CLEVELAND — Alabama coach Nate Oats was listening Thursday as his star point guard Mark Sears was talking about spending his first two years at Ohio University. It brought Oats back to his own time when he was head coach at the University at Buffalo.

For Oats specifically, he thought about his successes playing inside Rocket Arena, where his Crimson Tide team will open the NCAA tournament against Robert Morris Friday. However, he was reminded about Sears’ own Cleveland successes.

“After you brought it up, I looked on my phone,” Oats said Thursday. “Mark is 4-1 here in Cleveland, so he’s got an 80% winning percentage here. It’s pretty good. I thought I was good, where I’m 9-1, but he’s right there with me. So between the two of us, we’ve won a few games down here in the arena we’re going to play in.”

Sears hasn’t just won a lot of games in Cleveland. Long before he was an All-America point guard in the Southeastern Conference, he was learning the ropes of college basketball in Southeastern Ohio while playing from 2020-22 at Ohio.

“When I was at Ohio, I spent a lot of time developing, and they did a great job helping me be the player I am today,” Sears said Thursday. “Just like you said, I have some experience coming to Cleveland because we’ve been the past two times. One of those times, we had won it all here and the other time we fell short. OU, I love it. That’s a part of me.”

The 6-foot-1, 195-pound Sears was raised in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but spent an extra season in prep school at Hargrave Military Academy in Virginia. From there, he ended up in Athens, where he appeared in 59 games over two seasons, with 40 starts, including all 35 in his last year with the Bobcats.

In Sears’ first season at Ohio, he averaged 8.5 points in 19.6 minutes per game. The Bobcats won the MAC Tournament in Cleveland to qualify for a COVID-impacted NCAA tournament, where they upset No. 4-seeded Virginia in the first round before losing in the second round to Creighton.

The next season, Sears was a full-time starter averaging 19.7 points in 35.7 minutes over 35 games. The Bobcats, though, lost to Kent State in the MAC semifinals and did not return to the NCAA Tournament.

After that season, Sears went into the transfer portal, which took him directly back to his sweet home Alabama.

With the amount of work he puts in his game outside of practice on his own in the offseason, and when he came to Alabama, he didn’t even go home. He went straight from Athens right to Tuscaloosa because he wanted to get a head start. He just got himself an apartment for a month and just went to work.

Robert Morris coach Andrew Toole’s team is tasked with trying to slow the high-octane Crimson Tide offense that scores national-best 91.1 points a game. That offense starts with Sears, who’s averaging 18.7 points while looking for his second All-American recognition in as many seasons.

Toole, though, has some institutional knowledge himself of Sears from his Ohio days.

“We actually scrimmaged him his freshman year when he was at Ohio U, and we were like, man, this guy is pretty good,” Toole said. “Next year, obviously, he’s at Alabama. He’s just so capable at any time of making a deep perimeter 3. He puts so much pressure on your defense with his ability to get to the rim and get fouled.”

Sears returns to Cleveland a highly decorated basketball player. He plays for one of the top teams in the entire sport.

Yet, Sears is coming into his final NCAA tournament much like he did while he was toiling as a freshman at Ohio.

“Still having that chip on their shoulder to want to get back,” Sears said. “At the mid-major level, you have to win the tournament to go to the championship, and at the high-major level, you’ve still got to win games to get a good seeding. When you get in that tournament, you just want to have that competitiveness to make it farther than you did last year.”

Chris Easterling can be reached at ceasterling@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him on X at @ceasterlingABJ