EVOLUTION

BIT BY BIT, AUBURN’S ISAAC OKORO WORKED HIS WAY FROM BOTTOM OF THE PACK TO ONE OF THE TOP DRAFT PROSPECTS IN THE NATION. AND HE’S NOT DONE YET. GRAB YOUR POPCORN.

- ALEX SQUADRON

THE ISAAC OKORO you see today—the one who’s leading a highly ranked Auburn team as a freshman and sure to be an NBA lottery pick come June—exists because the old Isaac Okoro was, well, terrible.

Omar Cooper, Isaac’s AAU coach through high school, remembers this tall, energetic 8-year-old who used to fall a lot.

“You couldn’t even tell he was an athlete back then,” says Cooper of the first time he met Isaac. “You could just tell he had some energy. He was trying to do something. Whatever he was trying to do, he was trying to do something [laughs].”

To put it lightly, the game did not come naturally to Okoro.

Or, as he puts it: “I was literally the worst person on my team.”

“I couldn’t dribble. I couldn’t shoot,” he adds. “Every time I’d catch it, I’d travel. The only thing I was good for was standing under the rim and getting rebounds.”

So Isaac, always the competitor, did just that. He crashed the boards like a maniac, putting that high-level energy on full display. He used his size and muscle to make the biggest possible impact, even if it didn’t show up in the stat sheet.

“Since I wasn’t the best player on the team, I knew I had to do something to stay on the court,” he says. “Playing defense was my way of staying on the court. Just guarding every position, hustling, doing all the intangibles—that helped me stay on the court.”