Ish Sanders found his scoring touch
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fifth story in a series on the top local high school boys’ basketball players of the past decade.
Late in his freshman year of college at NCAA Division II Carson-Newman, former Cleveland standout Ish Sanders scored 51 points in a win over rival Mars Hill.
That, along with a 22-point effort a few nights later against Newberry, earned him South Atlantic Conference Player of the Week honors.
But as Sanders revealed Thursday, it was a week that almost didn’t happen.
Freshman seasons are tough in college. Players come in with their own resumes, not always taking into consideration that each of their teammates has put together quite the resume prior to college as well. Everybody wants to be the star immediately, and Sanders - who holds the Cleveland record for points in a career with 2,120 - was no exception.
“I was about to quit. I was about to leave,” Sanders said. “From the outside looking in, it looks like the success came quick, but for me, it was tough because you go to college as the best player on your team, but you get there and everybody else was too, so they have the same mentality as you.
“So it took a couple of months to really break out, which seemed like a year to me.”
During that time Sanders spent a lot of time in his dorm room, crying and talking to friends and family about his desire to come home.
He did have some good moments early, but it took a while. Eight games into his career, he was averaging seven points per game, and after fifteen games the average was still under 10 (9.7). But over his final 12 contests Sanders started to figure things out, averaging 18.2 points per game while making at least three 3-pointers in eight of those 12 games.
The 51 points was a school record until Charles Clark broke it twice, most recently with 54 in a win over Coker in 2017. The 11 3-pointers Sanders made that night are still the standard.
Scoring has always been in his DNA, and ultimately
that has been what he has thrived on at every level in high school and beyond. He finished his career at Carson-Newman with 1,922 points, which ranks fifth all-time, as well as 343 3-pointers, which ranks first in both school and conference history.
The productivity hasn’t let up while playing in the professional ranks in Australia, where Sanders has averaged at least 25 points per game in each of his past five seasons while playing for the Sunbury Jets.
His recruiting never took off at Cleveland like he assumed it would, which led to some frustrations. But in a way, that led to him sliding into a perfect situation at Carson-Newman which led to some great moments, such as graduating in August of 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in Human Services.
“It was frustrating at times, but in the end, after getting to be with my teammates, I knew I was where I was supposed to be,” he said. “It wasn’t about playing a lot, or scoring a lot, it was the atmosphere and the family time and the team.
“I was not upset and I’m still not to this day that [Carson-Newman] is where I chose to go.”