By Dan Weber
NKyTribune Sports Reporter
From Northern Kentucky to West Australia.
From his cozy suburban Fort Thomas hometown and a short 10-minute drive to NKU for his college basketball and undergraduate degree to the wild West gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie at the end of the Great Eastern Highway in a desert Down Under, some 10,863 flying miles and 22 hours from home and a start to his professional career.
“It’s kind of crazy, just saying that, to go half-way around the world to play basketball,” Sam Vinson says.
But it’s a game that’s pretty much defined Vinson’s life from Kentucky’s Gatorade Player of the Year after leading his Highlands’ Bluebirds to the state championship in 2021 to a spot on the Northern Star Resources Goldfields Giants in the semi-pro State Basketball League in West Australia.
Sam had been hoping to finish out his college career this year at NKU after missing significant parts of two seasons with a knee injury requiring surgery and then a re-injury that had him starting the NCAA eligibility waiver process last February. But after nearly 10 months, he’d lost both at the NCAA appeals level and in state court in Campbell County.
“We’d seen seven or eight players in similar situations who were allowed to play,” Sam said of a convoluted NCAA process with lots of legal challenges and little rhyme or reason these days. But no luck for Sam from a rule that says if a player appears in more than 30 percent of a team’s games, that counts as an entire year of eligibility.
Sam’s hope was that with one year’s injury playing into the next, he’d get the waiver. And with all that time lost to pursuing his final college year, it was too late for him to sign with many of the international basketball leagues as a 6-foot-5 point guard with solid basketball and leadership skills and NCAA Tournament experience.
Except for the Aussies, who start their 20-game regular season in March and finish on through the summer. Perfect timing for Sam, who leaves March 8 for Kalgoorlie-Boulder, the official name of the 30,000-population town on Aboriginal lands that still does some of the most serious gold mining in the world since its discovery there in 1893.
Maybe you can call this a player-for-player trade as this year’s point guard at NKU, replacing Vinson, is Ethan Elliott from Perth, WA, just 370 miles down the road from Kalgoorlie on the Indian Ocean, which in this neck of the woods is like right next door.
“We’ve gotten pretty close talking about it,” says Sam, “he says I’m going to be perfectly fine, that the basketball is pretty much the same.”
When he’s there, the team will provide Sam and a roommate from the team with a house and he’ll get a car. Although they drive on the left side, another new experience for him. One plus is that Sam’s parents and some of his buddies will be coming over to visit during the season. So there’s that.
Sam’s longest flight until now came on NKU’s summer trip to Italy a couple of years back.
The one-season deal will allow Sam to establish himself in a post-college career and be ready for the other pro possibilities that may come his way next fall.
“They have a new 15-million-dollar facility and the arena (the 1,200-seat Neils Hansen Basketball Stadium) looks pretty nice,” Sam says. He’s had a number of phone conversations with his new coach, Lennon Smart, who had this to say in a press release after signing Vinson.
“We are excited to add a point guard of Sam’s size, court vision, college experience and high character. Sam will be a force on both ends of the floor, and we are excited to be the destination club of his first professional contract.”