FAU Men’s Basketball News
On Thursday afternoon FAU announced another addition to the Men’s Basketball coaching staff. Adding to the Baylor connections, former Bears G Obim Okeke is joining the squad as a Special Assistant to the HC, coming over to the Owls after 1 season as a Video Analysis associate with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Okeke is only 2 years removed from college, having spent last year with the Thunder video department and the year prior with the Pacers.
A former football and basketball star while at Bishop Gorman high school in Las Vegas, Okeke originally attended Baylor for football and got into basketball second. Okeke was never fully able to break through in Football while at Baylor, playing under 3 different coaches and eventually finding himself with an unsecured role during Matt Rhule’s first year.
During that season he was approached by a staffer who asked if he wanted to be a practice player with basketball, he said yes, and shortly after he found himself getting a call from John Jakus. In a self written piece in the Baylor Champions Tribune, he explained he had “the hardest workout of his life,” with Coach Jakus to try out, and 2 weeks later he was suiting up for Baylor against Wichita State— and the rest was history.
Winning is nothing new for him as he won 5 championships at Bishop Gorman while in high school, 3 in basketball and 2 in football. That winning kept on with him as he went to the cactus bowl with Baylor football in 2016 and was on a Bears Basketball team that went to the Round of 32 in the 2018 NCAA tournament.
Okeke is relatively new to the D1 coaching scene but has a very strong relationship with Coach Jakus and is a young mind that can bring a lot of different traits to the coaching table.
Another one of Coach Jakus’s friends is headed down to boca, joining Jordan Fee, Isaiah Austin, and Demond Parker as new additions, while Todd Abernethy was retained from the previous staff.
The staff will now continue to work on bringing players to paradise, which so far has proved successful. The Owls have landed 2 former ESPN top 100 recruits via the transfer portal in Kaleb Glenn from Louisville and Leland Walker from Eastern Kentucky, along with an NCAA tournament proven guard in Aj Staton-McCray transferring in from Samford.