Reluctant to play the game at first, Aluma now a force
Watching the 6-foot-4 eighth-grader walk across the middle school cafeteria, BJ Johnson was certain he was headed to sign up for basketball tryouts like the rest of the boys gathered around the list on the wall. But the tall kid had no such plans.
He just kept on walking, oblivious to Johnson’s bewildered gaze. Johnson had to find out more about the lanky kid who didn’t seem to care about Johnson’s efforts to evaluate new talent for the junior-varsity boys basketball team and for the varsity boys team he coached at nearby Stephen
Decatur High on the Eastern Shore in Berlin, Maryland.
“My first question to one of the other kids was, ‘Who’s that kid?’ ” Johnson said. “They all said, ‘Oh, Keve doesn’t play basketball. He plays soccer.’ ”
Long before Keve Aluma played basketball for Wofford, and ended up a second-team All-ACC performer this season for Virginia Tech, Johnson knew there was something unique about Aluma.
The Hokies, seeded 10th
in the South Region, play a firstround NCAA tournament game today against No. 7 seed Florida (14-9) in Indianapolis.
Back then, Johnson just had to get Aluma to pick up a basketball for the first time.
Undeterred by young Aluma’s initial lack of interest, Johnson introduced himself to Aluma a few days into his freshman year of high school, and all but begged Aluma to come to the school gym.
“All I said was, ‘I want to see you run and I want to see you jump.’ ” Johnson said. “That was it.”
A few minutes into that first workout, Johnson knew he had to seek out Aluma’s parents.
“I told them, ‘If this kid stays with me for four years, he’ll go to college for free,’ ” Johnson said. “I saw that kind of potential in him.”
Johnson was right, but Aluma wasn’t ever the conventional star player. A reluctant shooter from the get-go, Aluma was far more interested in getting teammates open or starting fast breaks with a tipped ball or block on the defensive end.
“What I used to always say was that he was going to have his better days in college,” Johnson said. “He was just so unselfish and he played the game the right way. He could’ve done the same thing in high school, but he was just such a team player, and scoring the basketball just wasn’t a priority for him.”
It’s not as if he didn’t have the ability to score in his blood. His dad, Peter Aluma, was a 6-10 center from Nigeria who scored 1,715 career points and blocked a school-record 366 shots for Liberty, where he was inducted in 2018 into the school’s athletics Hall of Fame. He died in February 2020 of an illness at 46.
Keve Aluma is now a 6-9, 235-pound redshirt junior forward averaging team highs of 15.6 points and eight rebounds per game while shooting 48.9% from the floor and 35.1% from 3-point range for Virginia Tech (15-6). He was a more-than-capable player in high school, helping propel Stephen Decatur to the state championship game as a junior and averaging nearly 16 points and 12 rebounds per game as a senior.
Yet he didn’t have the advanced offensive game to draw much attention from college recruiters.
Then-Wofford coach Mike Young and his staff took notice.
Even as a significant contributor off the bench as a freshman for Wofford and a starter as a sophomore, Aluma never shot the ball in a game more than nine times and never scored more than 14 points in 68 games, averaging 6.1 points and 6.4 rebounds per game as a sophomore.
“I don’t really know if I shot enough at Wofford for (other teams) to worry about that,” Aluma said in January after scoring a career-high 29 points in Tech’s 65-51 win against Virginia.
“I don’t know if I’m really that worried about it. I’m just trying to win games.”
Transferring to Virginia Tech after Young took the job in Blacksburg in April 2019, Aluma sat out a year per NCAA transfer rules and worked on getting more comfortable looking for his shot.
“He was a glue guy for me down there (at Wofford),” Young said. “He was a tough, hard-nosed rebounder, excellent defender. … What he’s done offensively has been nothing short of amazing. I think he took one 3 as a sophomore for me, and I don’t think we ran anything through him. ... He became serious about it
and wanted to become a serious player, and what a sight it’s been to behold for me. He’s a load down there and has done it night in and night out.”
While his breakout this season has been surprising to most outsiders, Tech forward Justyn Mutts insists he could see signs of Aluma’s offensive game about to emerge in limited workouts before the season.
“He is a really skilled player with a touch around the rim, his touch away from the rim, being able to shoot the ball,” Mutts said. “He is such a talented scorer and a versatile player, and I feel a lot of times he has a mismatch and he can exploit that for us.”
As unassuming as ever, Aluma is as stunned as anybody about just how far his offensive game has come.
“I did not,” Aluma said when asked if he expected to have this kind of season. “I think somebody asked me before the season what I saw myself averaging and I said ‘10 (points) and 10 (rebounds), I’d be happy with that,’ but I did not really expect it.”