Ohio
‘OU, I love it. That’s a part of me’: Alabama’s Mark Sears hasn’t forgotten time at Ohio
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
GIRARD, Ohio (WKBN) – Over 100 athletes came together for the 5th Annual Trumbull County Special Olympics Invitational Saturday morning in Girard.
These athletes represent five different schools across Trumbull County to compete and spread the message of inclusion, achievement, and sportsmanship.
The Invitational continued its long-standing tradition of honoring the legacy of Randy Suchanek while celebrating the dedication and accomplishments of Special Olympics athletes throughout the region.
“You can hear all the excitement for this, for the athletes that are here today,” said superintendent Bryan O’Hara. “They work hard all year long to participate. We’ve always worked hand in hand with the rotary to get this accomplished is a lot of work behind the scenes.”
Participating schools included Ashtabula, Geauga, Columbiana, Kent-Portage and Trumbull Fairhaven
“There’s a lot of nice participation from girard students as you see behind us, and a lot of participation from the community helping out,” Girard-Liberty Rotary co-president Andy Kish added.
O’Hara added that the event keeps everything in perspective, seeing the athletes compete in the spirit of fun, along with the courage and determination that they show.
Alex Sorrells contributed to this report.
Out of prison, Indiana’s caviar king back on Ohio River to find fishing holes taken
David Cox, of English, Indiana, says once he began setting his nets again after a two-year prison sentence and a three-year ban on commercial fishing, all of his once-secret spots were taken.
Can you eat fish from the Ohio River?
In 1975, future presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, bet 20 pounds of New England cod that the Red Sox would defeat the Reds in the World Series. If things went south for Boston, Ohio governor James Rhodes promised to send Dukakis 10 pounds of Lake Erie perch and 10 pounds of Ohio River catfish. The Reds ended up winning and the cod was sent to the Convalescent Home for Children, in Cincinnati.
At the time, people were still eating catfish from the Ohio without too much concern. The fish were also served at several restaurants along the river.
There were warnings in 1977
But two years later, in 1977, The Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission released the results of a study of contaminants found in the tissues of Ohio River fish. They warned anglers in cities such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Wheeling and Gallipolis that man-made chemicals known as PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, had been discovered in the river fish. Later, high concentrations of mercury were discovered in the fish, too.
Thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the environmental regulations that followed, the river is now cleaner than it was in the seventies. And it’s still teeming with a variety of fish, including catfish, striped bass, drum and black bass, among other species.
But even though PCBs were banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1979, they are still found in fish, since they remain in the sediment in the bottom of the river. “Organisms live in the sediment and fish feed on them,” Rich Cogen, the executive director of the Ohio River Foundation told The Enquirer. Mercury is also a big problem, according to Cogen.
So the question is: Can you eat fish caught in the Ohio River?
The short answer is yes. But it depends on what species you are eating and where along the river you caught it.
There are also very strict limitations on how frequently you should eat them, according to the web site for the Ohio Sport Fish Consumption Advisory, part of the Ohio Department of Health.
In areas of the river between the Belleville Lock, located 204 miles downstream from the river’s origins in Pittsburgh, to the Indiana border, the advisory agency currently recommends consuming Ohio River fish no more than once a month max. That area includes Adams, Brown, Clermont, Gallia, Hamilton, Lawrence, Meigs and Scioto counties.
Here’s where to check
Recommendations change throughout the year, but you can keep up by visiting the Ohio Department of Health’s Sport Fish Consumption Advisory page, which provides updated information on when certain fish, usually bottom feeders such as carp, are deemed too dangerous to eat at all.
Here’s who should take a pass on Ohio River fish
The agency also warns that people who are more likely to have health effects from eating contaminated fish, includingchildren younger than 15 years old, pregnant women and women who are planning to become pregnant to avoid Ohio River fish altogether.
Just because you have to limit the amount of fish you eat, doesn’t mean the river is a bad place for fishing, as long as you limit your intake or do catch-and-release fishing. Just make sure you have a proper fishing license before casting your line.
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It isn’t over until it’s over. That’s the case for both the UCLA Bruins football program recruiting and for quarterback Brady Edmunds. Edmunds is currently committed to head to Ohio State but he took a visit from UCLA offensive coordinator Dean Kennedy earlier this week.
Kennedy met Edmunds on Thursday despite the fact that the quarterback has been committed to the Buckeyes since December of 2024 but could the UCLA Bruins be making a run at flipping the quarterback?
Edmunds has only had an official visit with Ohio State but could UCLA heave a heat check on the 6’5” quarterback? New UCLA head coach Bob Chesney is off to an unbelievable start to his recruiting with the Bruins and flipping a recruit of Edmunds’ caliber would be his most impressive move yet.
247 Sports has Edmunds as the No. 16 quarterback in the class, which would give UCLA a clear predecessor for Nico Iamaleava whenever the Bruins current starting quarterback decides to head to the professional level.
It’d be a full circle moment for the Bruins, as Edmunds was originally recruited to Ohio State by former UCLA head coach Chip Kelly, who bailed on UCLA to go run the Buckeyes offense. Ohio State is a great spot for a developing quarterback, as the Buckeyes produce tons of NFL talent, especially at the wide receiver position, which would help Edmunds put up some gaudy numbers in Columbus.
Chesney and the Bruins have geography on their side, Edmunds attends Huntington Beach High School in Southern California, which could potentially become a factor if Edmunds views UCLA as a program on the rise that’d be much closer to his friends and family than out in Ohio.
Time will tell if Kennedy’s visit will make a difference but UCLA’s recruiting has made waves in the first offseason under Chesney and the new regime.
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