tenured player, said. “We’re trying to provide a spark in the beginning of the year like, look, we’re not going back to last year. We’re not doing the same thing.
“We’re saying it every day: don’t let last year happen again.”
How well that lesson will be received by a roster that will again be comprised primarily of new faces remains to be seen. Only four Buckeyes return after playing in at least 25 games a season ago: the three sophomores, Roddy Gayle, Felix Okpara and Bruce Thornton, and Key, the fourth-year senior who missed 10 games with a shoulder injury that required season-ending surgery.
Those who remain are tasked with making sure those who are either new or could be stepping into bigger roles understand what happened.
“We went through it all,” Gayle said of his classmates. “We experienced it. We need to set the way for the people who weren’t here last year. We don’t want to have another season like we did last year. We want to flip the program around and play a completely different way.”
In that regard, a reshuffled roster could be a benefit. Ohio State has a four-man freshman class and added three players via the transfer portal: Minnesota’s Jamison Battle, Baylor’s Dale Bonner and Penn State’s Evan Mahaffey. Bonner and Mahaffey are both native Ohioans while Battle was part of a Golden Gophers team that went 2-18 in Big Ten play but won at Ohio State in mid-January.
Battle transferred to Ohio State with the goal of reaching the NCAA Tournament for the first time in his career atop his list of goals. He also has an acute understanding of what the Buckeyes went through last season.
“You’re looking at it like, ‘Man, am I really gonna sit down with my kids and watch March Madness and have them ask me if I played in it and I have to answer no, I didn’t?’ ” he told The Dispatch when he committed. “That’s the most important thing to me. Last year is the first year coach Holtmann didn’t make it, and you look at the team they had, they were pretty young.”
Holtmann said those roster additions and last year’s experiences should give his team an extra edge to its play.
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“I think there can be real power in the pain that we went through last year,” he said. “I think if it’s used in a way that provides fuel, that’s a really positive thing. I don’t think you can go through what we went through last year and not feel that way if you’re not a competitive guy.”
The Buckeyes are still young, but they’re not quite as young as last year’s team. Thornton, who emerged as a team captain last year and will reprise that role this year, said he’s taking it upon himself to make sure those lessons aren’t forgotten.
“We’re not going to just put it away,” he said. “We’re going to have it in the back of our minds that we’re not going to have that season we did last year. It’s going to make us work harder. You can’t lose that many games.”
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: After disappointing year, Ohio State hoping to turn lessons into wins
