TULSA, Okla. — The Oral Roberts Basketball Team is having a great season — 22 and 4 on the year and undefeated in conference play. Helping the Golden Eagles get all those wins is a new player that is incredibly rare.
FOX23 has previously reported that being tall is good in basketball. And that is great news for 7′5″ Connor Vanover.
“I’ve probably been playing since I was about five or six years old,” Connor told FOX23. “I’ve always been really tall. I’d say around 6th grade, I was about 6 feet already. Then around 7th, 8th grade, I just kind of shot up over the next year or two. And by the end of my 8th grade year, I was 7 feet tall.”
When FOX23′s Spenser Tilus played college basketball, he was 6′2″ — the average height for his team. He played for a junior college, and the game has grown a lot since then.
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Now, the average height of a D1 player is around 6′4″. Connor is not only a foot taller than that, he’s actually tied for the tallest player in college basketball this year. To go one step further, Connor would also be the tallest player in the NBA this year, and their seventh tallest player ever.
“You know, I’ll tell people like different heights. Like 6′10″. I see how low I can go and still have people believe it,” Connor said. “Or I’ll go like, ‘Oh, I’m 7′9″.’ Or like, ‘I’m almost eight feet tall.’”
So how does this happen? Turns out, it’s a family thing.
“They’re 7′ and 7′1″. And there is me. Definitely seems like a miracle,” he said. “We were like 99th percentile growing up.”
And maybe the only thing bigger than Connor’s height is his skill set. He’s been making 3-pointers this year ... a lot of them. Thirty-six to be exact. This is another skill that happens to run in the family.
“My mom, she was able to shoot. That was the one thing she was really good at, you know? Mid-range, short corner shots, and getting the touch from here. I think it really helped,” he explained.
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